Not known

[Drawing] Dreto à Campidoglio (‘Behind the Campidoglio’); 28 [in graphite] [Mount] 153 [x2]

• 1625/35
  Date range: 1625/35

[Drawing] Pen and brown ink and grey-brown and brown wash over traces of black chalk; on laid paper (231x164mm), rounded corners at left, inlaid (back to front with respect to original foliation, window on verso of mount) [Mount] Frame lines, in pen and dark brown ink, 10mm apart

Seventeenth-Century Hand 1 (Codex Ursinianus Copyist) and Seventeenth-Century Hand 2 (Sangallo Copyist 2)

[Drawing] None [Mount] None

Another seventeenth-century addition to the codex, the drawing depicts a capital of fairly standard design, but with proportions that are apparently rather tall and narrow. The capital’s given location as being ‘behind’ the Campidoglio could indicate that it was from the Temple of Vespasian in the Roman Forum, which backs onto the Capitoline Hill, but the Vespasian capitals have fluted abacuses whereas this one, with its undecorated abacus, is more like those, as Ashby suggested, from the Forum of Nerva which lies some distance away to the northeast. On this basis, it would seem that the capital was either drawn inaccurately, or that it belonged to another building close to the Campidoglio such as the long-vanished Temple of Concord which was also located in the Roman Forum at the base of the hill, or else that the drawing was mislabelled. This latter possibility is rather confirmed by a seemingly related drawing from the mid-sixteenth century in Berlin , which is virtually identical and is labelled (twice) as being in Albano.

The drawing is the product of two hands, one executing the half on the left and the other the half on the right, a partnership also seen in another seventeenth-century drawings in the codex (Fol. 40v/Ashby 66). Like others from this time it is numbered in graphite.

RELATED IMAGES: [Anon.] Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, inv. OZ 114, fol. 17

Ashby 1904, p. 72
Campbell 2004, 2, pp. 644–45 and 647
Census, ID 47069

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