Not known

[Drawing] 25 [early seventeenth-century hand]; In Roma nella piazza di Sto Isidoro (‘In Rome in the Piazza di Sant’Isidoro’); 29 [in graphite]
[Mount] 155 [x2]

• c.1629
  Datable to c.1629

[Drawing] Pen and brown ink and grey-brown and brown wash; on laid paper (232x166mm), rounded corners at right, inlaid
[Verso] Blank
[Mount] Frame lines, in pen and dark brown ink, 10mm apart
[Verso of mount] Window (225x155mm)

Seventeenth-Century Hand 2 (Sangallo Copyist 2)

[Drawing] Anchor in circle topped with six-pointed star (variant 6; cut at left) [Mount] Fleur-de-lys in circle topped with crown (variant 3; cut at bottom of window)

A seventeenth-century insertion into the codex, this drawing is a perspectival view of the front and right side of a capital that has its bell divided horizontally into two. The lower part is ornamented with anthemion and is separated by a gadrooned band from the taller upper section, which is adorned with foliate decoration. Above the bell is an egg-and-dart echinus topped with an abacus ornamented with running wave decoration. The caption gives the capital’s location as ‘Piazza Sant’Isidoro’, which is presumably the square beside Rome’s Sant’Isidoro a Capo le Case, a church situated northwest of Palazzo Barberini on the slopes of the Pincian Hill and founded in 1625 (Campbell; Buchowiecki 1967–97, 2, pp. 224–30). A closely related drawing in Berlin dating from the mid- sixteenth century gives the location as the Macel de’Corvi, an area just north of the Capitoline Hill, which may suggest that the capital had very recently been moved or that the Coner drawing was mislabelled, rather than it recording an identical example perhaps discovered when Sant’Isidoro was built (ibid.).

The similarities between the Coner and Berlin drawings suggest they both depend on a now-lost original, and they extend to the inclusion of the top of the shaft, and even to the use and handling of wash, except that the Coner image shows the capital obliquely rather than frontally. Another drawing of the capital appears in a mid- sixteenth-century compilation in Saint Petersburg, although this shows just half the capital. A drawing in Naples looks superficially similar but differs in several particulars suggesting that it is either a free copy of an earlier depiction or actually represents a different capital. The capital, in its composition, closely recalls two others (from Santa Maria Maggiore and San Nicolò in Carceri) depicted earlier in the codex (Fol. 70r/Ashby 119), which differ only in minor details and proportions, and its inclusion here thus extends the codex’s coverage of richly decorated capitals of a Doric type that has the abacus and echinus combined with a very large ornamental bell. Like others from the seventeenth century in the codex, the drawing is numbered in graphite.

RELATED IMAGES: [Anon.] Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, inv. OZ 114, fol. 19

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Anon.] Saint Petersburg, Codex Destailleur B, fol. 99v (Lanzarini-Martinis 2015, p. 151); [Anon.] Naples, Bibl. Nazionale, MS XII.D.74, fol. 8v (Lanzarini 2020, p. 496)

Ashby 1904, p. 72
Campbell 2004, 2, pp. 649 and 651
Census, ID 47106

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