Not known

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

• 1625/35
  Date range: 1625/35

Pen and brown ink and brown wash over graphite

Seventeenth-Century Hand 1 (Codex Ursinianus Copyist)

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)

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

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