Drawing 2: Cornice perhaps from the Temple of Isis

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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 115/107

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Reference number

SM volume 115/107b

Purpose

Drawing 2: Cornice perhaps from the Temple of Isis

Aspect

Cross section and raking view of front, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:3

Inscribed

reperta.no[n] lunge. a. teatro/ mineruae (‘Discovered not far from the Theatre of Minerva’); [measurements]

Signed and dated

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

Medium and dimensions

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

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

The stated location of this fragment puzzled Ashby who initially suggested that the ‘Theatre of Minerva’ was a reference to the protruding exedra of the Forum of Augustus that abuts the Temple of Minerva in the Forum of Nerva. Later, however, he connected it with the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and suggested that the caption may have been a misinterpretation of an annotation on an earlier drawing (Ashby 1913). The cornice may have come from the ancient Iseum that once stood near S. Maria sopra Minerva as is also suggested by two drawings of similar cornices in the Uffizi (GDSU, 1538 Av and 1634 A), but neither of them corresponds in its specified measurements, despite its general similarity in composition.

The cornice is of fairly standard Corinthian design except for the corona being decorated with foliate decoration and the cyma above being ornamented with a Lesbian leaf decoration. The drawing’s hybrid format is the one usually followed for Coner depictions of cornices.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [‘Pseudo-Giocondo’] Florence, GDSU, 1538 Av (Bartoli 1914–1922, 6, p. 19); [Anon.] Florence, GDSU, 1634 A (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 62)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 53
Ashby 1913, p. 207
Census, ID 45499

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.

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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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