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  • image SM volume 115/148a
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Reference number

SM volume 115/148a

Purpose

Drawing 1 (left column, top): Ionic capital possibly once from the Scala Santa at the Lateran

Aspect

Perspectival view, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:11

Inscribed

[Measurements]

Signed and dated

  • c.1515
    Datable to c. 1515

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink and faint grey-brown wash over black chalk and single vertical stylus line at centre

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

The Ionic capital depicted here is of fairly standard design, although distinctive features include the tiny band inserted between the astragal and the echinus, and the echinus and the abacus both being enlivened with egg-and-dart decoration. A similarly composed capital appears a little beforehand in a possibly related drawing in the Codex Strozzi, although this has a bead-and-reel moulding in place of the astragal, and in a slightly later depiction by Baldassare Peruzzi. The Codex Strozzi drawing gives the capital’s location as the portico of the Staircase of Christ (Al porticho della ischala di Christo), or, in other words, the Scala Santa at the Lateran before it was moved and altered in 1589.

The same capital is shown from the side directly below (Drawing 2), and the practice of depicting Ionic capitals through a frontal view set immediately above a side one is repeated in Drawings 3 and 4, as well as on Fol. 83r/Ashby 138, and it is also followed in the Codex Strozzi, which further suggests that the Strozzi drawings are of the same capital and are related to the Coner ones. Although the Coner drawing is relatively neat, it probably dates from c.1515 rather than c.1513/14, as it follows similar conventions to those seen in the other later drawings of capitals, especially the format of a frontal view that includes part of the shaft, and the greater use of hatching combined with a more limited use of wash. It was later copied in simplified form by Michelangelo.

RELATED IMAGES: [Anon.] Florence, GDSU, Codex Strozzi, 1598 Av (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 27); [Michelangelo] Florence, CB, 1Ar: left side (De Tolnay 1975–80, 4, p. 49; Agosti–Farinella 1987, pp. 92–93)

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Baldassare Peruzzi] Florence, GDSU, 486 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, pp. 49–50; Wurm 1984, pl. 439)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 71
Census, ID 47040

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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