Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Drawing 2: Elaborate unidentified column base

Browse

  • image SM volume 115/131b
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

SM volume 115/131b

Purpose

Drawing 2: Elaborate unidentified column base

Aspect

Perspectival elevation (paired with one of a different base)

Scale

Not known

Signed and dated

  • c.1513/14
    Datable to c.1513/14

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink and grey-brown wash over black chalk and stylus lines

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

This half of a composite image, produced around 1515, shows a base that is again unidentified. It has an undecorated plinth and then two toruses, one with cable moulding and the other with Lesbian decoration, followed by a cyma reversa with vertical foliate decoration, an astragal treated as a cable, a fluted scotia, an astragal made up of beads and a final torus of banded laurel. Some of the mouldings match, in shape or size, with mouldings belonging to the neighbouring base (see Drawing 1 for further discussion). The drawing was copied by Michelangelo but just as a profile, and 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] Vienna, Albertina, It. AZ (fol. 180; G XI, i): inv. Thelen 4 (Thelen 1967, 1, p. 12)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 65
Census, ID 45842

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).