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Reference number

SM volume 115/105c

Purpose

Drawing 3 (bottom left): Cornice seen near the present-day Largo di Torre Argentina

Aspect

Perspectival elevation of a corner, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:10

Inscribed

incarcarara (‘In the calcarara’); [measurements]

Signed and dated

  • c.1513/14
    Datable to c.1513/14

Medium and dimensions

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

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

The drawing was presumably included on this sheet because the entablature – with its channel-decorated corona and lack of supporting modillions – is so similar to the one depicted above it, and because their formats are the same. As Ashby noted, the ‘Calcarara’ was the locality at one end of the vanished Circus Flaminius (near today’s Piazza dei Calcarari just east of the Largo di Torre Argentina) where marble was converted into lime; and, as he also noted, an identical entablature is recorded in later drawings, including two by Baldassare Peruzzi, which give the location as the ‘Arco di Camilliano’, a ruin then standing near the ancient Iseum (close to today’s Collegio Romano) some 300m to the north. Ashby suggested that there were fragments of the same cornice in the two different places – which could be correct if a portion of a cornice from near the Arco di Camigliano had been transported to the Calcarara for the purpose of lime production. Intriguingly, an engraving of this cornice is found in an album in Ferrara on the page immediately before one of the cornices depicted above it here, although this may just be a coincidence.

The cornice is grouped on the same page with two others of similar type, all three without modillions and two of the three with fluted coronas, while similar cornices are also depicted on the following folios (62v and 63r). All are shown as corners – a drawing convention used in the codex – but there is no evidence to suggest that they represent actual corners.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Baldassare Peruzzi] Florence, GDSU, 386 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 42; Wurm 1984, pl. 13); Florence, GDSU, 539 Av (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 51; Wurm 1984, pl. 104); [Jacques Prevost] Ferrara, Bibl. Com Ariostea, MS. I 217, fol. 44r

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 52
Lembke 1994, p. 153
Census, ID 47202

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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