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  • image SM volume 115/138b
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Reference number

SM volume 115/138b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (top row, centre): Corinthian-type capital with sea monsters seen possibly at Tivoli

Aspect

Perspectival view

Scale

Not known

Signed and dated

  • c.1515
    Datable to c.1515

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink over black chalk, with single vertical stylus line at centre

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

This Corinthian-type capital has acanthus at the bottom and intertwined sea monsters above, with a palmette or anthemion at the centre of the abacus. The volutes take the form of dragon-like monsters with tails interlocking at the centre of the calathus. No other drawings of it have been identified, but it very closely resembles an extant example at Tivoli on Via Domenico Giuliani (Von Mercklin 1962, p. 255, fig. 1186), and this, as in the Coner drawing, is accompanied by a part of a column shaft that is broken.

The drawing differs from many others in the codex in the hesitant way it shows the section through the shaft, and this together with the less precise, tentative quality of the draughtsmanship in general suggests that it was produced at a later moment, as was the case with the other drawings on the sheet.

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 68
Census, ID 46977

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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