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  • image SM volume 115/140a
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Reference number

SM volume 115/140a

Purpose

Drawing 1 (top left): Unidentified Ionic capital

Aspect

Perspectival view

Scale

Not known

Signed and dated

  • c.1515
    Datable to c.1515

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink and grey-brown wash over traces of black chalk and a single vertical stylus line at centre

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

With its channelled neck, this Ionic capital is quite like other examples shown on Folio 89r/Ashby 148, apart from it having scrolls that emerge from the top of the echinus rather than joining each other across its top and having two ornamented mouldings at the neck’s bottom. It is similar to one now in Rome’s Museo Nazionale (Museo Nazionale Romano 1979–91, 1,2, pp. 113–14), except that this ancient specimen has scrolls that join each other, and ornament that is slightly different. The drawing is of two halves that meet at a black chalk line, the left one in heavier ink and more shaded and completely finished, and the right one more cursory in execution, with the scroll only roughly sketched in. In style and format, it is otherwise consistent with other drawings dating from the slightly later phase of the codex’s completion. It was copied in simplified form by Michelangelo.

RELATED IMAGES: [Michelangelo] Florence, CB, 1Ar: left side (De Tolnay 1975–80, 4, p. 49; Agosti–Farinella 1987, pp. 92–93)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 69
Census, ID 47017

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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