Drawing 3 (centre left): Unidentified Composite capital

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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 115/140

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Reference number

SM volume 115/140c

Purpose

Drawing 3 (centre left): Unidentified Composite 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

This unusual Composite capital has a striated bell decorated with acanthus and palmettes. It is also depicted in two drawings in the anonymous Codex Strozzi, one (GDSU, 1604 Ar) more cursory with plain leaves and showing more egg-and-dart between the volutes, and the other (GDSU, 1597 Ar) with far more attention to detail, such as with regard to the ornamentation on the volutes and the precise shape of the palmette, which both differ slightly from their depictions here, although all these drawings may well have a shared ancestry. The capital was recorded later on in a drawing by a follower of Maarten van Heemskerck, this confirming the veracity of the second Codex Strozzi depiction. The Coner drawing is roughly the same size as the one above it and the two are very neatly aligned, which, along with their very similar formats and their cursory treatments of the capitals’ right-hand sides, could suggest that they were both copied from the same source. It was presumably included on the same sheet as the capitals on the right because of its palmette decoration. The horizontal section through the shaft is hatched, like in many drawings of capitals dating from this slightly later period.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Anon.] Florence, GDSU, Codex Strozzi, 1597 Ar and 1604 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, pp. 27 and 29); [Circle of Maarten van Heemskerck]: Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Inv. 79 D 2a (Heemskerck Album II), fol. 58v (Hülsen–Egger 1913–16, 2, p. 36)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 69
Census, ID 47021

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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