Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Drawing 1 (left): Entablature similar to the one from the Colosseum’s second storey

Browse

  • image SM volume 115/114a
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

SM volume 115/114a

Purpose

Drawing 1 (left): Entablature similar to the one from the Colosseum’s second storey

Aspect

Cross section and axonometric raking view of front, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:12

Inscribed

[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

This entablature is not recorded in any other surviving drawing from the Renaissance period. The cornice, however, is very close to that of the Colosseum’s Ionic second storey, which, strangely, is unrepresented among the labelled details from this monument included in the codex, but the architrave is a little too elaborate in having subsidiary mouldings above and below its three fascias, which are lacking in the Colosseum’s actual architrave (see Desgodetz 1682, p. 299). Nevertheless, it could be that the entablature is supposed to be from the Colosseum even though the architrave is shown incorrectly, which is reasonable given that the neighbouring drawing is unquestionably an entablature from this building.

The entablature is grouped with others on this and neighbouring pages presumably on account of its severe style.

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; Fol. 66v/Ashby 114 (Drawing 2 on this page); Fol. 83v/Ashby 137)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 55
Census, ID 45728

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.


Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).