Drawing 2 (top right): Dolphin’s head with a shell in its mouth

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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 115/145

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Reference number

SM volume 115/145b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (top right): Dolphin’s head with a shell in its mouth

Aspect

Perspectival view of side

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

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

A modern invention, the drawing is of the head of a dolphin that holds a scallop shell (or two) in its mouth with schematic waves depicted beneath. Depicting its subject from the side, it appears to relate to the drawing of a dolphin shown from the front at the page’s bottom (Drawing 5), which was probably intended as a design for a fountain. It is consistent in style with the other drawings executed during the codex’s second phase of production, which are often little connected directly with the antique.

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.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).