Drawing 4 (bottom right): Window aperture from an unidentified tomb building

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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 115/150

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Reference number

SM volume 115/150d

Purpose

Drawing 4 (bottom right): Window aperture from an unidentified tomb building

Aspect

Orthogonal elevation

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:10

Inscribed

[Measurements]

Signed and dated

c.1515
Datable to c.1515

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink and light brown wash over stylus lines and compass pricks

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

This drawing is almost certainly of a window from an ancient mausoleum, perhaps one of those lining the Via Appia Antica or Via Latina. In combining a narrow opening (about 17 minutes or 15 centimetres in width) with an eared architrave, it is of a type that sometimes appears in mausolea, as exemplified by a drawing at Windsor of a tomb located on the Via Latina and by another drawing in Berlin of a different tomb. Its eared frame is surrounded by decoration that includes a winged lion and scrolling tendrils, which suggests that the frame was to be seen on the building’s frescoed interior.

The design recorded here was added only after the drawing of the vase next to it had been completed, preventing the top left-hand corner from being shown. Like its neighbour, it dates from around 1515.

OTHER DRAWINGS MENTIONED: [Anon. Portuguese draughtsman] Windsor, Royal Library, RL 10357 (Campbell 2004, I, p. 322); [Anon. French draughtsman] Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, HdZ 4151, fol. 69r

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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