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Reference number

SM volume 115/110d

Purpose

Drawing 4 (bottom left): Cornice seen near the church of Santa Francesca Romana (formerly Santa Maria Nuova)

Aspect

Cross section and axonometric raking view of front, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:10

Inscribed

Circa. s. maria [m]. novam. [‘Near to Santa Maria Nuova’); [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 and compass pricks

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

The cornice is known only from this drawing and its copy by Michelangelo. Since it was seen, as the caption indicates, near the church of Santa Maria Nuova (later known as Santa Francesca Romana), it may have come from Hadrian’s Temple of Venus and Rome (begun 121 CE), given that the church partly occupies the temple’s site. Also pointing to such a possibility is the unusual design feature of replacing the customary dentils with an unadorned plain band, a feature also seen in the various cornices of the Pantheon which was erected at around the same date and associated with the same patron. Two of the Pantheon’s cornices with this band are drawn on what was originally the adjacent page of the compilation (now Fol. 65r/Ashby 111). Intriguingly, the band here was initially drawn as a row of dentils before the mistake was realised and corrected.

The cornice in also distinctive in having two rows of egg-and-dart, a combination it shares with the one drawn at the top of the page [Drawing 1], which was also seen at Santa Maria Nuova, suggesting that both could have come from the same structure. The drawing was copied in simplified form by Michelangelo.

RELATED IMAGES: [Michelangelo] Florence, CB, 3Av: right side (De Tolnay 1975–80, 4, p. 50; Agosti–Farinella 1987, pp. 114–15)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 54
Census, ID 45490

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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