Drawing 3 (right): Column base seen in San Marco

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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 115/133c

Purpose

Drawing 3 (right): Column base seen in San Marco

Aspect

Partial section with perspectival view, and measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:6

Inscribed

ad. S. marcum/ .cum. canalibus. 24 (‘At San Marco 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 stylus lines

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

This drawing of a base of a fluted column, seen as the caption states in the church of San Marco, is of similar format to the others on the page (see Drawing 1). Ashby noted that the base came from a ‘considerable building’, a conclusion deriving from the fact that the plinth had a width of 2 braccia 53 minutes, equivalent to 1.68 metres, which is even larger than the two sizable bases recorded on subsequent pages (Fol. 80r/Ashby 134 Drawing 2 and Fol. 82r/Ashby 136 Drawing 2) and suggests that it came from a building with columns over 40 Roman feet tall. Where such a large base was located in the church is unclear, as is where it originated from, although it could perhaps have come from the Temple of Trajan which once stood in this vicinity. The noted number of flutes – twenty-four – again accords with the Vitruvian theoretical norm.

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 66
Census, ID 46863

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.

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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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