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  • image SM volume 115/113b
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Reference number

SM volume 115/113b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (top right): Cornice from the Colosseum’s third storey

Aspect

Cross section and raking view of front, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:14

Inscribed

.T [ertia corona]. anphiteatri. uespasiani (‘Third [cornice] of the amphitheatre of Vespasian’); [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

Although identified by the caption, the drawing differs from the cornice actually on the Colosseum’s third storey as this does not have dentils and has a plain rectilinear band instead, a mistake resulting either from faulty recollection or from copying an earlier drawing that was itself incorrect. The cornice was correctly recorded, although without measurements, by Giuliano da Sangallo in his Codex Barberini in a comparable section-plus-view format (unusual in that compilation), and as a perspectival view on a sheet, attributed to Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, where this and other cornices from the Colosseum are bizarrely treated as corners.

Other details from the Colosseum appear below (Drawing 4) and on the drawing’s verso (Fol. 66v/Ashby 114 Drawing 2].

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 65v (Hülsen 1910, p. 69); [Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, attr.] Florence, GDSU, 2043 Av (Bartoli 1914-22, 6, pp. 30–31)

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 2r/Ashby 2; Fol. 2v/Ashby 3; Fol. 3r/Ashby 4; Fol. 3v/Ashby 5; Fol. 25 and flap recto/Ashby 39; Fol. 25 verso of flap/Ashby 39a; Fol. 25v/Ashby 40; Fol. 26r/Ashby 41; Fol. 66r/Ashby 113 (Drawing 4 on this page); Fol. 66v/Ashby 114; Fol. 83v/Ashby 137

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 55
Günther 1988, p. 337
Census, ID 48195

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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