Drawing 1 (top left): Vase once in San Nicola in Carcere

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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 115/141

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Reference number

SM volume 115/141a

Purpose

Drawing 1 (top left): Vase once in San Nicola in Carcere

Aspect

Perspectival view, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:8

Inscribed

.in. S. ni[cola]. carce[re]. (‘In San Nicola in Carcere’); [measurements]

Signed and dated

c.1515
Datable to c.1515

Medium and dimensions

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

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

The depicted vase is ornamented on either side with satyr masks complete with beards and scrolling horns and is composed in four layers. The cup-shaped zone at the bottom is unadorned as is the slightly recessed portion above it, while a narrower band above that is adorned with banded laurel, and the top element is embellished with scrolling acanthus. It was seen, as the caption specifies, in San Nicola in Carcere and, given its small size (having a diameter of around 38 cm), it may have been used, as Ashby suggested, as a water stoup. It is no longer traceable but was drawn later in the sixteenth century by Sebastiano Vini (1515–1602).

Unlike the massive specimen from Santa Cecilia also shown on this sheet, the vase is drawn as if from above, which is again indicative of its diminutive size. The drawing is consistent in style with those from the second campaign of the codex’s execution, but the handwriting of the caption is in keeping with that of Bernardo della Volpaia on many other Coner drawings.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Sebastiano Vini] Paris, Louvre, Cabinet des dessins, Vini Sketchbook, inv. 975v (Lalande Biscontin 2015, pp. 167–69)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 69
Census, ID 46892

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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