Folio 72 verso (Ashby 123): Doric capital from Tivoli

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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 115/123

Purpose

Folio 72 verso (Ashby 123): Doric capital from Tivoli

Aspect

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

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:6

Inscribed

[Drawing] totum. est. m[inuti]. 55 (‘The whole [i.e. width of the abacus] is 55 minutes’); a. tibure. [h]abet. / canales. 20 (‘At Tivoli, it has 20 flutes’); [measurements]
[Mount] 123 [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 compass pricks; on laid paper (232x165mm), rounded corners at left, inlaid
[Mount] Frame lines, in pen and dark brown ink, 10mm apart; window (224x158mm)

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Watermark

See recto

Notes

According to one of the annotations, this Doric capital was seen at Tivoli, but the original cannot now be traced. With its plain abacus, quadrant-shaped echinus, three annuli and neck, it is of conventional design, except that the neck is not separated by an astragal from the fluted shaft beneath as is normally the case, and so the junction is like that at the top of Trajan’s Column in Rome (see Fol. 76r/Ashby 129). As specified in the same annotation, the flutes are twenty in number, and they are also shown as meeting at arises, which is in line with Vitruvius’s recommendation for Doric columns (Book 4, chapter 3, 9). The indentation depicted at the drawing’s bottom right-hand corner is a fictional dowel hole.

The drawing is positioned at the bottom right-hand corner of the sheet, which is otherwise blank. It was presumably the intention to add further capitals of similar type to the page, but why this first drawing was placed at the bottom is unclear. It was partly copied by Michelangelo.

RELATED IMAGES: [Michelangelo] Florence, CB, 1Ar: right side (De Tolnay 1975–80, 4, p. 49; Agosti–Farinella 1987, pp. 86–87)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 61
Census, ID 45623

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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