Drawing 3 (left half, bottom): Putto with hybrid creature

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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 115/161

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Reference number

SM volume 115/161c

Purpose

Drawing 3 (left half, bottom): Putto with hybrid creature

Aspect

Part of an 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

This drawing, mostly highly-finished, features a putto with foliate hair holding a plant pushing away a hybrid creature which has a goat-like head and horns, lion’s front paws and a spiralling snake-like tail terminating in leaves. Like the others on this page, it is probably a modern invention dating from c.1515, but unlike them it straddles the sheet’s central fold, suggesting, as with the previous drawing, that it was produced before the codex’s original binding took place. The right-hand portion of the drawing is left unfinished. A similar horned creature with a snake-like tail appears in a drawing by Giuliano da Sangallo in his Taccuino Senese.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Siena, BCS, Ms. S.IV.8 (Taccuino Senese), fol. 41r (Borsi 1985, pp. 302–10)

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 73

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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