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  • image SM volume 115/138g
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Reference number

SM volume 115/138g

Purpose

Drawing 7 (third row, centre): Corinthian-type capital possibly from Hadrian’s Villa 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

The capital has a head at the centre (possibly female), and two further heads on either side as the culminating features of volutes of reversed shape. It may be one of those from the Piazza d’Oro of Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli which are broadly similar in design, having heads at the sides affixed to discs encircled by the volutes, but surviving specimens are very damaged where a central head might have been (see Von Mercklin 1962, pp. 121–22). No other drawings are known of capitals of this type. Exploration of Hadrian’s villa had begun in the late fifteenth century but made little headway before the time of Pirro Ligorio in the mid sixteenth century.

The drawing is close in style to others on the sheet, and different from other depictions of capitals in the codex, suggesting a slightly later date of execution.

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 68
Census, ID 46989

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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