Drawing 4: Cornice from the pedestal of Trajan’s Column

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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 115/109

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Reference number

SM volume 115/109d

Purpose

Drawing 4: Cornice from the pedestal of Trajan’s Column

Aspect

Cross section and axonometric raking view of front, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:8

Inscribed

.APVD. COLV [M]NA [M]. TROIANA [M]. (‘At Trajan’s Column’); [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

Recorded here, and identified in pseudo-antique capitals, is the same cornice from the pedestal of Trajan’s Column that was depicted previously (see Cat. Fol. 53r/Ashby 91). The two drawings are not identical, however. This one shows more of the acanthus decoration on the cyma and gives this moulding a slightly differently-curving profile; and it also indicates the top of the face of the pedestal below, which is omitted from the other drawing. The measurements (as Ashby noted) are also a little different, while the label is less specific about the cornice’s location. This suggests that the two drawings had different sources, and that the draughtsman may not have been aware they were of the same feature.

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 53r/Ashby 91; Fol. 76r/Ashby 129

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 54
Census, ID 45335

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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