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  • image SM volume 115/139a

Reference number

SM volume 115/139a

Purpose

Drawing 1 (top left): Unidentified Corinthian capital with an urn and sphinxes

Aspect

Perspectival view of half

Scale

Not known

Signed and dated

  • c.1515
    Datable to c.1515

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink over traces of black chalk

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

This two-tier Corinthian-type capital has a single row of acanthus leaves at the bottom, above which is an urn flanked by sphinxes (one shown) with wings extending upwards to form volutes. Ashby conjectured that the capital was a modern invention, since no ancient example has been found. However, this may well not be the case, since it is comparable to two others depicted on the page that are both ancient.

In style, the drawing is similar to others on this page and the one before it, and in format, it tallies with three on this page and one on the previous one, in depicting half the capital and part of the shaft. It is executed in the same tone of ink as two others on this page (Drawings 2 and 5), and, like them, shows the right half of the capital, which suggests that the three were the earliest executed on the page and perhaps derive from the same drawn source. They again depart from the more elaborate compositional conventions employed elsewhere in the codex, and so probably date from a rather later phase in production.

Literature

Ashby 1904, pp. 68–69

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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