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  • image SM volume 115/141b

Reference number

SM volume 115/141b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (top right): Cartouche

Aspect

Perspectival view

Scale

Not known

Signed and dated

  • c.1515
    Datable to c.1515

Medium and dimensions

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

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

This cartouche for a family’s coat of arms, either an invention or copied from a model book, is of a design that was becoming increasingly popular, with two scrolling flanges at the top and a third at the bottom. A similar cartouche associated with Pope Leo X and dating from c.1515 is in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Pope-Hennessy 1964, 2, p. 410). Faintly visible in the black chalk underdrawing is an inset oval field, presumably for the coat of arms itself, which is divided horizontally with a circle positioned in the lower half.

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 69

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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