Drawing 10 (bottom row, left): Unidentified Corinthian-type capital with winged animals

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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 115/138

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Reference number

SM volume 115/138j

Purpose

Drawing 10 (bottom row, left): Unidentified Corinthian-type capital with winged animals

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

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

This Corinthian-type capital, composed in three tiers, features a pair of winged animals, probably horned lions, acting as protomes and rising from two levels of acanthus foliage below. It is similar in design to the famous winged horse, or ‘Pegasus’, capitals discovered in the Temple of Mars Ultor, which were recorded by Baldassare Peruzzi and then published by Sebastiano Serlio in Book Four of his treatise (1537) as well as by Antonio Labacco (1552). Also similar is a capital recorded in a drawing in Kassel, although this has what appear to be winged bulls. The type had been of architectural interest from the late fifteenth century, providing a precedent for the capitals with winged-animal emblems of the Four Evangelists in Giuliano da Sangallo’s Madonna delle Carceri at Prato (Davies 2017). No other drawings of the capital are known. In style and format, the drawing is like others on this page but unlike many others elsewhere in the codes, which suggests it was executed at a slightly later date.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Baldassare Peruzzi] Florence, GDSU, 632+633 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 58; Wurm 1984, pl. 463); [Anon.] Kassel, Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, Graphische Sammlung, Kassel Codex, fol. 38v (Günther 1988, p. 359 and pl. 86b); Serlio 1619, 4, fol. 185r; Labacco 1552, unpaginated (fol. 11)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 68
Ashby 1913, p. 209
Census, ID 46993

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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