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  • image SM volume 115/145a
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Reference number

SM volume 115/145a

Purpose

Drawing 1 (left): Fantastical vase

Aspect

Perspectival view

Scale

Not known

Signed and dated

  • c.1515
    Datable to c.1515

Medium and dimensions

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

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

This highly elaborate vase is a modern invention. Rising delicately from feet in the form of lions’ paws with some sort of acanthus-decorated bulb above them enclosing a concave plinth, it has a lower bowl ornamented with two masks with rings in their mouths from which hang delicate garlands. Its upper part is then decorated with fluting or gadrooning, from which ascend two outward-curving handles and a neck embellished with acanthus, leading to a opening ringed with petal-like ornament.

The drawing is stylistically in keeping with many others from the codex’s second phase of execution, as is seen in the extensive use of hatching which, at the right, continues beyond the vase’s outline. It was probably positioned on the sheet before the drawings to its right were added in a much more haphazard manner.

Literature

Ashby 1904, pp. 70–71

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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