Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Drawing 2 (bottom): Elaborate column base in San Bartolomeo all’Isola

Browse

  • image SM volume 115/125b
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

SM volume 115/125b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (bottom): Elaborate column base in San Bartolomeo all’Isola

Aspect

Half section with perspectival elevation from above, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:7

Inscribed

in. s. bartolomeo./ insulae (‘In San Bartolomeo all’Isola’); isto. dado. est. brachia. Duo (‘This plinth is 2 braccia [wide]’); [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

As the caption indicates, this base was seen in San Bartolomeo all’Isola and, as Ashby noted, it is one of the two that face one another supporting the third columns from the entrance. The drawing actually shows rather more of the base than can be seen today, because the floor level has been raised, and it includes the plinth, now hidden, which has a panel set into its face. The drawing is accurate in its recording of both the profile (the plinth being followed by a torus, scotia, astragal, scotia and cyma) and the surface decoration (banded laurel, anthemion, bead-and-reel, fluting and acanthus). The base was regularly depicted, appearing previously in a drawing by Francesco di Giorgio, and in the Codex Barberini and Codex Escurialensis.

The drawing, like the one above it, follows the format of a frontal view with a quadrant removed to show the profile, and has a correction made at the left to the receding line of the plinth. It was partly copied by Michelangelo showing just the front, and also copied 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 3829, inv. Thelen 3 (Thelen 1967, 1, p. 12)

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Francesco di Giorgio] Turin, Biblioteca Reale, Codex Saluzziano 148, addendum, fols 99r and 100v (Martini 1967, p. 289); [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 15r (Hülsen 1910, p. 28; Borsi 1985, p. 106); [Anon.] El Escorial, Real Monasterio, 28-II-12 (Codex Escurialensis), fols 23r and 49v (Egger 1906, pp. 86 and 126)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 63
Census, ID 45671

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.


Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).