Drawing 2 (top right): Capital from San Giovanni in Laterano

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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 115/151

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Reference number

SM volume 115/151b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (top right): Capital from San Giovanni in Laterano

Aspect

Perspectival view

Scale

Not known

Inscribed

.ad. S. ioan[n]e inlaterano (‘In San Giovanni in Laterano’)

Signed and dated

c.1515
Datable to c.1515

Medium and dimensions

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

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

This very unusual capital has four sprigs of leaves at the centre of each face, sparsely covering the calathus. Different too is the leaf type which differs considerably from the more normal acanthus. The echinus is adorned with palmette or anthemion decoration. The capital is no longer to be seen in the church although, as Ashby noted, one of very similar design was later recorded by Giovanni Battista Piranesi in his Della magnificenza ed architettura de'Romani, who gives the location as the vigna of Jacopo Ingamo near the Circus Maximus (Piranesi 1761, pl. 16). The drawing’s format and style suggest that it was executed around 1515.

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 72
Census, ID 47052

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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