Drawing 5 (bottom centre): Pilaster base seen near the Theatre of Marcellus

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / Drawing 5 (bottom centre): Pilaster base seen near the Theatre of Marcellus

Browse

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

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

Reference number

SM volume 115/137e

Purpose

Drawing 5 (bottom centre): Pilaster base seen near the Theatre of Marcellus

Aspect

Partial section with perspectival view, and measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:6

Inscribed

apud. savellos. (‘At [the palace of] the Savelli’); [measurements]

Signed and dated

c.1513/14
Datable to c.1513/14

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink and grey-brown wash over black chalk, stylus lines and compass pricks

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

Seen near the Theatre of Marcellus (the Savelli palace mentioned in the caption), this base moulding has a torus, a scotia, a cyma reversa and three astragals: one above the cyma and two between the cyma and the scotia. That it belongs to a pilaster rather than a column or half-column, is indicated by the receding edges, shown perspectivally, of the torus and the fillet above it, which are straight rather than curving. The drawing was copied by Michelangelo although the profile was reversed.

RELATED IMAGES: [Michelangelo] Florence, CB, 1Ar: left side (De Tolnay 1975–80, 4, p. 49; Agosti–Farinella 1987, pp. 92–93)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 68
Census, ID 46888

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.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).