Drawing 4 (bottom left): Corinthian capital from the Colosseum’s third storey

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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 115/140d

Purpose

Drawing 4 (bottom left): Corinthian capital from the Colosseum’s third storey

Aspect

Perspectival view

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:30

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

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

This Corinthian capital, drawn here frontally, has two tiers of uncarved leaves and is one of those from the third level of the Colosseum. There is, surprisingly, no other drawing from around the same period that records the capital in enough detail to show the blank disc in the place of the flower on the abacus (cf. Desgodetz 1682, p. 271). The closest parallels from later on are a more cursory drawing from mid-century attributed to Giovanni Colonna da Tivoli, and a pair in Berlin from still later in the century that depict the capital both frontally and obliquely. The Coner drawing is notably different from the others on this sheet in being less heavily drawn and unrelated to them in position, which indicates it was added during the second phase of the codex’s completion at a very late stage.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giovanni Colonna da Tivoli, attr.] Rome, BAV, Vat. lat. 7721, fol. 65v (Micheli 1982, pp. 97–98); [Anon. French draughtsman] Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, HdZ 4151, fols 18v and 19v

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 2r/Ashby 2; Fol. 2v/Ashby 3; Fol. 3r/Ashby 4; Fol. 3v/Ashby 5; Fol. 25 and flap recto/Ashby 39; Fol. 25 verso of flap/Ashby 39a; Fol. 25v/Ashby 40; Fol. 26r/Ashby 41; Fol. 66r/Ashby 113; Fol. 83v/Ashby 137

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 69
Günther 1988, p. 337
Census, ID 47026

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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