Drawing 1 (left): Unidentified Attic column base

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Books

Italian Renaissance Drawings
- Codex Coner: Architecture and Antiquarianism in early sixteenth-century Rome, c.1513-15 with seventeenth-century additions (100 folios)
  - SM volume 115/133

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Reference number

SM volume 115/133a

Purpose

Drawing 1 (left): Unidentified Attic column base

Aspect

Partial section with perspectival view, and measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale 1:8

Inscribed

canales. sunt/ 24 (‘There are 24 flutes’); [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

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

Of a commonplace Attic type, albeit with a double plinth, this base remains unidentified and is not recorded in any other known drawing. It is on the first of five pages of bases that are all depicted in a similar way, each in the form of a partial section rendered orthogonally and showing little more than the profile, but with salient mouldings visible behind the profile seen in perspective from above, this being the preferred method in the codex for representing bases that have no surface decoration. The drawing is also the first on two pages of bases that all have fluted shafts represented identically as coming forward from the section below, a normal practice in the codex for depicting shafts of this kind. As the annotation states, this shaft has twenty-four flutes and it is thus in line with the rule stipulated by Vitruvius (Book 4, chapter 3, 9) for Ionic and other columns.

The placement of this drawing and the two next to it at the bottom of the page, leaving the rest of it blank, suggests further depictions of bases with fluted shafts were intended to be added.

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 66
Günther 1988, p. 338
De Angeli 1992, p. 43
Census, ID 45890

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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