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Reference number

SM volume 115/127

Purpose

Folio 74 verso (Ashby 127): Unidentified elaborate column base

Aspect

Perspectival elevation from above with partial section, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:5

Inscribed

[Drawing] Media. pars. est. M[inuti]. 26 (‘The half part [width of plinth] is 26 minutes’); [measurements]
[Mount] 127 [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 stylus lines, black chalk and compass pricks; on laid paper (232x166mm), 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

This base, which has not been identified, is a relatively small one with a plinth that measures, according to the annotation at the bottom, almost exactly half a metre in width. With a moulding sequence of plinth, lower torus, scotia, astragal, scotia and upper torus, it is of a type also seen on the previous page and used too for the internal upper storey of the Pantheon (Desgodetz 1682, p. 52). It differs, however, in that the lower torus is adorned with cable decoration and the upper one is ornamented with banded laurel.

The drawing’s format is unique in the codex, being unlike all other representation of highly decorated bases. At first sight, the base appears to be for a three-quarter column, but this is impossible to judge from the position of the fictional dowel hole on the far right, which must be at the base’s centre. What is especially odd about the drawing is that the drawn profile is part of a raking section through the base starting at the mid-point of the plinth’s front rather than being a conventional transverse section positioned at the right. The perspectival treatment of the plinth is also incongruous, in that the receding lines are far from convergent. It seems likely that the drawing with its unnecessary distortions and illogicalities was a failed experiment in representational format, which would explain why it was not repeated. The drawing’s lonely position on the top right-hand corner of the sheet suggests that others of bases were to have been added later on.

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 64
Census, ID 45697

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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