Drawing 2 (top right): Unidentified Doric capital

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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 115/122

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Reference number

SM volume 115/122b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (top right): Unidentified Doric capital

Aspect

Cross section and perspectival views of sides, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:11

Inscribed

[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, traces of black chalk and compass pricks

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

This unidentified capital is of very similar design, with a pair of astragals beneath the echinus, to the one drawn next to it (Drawing 1), but the measurements show it to have been considerable larger. The drawing has the hybrid format of a section combined with elements of a perspectival view, together with the slice through the top of the shaft to show an imaginary dowel hole, but very little of the capital’s exterior is made visible. The original intention, as is evident from black chalk under-drawing, was to follow the same format as the drawing next to it and depict a raking view of the capital’s left side, but the format was then changed, because the neighbouring drawing was found to be in the way.

This capital bears a marked similarity to one drawn twice in a sketchbook in Harvard that, according to an inscription, was found in a vigna near San Pietro in Vincoli in 1514, but the measurements, though similar, are not close enough to make the identification secure.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Circle of Antonio Labacco] Cambridge (Mass.), Fogg Museum, Inv. 1932.271, fol. 1r and 3r (Burns 1984, p. 413)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 61
Census, ID 45891

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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