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  • image SM volume 115/149i
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Reference number

SM volume 115/149i

Purpose

Drawing 9 (middle column, bottom): Table with a central column

Aspect

Perspectival view of corner

Scale

Not known

Signed and dated

  • c.1515
    Datable to c.1515

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink over black chalk and a single vertical stylus line at centre

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

The table has its legs terminating in claw feet that rest on a plinth with concave sides, and between the legs is a raised platform that supports a central column, which passes through the table but is not shown much beyond. A depiction of a very similar table with a central column rising through it appears in the stucco decorations of the ancient Roman villa found in the grounds of the Villa Farnesina in 1878–79 during the construction of the Lungotevere embankment, and this testifies to the existence of such tables in antiquity and implies that they were known about in the Renaissance. Interestingly too, the stucco depiction shows the central column topped with a vase, while the Coner drawing has the vase in the previous drawing placed immediately above it and on axis with it, which could suggest that the table’s association with vases was understood by the Coner draughtsman. The drawing’s style is indicative of a date of c.1515.

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 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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