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  • image SM volume 115/139c
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Reference number

SM volume 115/139c

Purpose

Drawing 3 (upper right): Composite capital with five faces once in Old St Peter’s

Aspect

Perspectival view of two sides

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

The capital is also depicted in the plan positioned below this drawing (Drawing 4), and Ashby eventually came to the opinion (1914) that it was from the rotunda dedicated to Santa Maria della Febbre, which was attached to the southern side of Old St Peter’s and served as its sacristy, this location indicated by the plan and view of a similar Composite capital from Santa Maria della Febbre from the mid- sixteenth century in Saint Petersburg. The later plan, admittedly, is based on a regular pentagon rather than one with two more-closely-spaced corners, but this may be the result of wishing to make the capital appear rather less odd. The positioning of the Coner drawings on the page, together with their more tentative style and less detailed execution in comparison with the others to their left suggests that they were a final addition in the second phase of the codex’s production.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Anon.] Saint Petersburg, Hermitage, Codex Destailleur B, fol. 97r (Lanzarini–Martinis 2015, p. 149)

Literature

Ashby 1904, pp. 68–69
Ashby 1913, p. 209
Census, ID 47011

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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