To an approximate scale of 1:40

24 houoli. sunt./ et canales. 24. (‘There are 24 eggs and 24 flutes’); .a.; .b.; c.; [measurements]

• c.1513/14
  Datable to c.1513/14

Pen and brown ink and grey-brown wash over stylus lines, traces of black chalk and compass pricks

Bernardo della Volpaia

This third drawing shows the upper reaches of Trajan’s Column, specifically the top of the shaft, the capital and the cylindrical superstructure, and it is in effect an enlargement of the top of the drawing found earlier in the codex (Fol. 42r/Ashby 69). Although it omits the rectangular aperture in the cylindrical superstructure, it otherwise records the top of the column more accurately and more precisely to scale, showing the Doric flutes visible at the shaft’s summit and the ‘eggs’ decorating the capital’s echinus, an annotation indicating that the shaft has twenty-four flutes and the echinus twenty-four ‘eggs’. It also shows the superstructure, a plinth originally supporting a statue of the emperor, as being formed of two separate elements and as being damaged at the top, rather than as a single component capped by a dome, in the way illustrated by Sebastiano Serlio in 1540. The reliability of the Coner depiction is supported by a drawing of column and its superstructure by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger which similarly indicates that the top of the plinth was in a badly damaged state. It is also rather supported by Antonio Labacco’s later engraving (1552) of the column, even though the plinth’s rough upper surface is rather tidied up. The Coner depiction, therefore, conforms with the preferred practice seen in the codex of avoiding reconstruction, and whether based on another drawing on not, it is dependant on knowledge of the monument gained from first-hand observation.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Antonio da Sangallo the Younger] Florence, GDSU, 1153 Av (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 85; Frommel–Schelbert 2022, 1, pp. 114–16); Serlio 1619, 3, fol. 77r; Labacco 1552, unpaginated (fol. 16)

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 42r/Ashby 69; Fol. 53r/Ashby 91; Fol. 64r/Ashby 109; Fol. 76r/Ashby 129 (elsewhere on this page)

Ashby 1904, p. 64
Census, ID 45729

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.

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