Drawing 3: Frieze from the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / Drawing 3: Frieze from the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina

Browse

Books

Italian Renaissance Drawings
- Codex Coner: Architecture and Antiquarianism in early sixteenth-century Rome, c.1513-15 with seventeenth-century additions (100 folios)
  - SM volume 115/100

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

Reference number

SM volume 115/100c

Purpose

Drawing 3: Frieze from the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina

Aspect

Depiction of ornament

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:14

Inscribed

In campo Vaccino (‘In the Campo Vaccino [cow pasture]’); 12 [in graphite]

Signed and dated

1625/35
Date range: 1625/35

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink and brown wash

Hand

Seventeenth-Century Hand 1 (Codex Ursinianus Copyist)

Notes

Again added in the seventeenth century, this drawing of a frieze, embellished with a gryphon, candelabra and a double scroll of acanthus, bears the caption in campo Vaccino (‘Cow Pasture’), the common name for the Roman Forum at the time the drawing was made. The caption helps to identify the drawing’s subject as the frieze of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina in the Roman Forum, built by Antoninus Pius from 141 CE, which was drawn repeatedly in the sixteenth century. Perhaps the drawing’s closest surviving parallel is one in a mid- sixteenth-century compilation now in Naples, which shows the same portion of the frieze, although in conjunction with smaller-scale depictions of the architrave and cornice. The two drawings are presumably dependent on the same now-lost prototype. This drawing, like other Cassiano additions to the Codex Coner, carries a number written in graphite.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Anon.] Naples, BNN, Ms XII D 74, fol. 11v (Lanzarini 2020, p. 507)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 49
Campbell 2004, 2, pp. 623–24
Census, ID 45572

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Codex Coner has been made possible through the generosity of the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, Berlin

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).