Drawing 3 (centre left): Half-column base from the Colosseum’s third storey

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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 115/137

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Reference number

SM volume 115/137c

Purpose

Drawing 3 (centre left): Half-column base from the Colosseum’s third storey

Aspect

Partial section with perspectival view, and measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:13

Inscribed

tertia./ anphitea/ trj. (‘Third level of the amphitheatre’); [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 reference in the caption to the third level of the ‘amphitheatre’ must refer to the Colosseum’s third storey, which has an order of Corinthian half-columns. In the form of just a plinth and single torus, the base is one of surprising simplicity for the Corinthian order. Its simplicity meant that it could be drawn at a small scale and squeezed into the small space between more complex bases above and below it at the left side of the page. Like others in the codex of Colosseum details, the drawing was almost certainly copied from an earlier source.

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 2r/Ashby 2; Fol. 2v/Ashby 3; Fol. 3r/Ashby 4; Fol. 3v/Ashby 5; Fol. 25 and flap recto/Ashby 39; Fol. 25 verso of flap/Ashby 39a; Fol. 25v/Ashby 40; Fol. 26r/Ashby 41; Fol. 66r/Ashby 113; Fol. 66v/Ashby 114

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 68
Günther 1988, p. 337
Census, ID 46881

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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