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  • image SM volume 115/146d
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Reference number

SM volume 115/146d

Purpose

Drawing 4 (second row, centre): Richly ornamented vase with gryphons’ heads

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 black chalk and a single vertical stylus line at centre

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

The vase is richly decorated with gadrooning and has a horned mask applied to the lower part of the bowl, acanthus scrolls adorning a band around its middle, and, towards the top, a pair of protruding gryphons’ heads emerging from acanthus bodies and serving as handles, and, finally, a gadrooned lid with a finial. Unlike others depicted on this page, it is not imaginary but real, being also known from an early drawing by Battista Brunelleschi, together with two others by Amico Aspertini that state it was in the house of an ‘Andrea Cavallo’ or, alternatively, an ‘Andrea Scarpellino’. The cursorily sketched base in the Coner drawing is not shown at all in the Battista Brunelleschi drawing, which suggests that the two may be distantly related. Otherwise, the Coner drawing’s precise, exacting and heavily-worked character distinguishes it from those on the rest on this page, and it may have been executed before these others were haphazardly added around it. It is, nevertheless, stylistically consistent with many further drawings dating from the second phase of the codex’s completion.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Battista Brunelleschi] Florence, Biblioteca Marucelliana, A. 78.1 (Brunelleschi Sketchbook) fol. 19v; [Amico Aspertini] Schloss Wolfegg, Codex Wolfegg, fols 18v and 44v (Schweikhart 1986, pp. 81 and 104)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 71
Census, ID 47039

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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