Not known

[Drawing] [early seventeenth-century hand] 28 [Mount] 160 [x2]

• c.1515
  Datable to c.1515

[Drawing] Pen and brown ink over traces of black chalk; on laid paper (232x163mm), rounded corners at right, inlaid (back to front with respect to original foliation) [Mount] Frame lines, in pen and dark brown ink, 10mm apart; window (223x156mm)

Bernardo della Volpaia

See recto

The drawing, which dates from the second stage of the codex’s initial production, shows a sitting male lion with wings, horns on his head, and one front paw raised. Ashby originally suggested that it recorded a fragment from one of the libraries in the Forum of Trajan (albeit featuring a gryphon rather than a lion), but he finally decided that it was based, like two earlier drawings in the Codex Escurialensis, on one or other of the panels positioned between the columns of the canopy, housing a bronze pine cone, this once in the atrium of Old St Peter’s (Bober–Rubinstein 1986, pp. 220–21) and depicted in a drawing by ‘Pseudo-Cronaca’. The animals in these panels were in pairs positioned either side of candelabra but are rather different from the lion seen in the Coner drawing, since they are not obviously male lions with manes. An explanation may be that the meticulously depicted male lion in the Coner drawing involved a degree of creative licence, seen not only in the head and but also in the near-side wing, making it more akin to the drawings of other fantastical creatures seen in the codex’s final pages.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Anon.] El Escorial, Real Monasterio, 28-II-12 (Codex Escurialensis), fols 59r and 62r (Egger 1906, pp. 145 and 152; [‘Pseudo-Cronaca’] Florence, GDSU, 157 Sv (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 9).

Ashby 1904, p. 73
Ashby 1913, p. 210
Census, ID 47177

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