Drawing 2 (top centre): Corinthian capital with garlands from the Lateran Baptistry

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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 115/139

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Reference number

SM volume 115/139b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (top centre): Corinthian capital with garlands from the Lateran Baptistry

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 Corinthian-type capital has acanthus at the bottom and then tall volutes overlaid with garlands suspended from the abacus’s central florets. Ashby was of the view that it was a modern invention, citing its similarity with capitals from the now-destroyed tomb in the church of San Francesco in Siena of the father of Pope Pius II. It is, however, ancient and belongs to a pair of columns made of giallo antico marble that are still in the Lateran Baptistery, although they were then located in the contiguous vestibule (Forni 1991, pp. 23–24) leading into the now-demolished Oratory of the Holy Cross (on which see Johnson 1995). The same capital is drawn in Giuliano da Sangallo’s Codex Barberini, which notes it as being in the Lateran Baptistery, and it is also the subject of several later drawings, including a pair by Alberto Alberti that specify their precise original location in a ‘portico’ fronting the baptistery’s entrance.

In depicting half of the capital and the upper part of the shaft, like three others on this sheet, the drawing differs from the more elaborate renditions of capitals in the codex that were executed a little earlier.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 14v (Hülsen 1910, p. 25; Borsi 1985, p. 102); [Alberto Alberti] Rome, ICG, Vol. 2501, fol. 7v and Vol. 2502, fol. 58v (Forni 1991, pp. 23–24 and p. 139)

Literature

Ashby 1904, pp. 68–69
Census, ID 47005

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

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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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