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Reference number

SM volume 115/136a

Purpose

Drawing 1 (top left): Column base from the Pantheon’s portico

Aspect

Partial section with perspectival view, and measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale 1:7

Inscribed

Sub. Colu[m]na. porti/ calis. S[anctae]. m[ariae]. rotund[a]e (‘Beneath the column of the portico of Santa Maria Rotunda’); [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 column base, as the caption establishes, is the one used for the portico of the Pantheon and it has two toruses, two scotias and twined astragals at the centre. The drawing is one of eight arranged very neatly on the page, and it is of the same format as the others, combining a section with a view, which makes it unlike an earlier depiction of the same base produced by Il Cronaca, and later ones by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and Baldassare Peruzzi, that show it in simple profile. A subsequent drawing by an anonymous draughtsman, however, has the profile accompanied by perspectival elements, although not as systematically as in the Coner drawing.

The ‘Pantheon’ base (also used for the building’s interior) was to achieve great popularity in built schemes from around this period, being employed for the courtyard of the Palazzo della Cancelleria (Drawing 4), the interior of Raphael’s Chigi Chapel (c.1514) in Santa Maria del Popolo, and the wooden model (Florence, Casa Buonarroti) of Michelangelo’s intended façade (1517) for San Lorenzo in Florence, and then by several subsequent architects such as Michele Sanmicheli in his Pellegrini Chapel (1528).

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Il Cronaca] Montreal, CCA, Cronaca Sketchbook, fol. 2r (Günther 1988, p. 331 and pl. 2a); [Antonio da Sangallo the Younger] Florence, GDSU, 1061 Av (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 83; Frommel–Adams 2000, pp. 201–02); [Baldassare Peruzzi] Florence, GDSU, 533 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 50; Wurm 1984, pl. 75); [Anon.] Florence, GDSU, 1958 Av (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 111)

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 8r/Ashby 13; Fol. 23r/Ashby 35; Fol. 23v/Ashby 36; Fol. 24r/Ashby 37; Fol. 24v/Ashby 38; Fol. 38r/Ashby 61; Fol. 38v/Ashby 62; Fol. 39r/Ashby 63; Fol. 40r/Ashby 65; Fol. 50v/Ashby 86; Fol. 65r/Ashby 111; Fol. 80r/Ashby 134

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 67
Günther 1988, p. 338
Census, ID 46867

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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