Drawing 2 (top row, right): Decorative frieze with foliate ornament perhaps from the Temple of Venus Genetrix

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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 115/156

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Reference number

SM volume 115/156b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (top row, right): Decorative frieze with foliate ornament perhaps from the Temple of Venus Genetrix

Aspect

Ornamental composition

Scale

Not known

Signed and dated

c.1515
Datable to c.1515

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink over traces of black chalk

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

The band of decoration, depicted here around 1515, has an acanthus bulb on the right and two foliate swirls emerging from it to the left. The design in this precise form is not known from any other drawing, although it is of a fairly standard kind. It is similar, for example, to the frieze of the Temple of Venus Genetrix in the Forum of Caesar (see Viscogliosi 2000, pp. 21–28), which is known from the building’s reconstructed remains as well as from sixteenth-century representation of it such as a mid- century drawing in Kassel and a plate in Andrea Palladio’s Quattro Libri; but this is denser in composition and the centres of the acanthus swirls have flowers. This notwithstanding, a drawing probably of this frieze attributed to Francesco da Sangallo records a precisely equivalent portion of it but in reversed orientation, and this could have been derived from the same source as the Coner drawing, a possibility also indicated by the fact that a frieze depicted immediately to its left likewise appears on the Coner sheet (Drawing 5).

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Francesco da Sangallo, attr.] Florence, GDSU, 1693 Orn.r (Borsi 1985, p. 512); [Anon.] Kassel, Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, Graphische Sammlung, Kassel Codex, fol. 46r (Günther 1988, p. 359); Palladio 1570, 4, p. 132

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 73
Census, ID 52875

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

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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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