Drawing 1 (top left): Entablature probably from the Basilica Ulpia

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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 115/113

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Reference number

SM volume 115/113a

Purpose

Drawing 1 (top left): Entablature probably from the Basilica Ulpia

Aspect

Cross section and raking view of front, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:10

Inscribed

prepe [sic]. arcem. militum (‘Close to the soldiers’ fortress [i.e. the Torre delle Milizie]’); [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 entablature is labelled as having been seen near the Torre delle Milizie which lies behind the Forum of Trajan from where it could well have come. It matches closely with fragments believed to have been part of the Basilica Ulpia (Bertoldi 1962, pp. 15–16), as well as with drawings of similar cornices seen near the now-demolished church of Santa Maria in Campo Carleo, popularly known as the Spoglia Cristi, at the forum’s southwestern edge (see entries for Fols 51v and 65v). These drawings include a large-scale elevational depiction by Giuliano da Sangallo, in his Codex Barberini, of an entablature fragment said in the annotation to have been recently discovered at the Spoglia Cristi, which is very similar to the one in the Coner drawing. It differs, however, in its measurements and in representing one of the fillets in the rounded form of a continuous bead moulding. An early sixteenth-century drawing by Giovanni Francesco da Sangallo shows the same entablature, but is closer to the Codex Barberini depiction, in showing the fillet as a rounded moulding and in summarising the Barberini annotation.

The drawing is grouped with those of other entablatures that are notably austere, as is the one originally on the facing page that was seen near the Milvian Bridge (Fol. 65v/Ashby 112 Drawing 1).

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 10r (Hülsen 1910, p. 18; Borsi 1985, pp. 86-87); [Giovanni Francesco da Sangallo] Florence, GDSU, 1326 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 102)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 55
Census, ID 47174

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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