Drawing 1 (top left): Elaborate column base from Tivoli

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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 115/124

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Reference number

SM volume 115/124a

Purpose

Drawing 1 (top left): Elaborate column base from Tivoli

Aspect

Half perspectival elevation from above, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:5

Inscribed

.a. tibure. (‘At Tivoli’)

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 richly ornamented base, according to the caption, was seen at Tivoli but remains unidentified. The design is very unusual, with a plinth decorated with shells, two cyma mouldings enriched with foliage, a scotia adorned with attenuated leaves, and a torus treated as a garland. The two cyma mouldings give it some additional height, and the composition has a parallel in the column bases from the Lateran Baptistery that are shown in a subsequent drawing in the codex (Fol. 78r/Ashby 132) and were later illustrated by Andrea Palladio.

The drawing is like the one at the bottom of this sheet (Drawing 4) in being executed in a much lighter ink than the two others, and in being less comfortably positioned on the page, which implies they were probably added subsequently. There are no other surviving images of the base, apart from a partial copy of this drawing made by Michelangelo and a copy produced later by Francesco Borromini.

RELATED IMAGES: [Michelangelo] Florence, CB, 1Ar: right side (De Tolnay 1975–80, 4, p. 49; Agosti–Farinella 1987, pp. 86–87); [Francesco Borromini] Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, HdZ 3826, inv. Thelen 3 (Thelen 1967, 1, p. 12)

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: Palladio 1570, 4, p. 63

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 61
Census, ID 45627

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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