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  • image SM volume 115/126a
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Reference number

SM volume 115/126a

Purpose

Drawing 1 (top): Column base from San Paolo fuori le Mura

Aspect

Half section with perspectival elevation from above, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:12

Inscribed

in. eclesia .S./ paulj. (‘In the church of San Paulo’); [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 Attic base is one of several once inside San Paolo fuori le Mura which, following the catastrophic fire of 1823, are now in ruined condition and located outside the building in a repository of architectural fragments (Krautheimer 1937–77, 5, pp. 140–41). The much-drawn bases exhibit many variations of decorative detail, but all have a plinth with faces embellished with buds, scrolls, masks and other motifs, a lower torus with a pattern of buds and leaves, a scotia with a rather simpler arrangement of buds and anthemion, and an upper torus ornamented with a wreath of oak leaves and (on some drawings) acorns. No other drawing precisely matches this one in decoration, although it comes close to a detailed late sixteenth-century depiction by Alberto Alberti.

Representing the base as a frontal view with a quadrant removed to reveal the profile is a format used for several other depictions of bases in the codex and it again necessitated an adjustment to the receding line on the left-hand side of the plinth. The format is not seen in other early drawings, although depicting the base from just a little above is a feature of a previous drawing of a similar base from Giuliano da Sangallo’s Codex Barberini (except that this does not indicate the position of a fictional dowel hole). A drawing by Giovanni Francesco da Sangallo showing half an elevation is similarly annotated with measurements, but these are often slightly different.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 15 (Hülsen 1910, p. 25; Borsi 1985, pp. 104–05); [Giovanni Francesco da Sangallo] Florence, GDSU, 1804 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 102; Frommel–Schelbert 2022, 1, pp. 206–07); [Alberto Alberti] Rome, ICG, Vol. 2502, fol. 8v (Forni 1991, p. 104)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 63
Census, ID 45692

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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