Drawing 2 (centre): Column base from the Temple of Vespasian

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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 115/133b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (centre): Column base from the Temple of Vespasian

Aspect

Partial section with perspectival view, and measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:10

Inscribed

classitudo. 144 (‘Width 144 [minutes]’); tria [rum]. colu [m]na [rum]. sub. capitolio. cum. canalib [us]/ 24 (‘Of the three columns beneath the Capitol, with 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 black chalk and stylus lines

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

This drawing of an unadorned base supporting a fluted column follows the same format as the others on the page (see Drawing 1). The particular base depicted is that of the Temple of Vespasian in the Roman Forum, as is established by the caption referring to the ‘three columns below the Capitol’, and it is of the type used on the lower storey of the Pantheon (see Fols 65r/Ashby 111, 80r/Ashby 134 and 82r/Ashby 136). Other early drawings of this base include orthogonal depictions produced by Baldassare Peruzzi and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger. The annotation further notes that it has twenty-four flutes, a number that again corresponds to Vitruvius’s theoretical norm. In another annotation, the Latin word for ‘width’ – crassitudo – is mistakenly written as classitudo.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Baldassare Peruzzi] Florence, GDSU, 533 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 50; Wurm 1983, pl. 75); [Antonio da Sangallo the Younger] Florence, GDSU, 1140 Av (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 89; Frommel–Schelbert 2022, 1, p. 110)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 66
Census, ID 46860

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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