Drawing 2 (top right): Keystone from the Arch of Titus

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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 115/147

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Reference number

SM volume 115/147b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (top right): Keystone from the Arch of Titus

Aspect

Orthogonal elevation of side

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:13

Signed and dated

c.1513/14
Datable to c.1513/14

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink over traces of black chalk, overlaid with traces of a purple-brown, oil-based substance

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

This depiction of the keystone, which has ‘S’-shaped volutes on its sides with rosettes at their two centres, again lacks a caption but it belongs to the Arch of Titus (cf. Desgodetz 1682, p. 191), although it again omits the statuette decorating the face, which in this case represents the deity Honor. The drawing differs from its neighbour in showing the keystone just from the side without any indication of the front, which may well mean it was based on a different source. Later depictions of the keystone, such as the one published by Sebastiano Serlio in Book Three of his treatise (1540) and a drawing now in Vienna, show it similarly from the side and but with accompanying details of the front – again minus the attached figurine.

The right side of the volute has been strengthened with an oily medium (also seen in Drawing 1), which is a later addition in a different hand. An offset of this line is visible on the verso of Fol. 89/Ashby 148, which suggests that it was added before the codex was dismantled in the seventeenth century and transformed into an album.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: Serlio 1619, fol.100r; [Anonymous Italian E] Vienna, Albertina, inv. Egger no. 49v (Egger 1903, p. 24; Valori 1985, p. 141)

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 35r/Ashby 56; Fol. 56r/Ashby 95; Fol. 57r/Ashby 97; Fol. 80r/Ashby 134; Fol. 82v/Ashby 137

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 71
Census, ID 49472

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.

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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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