Not known

[Drawing] A Tiuoli in una Vigna Vicino a Porta scura (‘At Tivoli in a vineyard near to the Porta Scura’); 79 [early seventeenth-century hand]; 13 [in graphite]
[Mount] 102 [x2]

• 1625/35
  Date range: 1625/35

[Drawing] Pen and brown ink and brown wash over graphite; on laid paper (232x159mm), rounded corners at right, inlaid (back to front with respect to original foliation, window on verso of mount)
[Mount] Frame lines, in pen and dark brown ink, 10mm apart; window (224x151mm)

Seventeenth-Century Hand 1 (Codex Ursinianus Copyist)

See recto

This seventeenth-century addition to the codex (numbered like most others in graphite) shows a portion of a Doric entablature, which is supported by a pair of Doric pilasters that have just their capitals drawn, and which breaks forward with respect to a further portion partly indicated at the right. Its caption states that it was to be seen in a vigna (‘vineyard’) close to the ‘Porta Scura’, another name for the Via Tecta, which tunnels underneath the temple complex of Hercules Victor, just outside Tivoli, dating from the first century BCE. The fragment may have come from this complex, which was extensively explored by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger in the 1530s (Lanciani 1989–2002, 2, p. 115; Vasori 1981, pp. 101, 116–17, 124–25, 133–35, 151–53), and by Pirro Ligorio subsequently (Campbell 2004, 1, pp. 190–95). It presumably belonged to the revetment of an unidentified structure.

The Coner depiction is very closely related to a mid- sixteenth-century drawing in Berlin, which gives the same information about the location but adds that the entablature and capitals were made from a single piece of stone (la cornice col capitello son[n]o tutte d[e] un pezo), and it is also similar to a drawing now in Saint Petersburg. That all three drawings have a shared ancestry is suggested by the mishandling of the perspective of the corona at the left, as it is by the error of not drawing the inner corner of the architrave to show it receding at its right-hand side, and by the highly idiosyncratic treatment of the tops of the channels in the triglyphs. The drawing was one of those copied by Francesco Borromini.

RELATED IMAGES: [Anon.] Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, inv. OZ 114, fol. 23; [Francesco Borromini] Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, HdZ 3826, inv. Thelen 1 (Thelen 1967, 1, p. 11)

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: Saint Petersburg, Hermitage, Codex Destailleur B, fol. 28v (Lanzarini–Martinis 2015, pp. 104–05)

Ashby 1904, pp. 50–51
Campbell 2004, 2, pp. 627–28
Census, ID 45450

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