Drawing 3 (bottom right): Column base of a tabernacle from the Pantheon’s interior

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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 115/111

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Reference number

SM volume 115/111c

Purpose

Drawing 3 (bottom right): Column base of a tabernacle from the Pantheon’s interior

Aspect

Cross section and perspectival view from above, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:10

Inscribed

Sub. ista. corona. Cum/ canalis.24. (‘Beneath this cornice with 24 flutes’)

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

Depicted here is the column base belonging to the tabernacle with a triangular pediment shown immediately above it, as is made clear in the annotation. The base has a profile that is common to all those on the ground level of the building, consisting of a torus, a scotia, two astragals, another scotia and a final torus. Also shown are the lower reaches of the shaft, which differs from those of the tabernacles with segmental pediments by being fluted. This drawing is not depicted at the same scale as the one above of the entablature, being a little larger at 1:10 as opposed to 1:12. To the top right of it is another much smaller study, showing part of the top of the shaft and drawn to the slightly larger scale of 1:8.

The drawing follows representational conventions reserved in the Codex Coner for bases associated with fluted shafts (as also seen for instance on Fol. 80r/Ashby 134). Here, an orthogonal section of half of the base is combined with a downward-looking view of a slice through the bottom of the shaft, this allowing the flutes to be illustrated (which as an annotation confirms are twenty-four in number), together with a peg hole shown in a position where there would not have been one. The drawing is the only known one from the Renaissance to represent the base and shaft of the tabernacle in this way.

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 8r/Ashby 13, Fol. 23r/Ashby 35, Fol. 23v/Ashby 36, Fol. 24r/Ashby 37, Fol. 24v/Ashby 38; Fol. 38r/Ashby 61; Fol. 38v/Ashby 62; Fol. 39r/Ashby 63; Fol. 50v/Ashby 86; Fol. 65r/Ashby 111 (elsewhere on this page); Fol. 80r/Ashby 134; Fol. 82r/Ashby 136

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 54
Census, ID 45802

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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