Folio 61 recto (Ashby 103): Unidentified entablature

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

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Reference number

SM volume 115/103

Purpose

Folio 61 recto (Ashby 103): Unidentified entablature

Aspect

Perspectival elevation of a corner

Scale

Not known

Inscribed

[Drawing] 80 [early seventeenth-century hand]; 15 [in graphite]
[Mount] 103 [x2]

Signed and dated

1625/35
Date range: 1625/35

Medium and dimensions

[Drawing] Pen and brown ink and brown wash over graphite; on laid paper (232x166mm), staining upper left edge, rounded corners at right, inlaid (window on verso of mount)
[Mount] Frame lines, in pen and dark brown ink, 10mm apart

Hand

Seventeenth-Century Hand 1 (Codex Ursinianus Copyist)

Notes

Ashby likened the entablature, depicted in a seventeenth-century addition to the codex (numbered like most others in graphite), to that of Rome’s Arch of the Argentarii, which is indeed similar in the amount of its decoration but is not at all close in its composition, or in having a frieze decorated with acanthus scrolls as shown here. Campbell, although unable to identify the actual subject, nevertheless drew attention to depictions of two very similar entablatures. One, shown in an engraving by Agostino Veneziano of 1536, is closely comparable in most respects, except that the cornice lacks the lower band of egg-and-dart. The other, seen in a drawing in Naples, has an identical cornice, but the frieze is undecorated and the architrave has only two fascias.

The drawing, in format, is consistent with the two others of entablatures in the codex dating from the seventeenth century (Fols 58v and 60r) in that it combines an orthogonal elevation of the corner with occasional elements represented perspectivally, in this case the row of dentils (although not the projecting corona). As such, it was presumably based on a much earlier drawing, produced when such a combination was much more the norm, and probably in the same compilation as other originals used for Coner drawings from this later time.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Agostino Veneziano] Oberhuber 1978, p. 216; [Anon.] Naples, BNN, Ms XII D 74, fol. 11 (Lanzarini 2020, p. 506)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 51
Campbell 2004, 2, p. 229
Census, ID 47194

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.

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