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  • image SM volume 115/138e
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Reference number

SM volume 115/138e

Purpose

Drawing 5 (second row, centre): Unidentified capital with winged horses

Aspect

Orthogonal 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 figurative capital features two winged horses framing a palmette. The same capital was also recorded, as Ashby observed, in a rather hurried sketch by an anonymous draughtsman in the Codex Strozzi . The version in the Codex Strozzi has a gently downward curving abacus and an upward curving astragal at the top of the shaft, which suggests that capital came from a round column, whereas the Coner version treats the capital orthogonally and does not indicate whether it belonged to a column or a pilaster. It could still be, however, that the two drawings were dependent the same original. The Coner drawing’s rather cursory handling compared with many in the codex suggests that it belongs, like the others on this sheet, to a slightly later phase of production.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Anon.] Florence, GDSU, Codex Strozzi, 1604 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 29)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 68
Census, ID 46986

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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