Drawing 6 (bottom right): Column base seen at the Palazzo della Cancelleria

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / Drawing 6 (bottom right): Column base seen at the Palazzo della Cancelleria

Browse

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

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

Reference number

SM volume 115/134f

Purpose

Drawing 6 (bottom right): Column base seen at the Palazzo della Cancelleria

Aspect

Partial section with perspectival view, and measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:6

Inscribed

.in. p [alatio]. car [dinalis]. S. Georgij. (‘In the palace of the Cardinal of San Giorgio’); [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

The base is labelled as being in the palace of the Cardinal of San Giorgio, known today as the Cancelleria, and Ashby concluded that it was ancient, realising that none of the columns belonging to the palace has a fluted shaft. It is much larger in scale than the columns used in the fifteenth-century building, which is clear when it is compared to the elaborate base used for the courtyard’s upper storey which is illustrated on a different page (Fol. 82r/Ashby 136 Drawing 4). In design, it is fundamentally Attic but it is unusual in having an astragal on a raised band running around the centre of the scotia. To judge from the black chalk underdrawing, it was originally composed as an Attic base with a conventional scotia before the scotia was subdivided, the initial design having perhaps been set out in error and needing to be changed. The ancient structure of which it was once part remains unidentified. It is depicted on a page with a series of ‘Pantheon’-type bases, presumably because of its compositional similarities.

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 67
Günther 1988, p. 338
Census, ID 46829

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