Drawing 2: Cornice once in San Giovanni Laterano

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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 115/104

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Reference number

SM volume 115/104b

Purpose

Drawing 2: Cornice once in San Giovanni Laterano

Aspect

Perspectival elevation of a corner

Scale

Not known

Inscribed

In. S. Gio[vanni]: Lat[erano] (‘In San Giovanni Laterano’); 17 [in graphite]

Signed and dated

1625/35
Date range: 1625/35

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink and brown wash over graphite

Hand

Seventeenth-Century Hand 1 (Codex Ursinianus Copyist)

Notes

There is no sign of this cornice today in San Giovanni Laterano (which was largely refashioned to a design by Francesco Borromini in 1646–50), but it is also known from other early drawings. Depictions of it are included, for example, in Giuliano da Sangallo’s Codex Barberini, which specifies the same location, in Amico Aspertini’s Sketchbook 1 in the British Museum, and in the Fossombrone Sketchbook. The closest surviving precedent, however, is a drawing from the mid-sixteenth century now in Berlin (Campbell), which, apart from showing a slightly shorter length of the cornice and the beginnings of a frieze beneath, is otherwise virtually identical. An extremely unusual feature of the cornice is the lack of a corona.

As with many seventeenth-century additions to the codex, this drawing bears a number written in graphite.

RELATED IMAGES: Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, inv. OZ 114, fol. 13

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 11v (Hülsen 1910, p. 21; Borsi 1985, pp. 91–93); [Amico Aspertini] London, BM, Aspertini Sketchbook I, fol. 8v (Bober 1957, p. 56); [Anon.] Fossombrone, Biblioteca Civica Passionei, Dis. Vol. 3 (Fossombrone Sketchbook), fol. 10r (Nesselrath 1993, p. 104)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 51
Ashby 1913, p. 207
Campbell 2004, 2, pp. 602–03
Census, ID 45482

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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