Folio 71 verso (Ashby 121): Doric capital once in Santa Sabina

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Italian Renaissance Drawings
- Codex Coner: Architecture and Antiquarianism in early sixteenth-century Rome, c.1513-15 with seventeenth-century additions (100 folios)

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Reference number

SM volume 115/121

Purpose

Folio 71 verso (Ashby 121): Doric capital once in Santa Sabina

Aspect

Half a cross section and raking view of side, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:12

Inscribed

[Drawing] .a. S. sauina. (‘At Santa Sabina’); totius. m. 62 (‘The whole [width is] 62 minutes’); [measurements]
[Mount] 121 [x2]

Signed and dated

c.1513/14
Datable to c.1513/14

Medium and dimensions

[Drawing] Pen and brown ink and grey-brown wash over stylus lines and compass pricks; on laid paper (232x165mm), rounded corners at left, inlaid
[Mount] Frame lines, in pen and dark brown ink, 10mm apart; window (224x160mm)

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Watermark

See recto

Notes

The richly ornamented Doric capital shown here has an abacus with a cyma reversa carrying Lesbian ornament and with rosettes on its underside, an egg-and-dart echinus, a bead-and-reel astragal, and a neck of S-shaped profile with foliate ornament. It cannot now be traced, but It is described in the caption as being at Santa Sabina on Rome’s Aventine Hill, and in a drawing by Baldassare Peruzzi as being used as a base at the church’s entrance (serve per basa a l entrata di s[an]c[t]a sabina). This may well explain why in Giuliano da Sangallo’s Codex Barberini the capital, again identified as being at Santa Sabina, is drawn upside down. There is some disagreement in the drawings about the capital’s precise design. In Giuliano da Sangallo’s, the neck is shown not as S-shaped but as concave, while it is straight in Peruzzi‘s but with an apophyge at the top.

The Coner drawing’s half-sectional format (which shows an invented dowel hole) tallies with that of most of the drawings on the recto. Its positioning in a top corner of the sheet implies that further drawings were anticipated.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 15 (Hülsen 1910, p. 26; Borsi 1985, pp. 106–07); [Baldassare Peruzzi] Florence, GDSU, 486 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, pp. 49–50; Wurm 1984, pl. 439)

Literature

Ashby 1904, pp. 60–61
Census, ID 45888

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

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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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