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  • image SM volume 115/116e
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Reference number

SM volume 115/116e

Purpose

Drawing 5 (second row, centre): Impost or cornice designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger

Aspect

Cross section and raking view of front, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:13

Inscribed

antonij (‘Of Antonio’); [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 stating that this cornice or impost was designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger is one of four attributions in the codex to Antonio (cf. Fols 48v/Ashby 82, 67r/Ashby 115 and 68r/Ashby 116 Drawing 9). The detail is almost certainly for a project associated with two of the others ascribed to him in the codex, one a Doric capital immediately below on this same sheet (Drawing 9) and the other an impost or cornice (Fol. 67r/Ashby 115), as all three have measurements in common. In each of them, the astragal near the bottom is 9 minutes tall and projects 7 minutes from the surface below and above it, while the fillet beneath the astragal is 5 minutes tall. It is clearly for a large structure, larger than any of the orders in the Cortile del Belvedere, and it is approximately of the same scale as the Tegurio that stood over St. Peter’s tomb (cf. Drawing 2 above and Fol. 47r/Ashby 79), although it is not for this structure. It could be connected with the Doric minor order for the interior of the Nicholas V chancel (now demolished) of St Peter’s, designed under Bramante’s direction.

The profile in the drawing was copied by Michelangelo and by Francesco Borromini, who may have thought it to be antique as he mis-transcribed the annotation as ‘antonini’ (as in the ‘Baths of Antoninus’) rather than ‘antonij’.

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)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 57

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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