To an approximate scale of 1:6

murata. in. arco / costantini. / est. (‘It is immured in the Arch of Constantine’); [measurements]

• c.1513/14
  Datable to c.1513/14

Pen and brown ink and grey-brown wash over black chalk and stylus lines

Bernardo della Volpaia

As Ashby noted in 1913, this cornice is to be found inside the Arch of Constantine in an internal space at the level of the attic. It is a spolium, reused from an earlier structure when the arch was being built, its rear face being employed for part of the inscription on the arch’s northern front (Pensabene 1999, pp. 141–42). With a tall corona formed of two levels and no supporting modillions, it is of very unusual design. Much drawn in the Renaissance, it was recorded twice in Giuliano da Sangallo’s Codex Barberini, most probably before the Coner drawing was produced, as well as in numerous later images.

The Coner drawing shows the front of the entablature as if at a corner (although the surviving fragment is from the middle part of an entablature) and it also includes depictions of the supposed undersides of the projecting corona and dentils. These are represented receding perspectivally towards a vanishing point below and to the right, a format seen elsewhere in the compilation, such as in two further examples on this page. There seems some confusion, however, over whether it is the underside of the projecting corona that is decorated, or whether the depicted leaf decoration somehow belongs to a separate moulding between the corona and a row of egg-and-dart beneath it – like it does in the ancient fragment. The drawn format is similar to those followed in the two Barberini drawings, although one (fol. 62v) includes an additional cyma moulding beneath the corona, decorated very crudely with leaves, and the other has a similarly confused rendition of corona’s underside, but with the perspective receding to the left rather than the right. Later drawings include one by Aristotile da Sangallo and another in the Uffizi by an anonymous draughtsman which both represent it as a section coupled with a raking view, this being the convention followed in the Codex Coner when corners are not being depicted. Both these drawings, however, mistakenly show the corona as having an underside that is decorated.

An engraving from the 1530s, perhaps by Enea Vico and known from an impression in Ferrara, is identical in format to the Coner drawing, and is annotated with very similar dimensions (Nesselrath 1992, pp. 152 and 156). It could, as it has been argued (ibid.), be a copy of the Coner drawing, as is the case with a print of a cornice certainly by Vico (Fol. 49v/Ashby 84 Drawing 1) that is paired with this one in a compilation in the V&A (Miller 2019, p. 776), but the treatment of the foliate decoration in the crowning cyma differs. Its resemblance to the Coner drawing still suggests that the two somehow are closely related.

The cornice is grouped on the same page with two other cornices of similar type, all three without modillions and two of the three with fluted coronas. Cornices of this type are also shown on the following folios (Fols 62v/Ashby 106 and 63r/Ashby 107).

RELATED IMAGES: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fols 12r and 62v (Hülsen 1910, p. 22 and 65–66; Borsi 1985, pp. 93–94 and 324–26); [Enea Vico, attr.] Ferrara, Bibl. Com. Ariostea, MS. I 217, fol. 44v; London, V&A, E.1983-1899

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Anon.] Florence, GDSU, 1953 Av (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 11); [Aristotile da Sangallo] Florence, GDSU, 1748 Ar (Ghisetti Giavarina 1990, p. 73)

Ashby 1904, p. 51
Ashby 1913, p. 207
Census, ID 47196

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