Drawing 2 (top right): Composite capital seen in the Lateran Baptistery

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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 115/144

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Reference number

SM volume 115/144b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (top right): Composite capital seen in the Lateran Baptistery

Aspect

Perspectival view

Scale

Not known

Inscribed

Santoianj (‘San Giovanni’)

Signed and dated

c.1515
Datable to c.1515

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink over traces of black chalk and single vertical stylus line on axis of symmetry

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

More akin to the Composite than the Ionic, this capital has an abacus with a concave face, volutes that emerge from above the echinus, and a short neck ornamented with acanthus and palmettes supporting the volutes above them. The diminutive caption, like that of the drawing below it (Drawing 4), gives its location as ‘San Giovanni’, which probably refers likewise to the Lateran Baptistery, but, although it is similar to the capitals of the lower circuit of columns, these have proportions that are considerably taller.

The drawing is neatly aligned with the one below it and the two have the same idiosyncrasy of depicting the corners of the abacus in an extremely distorted perspective. Both were probably copied, therefore, from the same source. Both date from the second phase of the codex’s production, as is indicated in particular by the hatched treatment of the section through the shaft (cf. Fols 83r and 84r). The script of both their captions is comparable with that on other pages of the codex, indicating that Bernardo della Volpaia was the draughtsman. This drawing was sketchily copied in modified form by Michelangelo, who corrected the perspective of the abacus, and combined it with a drawing of the capital beneath.

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. 70
Census, ID 46906

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.

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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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