Drawing 1 (top right): Elaborate Doric capital seen near San Matteo in Merulana

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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 115/120

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Reference number

SM volume 115/120a

Purpose

Drawing 1 (top right): Elaborate Doric capital seen near San Matteo in Merulana

Aspect

Cross section and raking view of side, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:11

Inscribed

prope S. matheum. (‘Close to San Matteo’)

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, traces of black chalk and compass pricks

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

This Doric capital has a neck decorated with Lesbian ornament and an echinus embellished with egg-and-dart. The church of San Matteo, specified in the caption as where it was seen, was situated on the Via Merulana on the Esquiline Hill between the Lateran and Santa Maria Maggiore before it was destroyed in the early nineteenth century (Armellini 1942, pp. 304–06).

The capital is also known from a subsequent drawing by Giorgio Vasari the Younger, who depicted it without the surface ornament. It is identical in form, although a little larger in size, to the one here drawn below it (Drawing 3), as well as being depicted in the same manner, a section combined with a view so as to allow a dowel hole (positioned too high up the shaft) to be seen. Either this drawing or the one below it was copied by Michelangelo, although he made it into a frontal representation with decorative embellishments.

RELATED IMAGES: [Michelangelo] London, BM, 1859-6-25-560/1v (De Tolnay 1975–80, 4, pp. 47–48; Agosti–Farinella 1987, pp. 94–95)

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giorgio Vasari the Younger] Florence, GDSU, ‘Porte e finestre’, 4628 Ar

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 60
Census, ID 45848

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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