Drawing 2 (top centre): Column base probably from the Basilica Ulpia

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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 115/134

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Reference number

SM volume 115/134b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (top centre): Column base probably from the Basilica Ulpia

Aspect

Partial section with perspectival view, and measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:6

Inscribed

in templo panteonis. (‘In the temple of the Pantheon’) [erased]; ad [...] s. iouan[n]e in laterano (‘At St John Lateran’) [erased]; apud./ colu[m]nam/ trojana (‘Near Trajan’s Column’); [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 and compass pricks

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

This base of the Pantheon type was misidentified – twice – by the draughtsman, who at first labelled it (at the top) as coming from the Pantheon, and then (in the same place as the final caption) as from San Giovanni in Laterano, before erasing both and finally giving the correct location. The mistake is easily understood as bases of this type were to be found in both the Pantheon and San Giovanni in Laterano and were in fact illustrated below on the same page (Drawings 4 and 5 respectively).

Otherwise unrecorded, this enormous base was seen – as the caption tells us – near Trajan’s Column and almost certainly came from the Basilica Ulpia. With a plinth measuring 2 braccia and 40 minutes (1.55m), it corresponds closely in size and design to a surviving fragmentary base from the basilica (Packer 1997, 1, pp. 303–04 and 2, plate 75.6). It is very similar in size and design, as well, to a base probably likewise from the basilica that is drawn on a later page (see Cat. Fol. 82r/Ashby 136 Drawing 2).

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 66
Census, ID 46813

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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