Drawing 1 (top): Cornice from the Milvian Bridge

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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 115/112

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Reference number

SM volume 115/112a

Purpose

Drawing 1 (top): Cornice from the Milvian Bridge

Aspect

Cross section and raking view of front

Scale

Not known

Inscribed

ponte. molle (‘Ponte Molle’)

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

Ashby could find no trace of this notably austere cornice, which the caption records as being located at the Milvian Bridge (Ponte Molle), and he suggested that it was a fragment, perhaps originating from a nearby tomb on the Via Flaminia, that had been incorporated into the bridge’s fabric. Of the five drawings on the sheet, this one is incongruous in being a cornice rather than an architrave, in being undecorated, and in being drawn with a perspective receding in a different direction. What is clear is that the drawing was not executed at the same time as the others on the sheet below it. It is likely to have been added after them since the one of an architrave on the far left was originally conceived as showing a full entablature before this idea was abandoned (see Drawing 2). It may have been added to this sheet, which was originally a verso, because of its resemblance to those of similarly austere cornices that were drawn, in the original Coner compilation, on the facing page which was a recto (Fol. 66r/Ashby 113).

The drawing was copied by Michelangelo and also, as a bare profile, by Francesco Borromini.

RELATED IMAGES: [Michelangelo] Florence, CB, 2Av: left side (De Tolnay 1975–80, 4, p. 48; Agosti–Farinella 1987, pp. 112–13); [Francesco Borromini] Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, HdZ 3826, inv. Thelen 1 (Thelen 1967, 1, p. 11)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 54
Census, ID 45493

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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