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  • image SM volume 115/144c
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Reference number

SM volume 115/144c

Purpose

Drawing 3 (bottom left): Unidentified Composite capital

Aspect

Perspectival view of half

Scale

Not known

Signed and dated

  • c.1515
    Datable to c.1515

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink over traces of black chalk

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

This Composite capital was thought by Ashby to be from either the Arch of Titus or Arch of Septimius Severus, but neither suggestion is convincing. It differs from the Arch of Titus capitals in lacking the three pods on the abacus between the volutes, in showing the flower and tendril at the top of the calathus differently, and in showing more of the axial acanthus leaf at the bottom (cf. Desgodetz 1682, p. 185); and it differs from the Arch of Severus capitals in these same ways and others (cf. Desgodetz 1682, p. 207). The capital has yet to be identified.

The drawing is executed in a much lighter ink and a less precise manner than the others of capitals on this page. Executed during the codex’s second phase of production, it was presumably added to the sheet at a very late stage.

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 70
Census, ID 46914

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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