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  • image SM volume 115/157a

Reference number

SM volume 115/157a

Purpose

Drawing 1 (top): Soffit with elaborate guilloche ornament

Aspect

Ornamental composition

Scale

Not known

Signed and dated

  • 1625/35
    Date range: 1625/35

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink and brown wash over graphite

Hand

Seventeenth-Century Hand 2 (Sangallo Copyist 2)

Notes

The first of four seventeenth-century drawings on the page, similar in subject to the decorative bands drawn on the previous one, is of a soffit, and it takes the form of an elaborate guilloche band with two rows of interlocking scrolls that are separated from each other by compressed oval fields with palmettes emerging from them. The band is positioned so close to another below it (Drawing 2) that Campbell thought they were both part of the same soffit, but this is probably not the case. Both bands are depicted in the mid- sixteenth-century Codex Destailleur B in Saint Petersburg but separately and on adjacent pages. A similar soffit without the additional band also appears in the Lille sketchbook but it omits the compressed ovals.

The drawn soffit has something in common with one from the Basilica Aemilia (Lipps 2011, pp. 72–73,) but the features are so distorted that it would appear to be either a poor representation or a copy of an earlier drawing that was itself a distorted interpretation.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Raffaello da Montelupo, attr.] Lille, Musée des Beaux Arts, Lille Sketchbook, fol. 17r (Lemerle 1997, pp. 308–09); [Anon.] Saint Petersburg, Hermitage, Codex Destailleur B, fols 72r and 72v (Lanzarini-Martinis 2015, pp. 131–32)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 73
Campbell 2004, 2, pp. 652–53
Census, ID 45476

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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