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  • image SM volume 115/139e
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Reference number

SM volume 115/139e

Purpose

Drawing 5 (bottom left): Unidentified Corinthian capital with flowering tendrils

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 elegant Corinthian capital, which is probably ancient but otherwise unrecorded, has delicate flowering tendrils at the sides but no corresponding ones in the middle where there is, instead, a palmette or anthemion. It is depicted in a very similar style and the same format, and in the same-coloured ink, as the two capitals above which all show its right half, suggesting that all three were based on a set of drawings by an earlier draughtsman. The hatching beyond the edge of the design (to the right of the abacus and volute), also seen in Drawing 2, serves to throw these particular features into relief, a convention not seen in the rather earlier drawings found in the codex.

Literature

Ashby 1904, pp. 68–69
Census, ID 47013

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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