Not known

• c.1515
  Datable to c.1515

Pen and brown ink over traces of black chalk

Bernardo della Volpaia

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

Ashby 1904, p. 73
Census, ID 52875

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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