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  • image SM volume 115/116g
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Reference number

SM volume 115/116g

Purpose

Drawing 7 (third row right): Top cornice from the Arch of Constantine

Aspect

Cross section and axonometric raking view of front, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:8

Inscribed

ultima. C [orona]. archi. C [onstantini]. (‘Top cornice of the Arch of Constantine’); [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 cornice is the crowning feature, as the caption indicates, of the Arch of Constantine. It is recorded accurately in the Coner drawing, as it is in one in Vienna dating from around 1519, and it corrects the slightly earlier orthogonal drawing in Giuliano da Sangallo’s Codex Barberini, where the ovolo between the corona and the plain band underneath are omitted.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 20r (Hülsen 1910, p. 30; Borsi 1985, pp. 116–22); [Anonymous Italian C of 1519] Vienna, Albertina, Egger no. 1v (Egger 1903, p. 17; Valori 1985, pp. 78–81; Günther 1988, p. 340 and pl. 23b)

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 33r/Ashby 53; Fol. 51r/Ashby 87; Fol. 51v/Ashby 88; Fol. 62r/Ashby 105

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 57
Census, ID 48862

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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