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Reference number

SM volume 115/144d

Purpose

Drawing 4 (bottom right): Composite capital from 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

This Composite capital has two tiers of foliage and distinctive fluting on the calathus. It was seen not in the church of San Giovanni in Laterano, as the caption states, but in the neighbouring Lateran Baptistery. It is, in fact, one of the capitals from the entrance into the baptistery’s vestibule, which is also depicted in early drawings in the Codex Barberini and Codex Escurialensis, although these show the leaves of the second tier of acanthus as falling short of the volutes. In this respect, the more accurate Coner drawing is more akin to a later depiction of the capital by Giovannantonio Dosio.

The drawing is the partner to the one above it (Drawing 2), the two being neatly aligned with each other and executed in a similar manner, and both probably being copied from the same source. They both show the capitals frontally, but depict their abacuses in exaggerated perspective from below, which gives them a rather ungainly appearance. Their hatching of their sections through the column shafts is similar to that of other capital drawings from the codex’s second phase of production (cf. Fols 83r and 84r), while the script of the tiny caption matches with that found elsewhere in the codex and indicates that the draughtman was again Bernardo della Volpaia. Michelangelo rapidly copied the right half of this drawing and combined it with the left half of the drawing above it.

RELATED IMAGES: [Michelangelo] Florence, CB, 1Ar: left side (De Tolnay 1975–80, 4, p. 49; Agosti–Farinella 1987, pp. 92–93)

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 10v (Hülsen 1910, pp. 19–20; Borsi 1985, pp. 87–88); [Anon.] El Escorial, Real Monasterio, 28-II-12 (Codex Escurialensis), fol. 22r (Egger 1906, pp. 84–85); [Giovannantonio Dosio] Florence, GDSU, 4316 Ar (Acidini 1976, p. 100)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 70
Census, ID 47000

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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