Drawing 4 (centre right): Doric capital seen near the Capitol

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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 115/122d

Purpose

Drawing 4 (centre right): Doric capital seen near the Capitol

Aspect

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

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:16

Inscribed

apud. capitolium. quarta pars (‘Near the Capitol, quarter part [of a capital]’); b. 2. E[t] minuta. sunt. 30 [‘Two braccia and 30 minutes’); [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 Doric capital with an S-profiled echinus was seen, as the caption indicates, on the Capitol, but cannot now be traced. A drawing of the same capital from the circle of Antonio Labacco has an annotation stating that it was seen at the foot of the hill and that it had been adapted to form the head of a well, here described as a ‘neck’ (gola duno pozzo). Having an echinus with an S-shaped rather than a quadrant profile is an unusual variant, but other examples are known, notably the theatre and the amphitheatre in Verona, which provided local prototypes for capitals of this design used by Michele Sanmicheli for his Palazzo Canossa (1526) and Palazzo Pompei (1530s). The drawing provides only minimal indications of a perspectival view of the capital and also shows a slice through the top of the shaft to include a dowel hole where none could have existed.

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

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 61
Census, ID 45892

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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