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  • image SM volume 115/116a
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Reference number

SM volume 115/116a

Purpose

Drawing 1 (top left): Impost from the ground storey of the Cortile del Belvedere’s lowest terrace

Aspect

Cross section and raking view of front, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:7

Inscribed

.p [ulchrum]. uidere. (‘Belvedere’); [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 design of this moulding, with its cyma below the corona and its astragal at the bottom, is consistent with that of an impost, and the annotation states that it comes from the Cortile del Belvedere, although it does not specify from which part. The impost can be identified, however, as being from the ground storey arcades of the lowest terrace. It is recorded by Letarouilly (1963, 2–3, p. 132), except that his illustration shows a cavetto rather than a cyma beneath the corona, and the impost’s position is shown on Fols 27r and 28r/Ashby 43 and 45. On this sheet, the impost is grouped, as on the preceding page (Fol. 67r/Ashby 115), with other unadorned architectural mouldings, which are mostly cornices and imposts.

The drawing was copied in just profile by Francesco Borromini.

RELATED IMAGES: [Francesco Borromini] Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, HdZ 3826, inv. Thelen 1 (Thelen 1967, 1, p. 11)

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 15r/Ashby 25; Fol. 27r/Ashby 43); Fol. 27v/Ashby 44; Fol. 28r/Ashby 45; Fol. 28v/Ashby 46; Fol. 46v/Ashby 78; Fol. 53v/Ashby 92; Fol. 54r/Ashby 93/ Fol. 69r/Ashby 117; Fol. 72r/Ashby 122

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 56
Ackerman 1954, p. 196

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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