Drawing 2 (top centre): Impost from the Tegurio in St Peter’s

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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 115/116

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Reference number

SM volume 115/116b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (top centre): Impost from the Tegurio in St Peter’s

Aspect

Cross section and raking view of front, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:6

Inscribed

circu [m]. ara [m]. S. petri (‘Around the altar of St Peter’s’); [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 annotation establishes that this detail belongs to the long-demolished structure, known as the Tegurio, which Bramante designed in 1513/14 to protect the altar of St Peter’s during the new church‘s construction, and which is also the subject of another Coner drawing (Fol. 47r/Ashby 79). It is presumably a design for the impost of the structure’s arches rather than the cornice of the attic, which was executed only later (Shearman 1974, pp. 571–72). It may have been executed with an ovolo moulding beneath the corona, as shown in the Codex Mellon, rather than a cavetto as shown here. The drawing’s profile was copied by Michelangelo, and it was later copied too by Francesco Borromini.

RELATED IMAGES: [Michelangelo] Florence, CB, 1Av: left side (De Tolnay 1975–80, 4, p. 49; Agosti–Farinella 1987, pp. 88–89); [Francesco Borromini] Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, HdZ 3826, inv. Thelen 1 (Thelen 1967, 1, p. 11)

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Domenico Aimo (Il Varignana), attr.] New York, Morgan Library, Codex Mellon, fol. 6v

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 47r/Ashby 79

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 56
Günther 1988, p. 337

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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