Drawing 7 (right half, bottom right): Elaborate helmet surmounted by a winged putto playing a pipe

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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 115/161g

Purpose

Drawing 7 (right half, bottom right): Elaborate helmet surmounted by a winged putto playing a pipe

Aspect

View of side

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 ceremonial burgonet has an upturned peak that covers the front of the skull, like those seen in other Italian helmets of the time (such as one attributed to Filippo Negroli in Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum: Pyhrr–Godoy 1998, pp. 209–12). The flange at the rear extends around the side to become an ear and cheek guard, similar in conception to an example in the Metropolitan Museum of Art of c.1550, made for King Henry II of France, that derives in part from designs by Rosso Fiorentino (Acidini Luchinat 2002, pp. 275 and 277). The cheek guard in the Coner drawing is adorned with a ram’s head while the skull is ornamented with a gryphon that has a tail culminating in a flower; and the crest takes the form of winged putto, like in a drawing in Giuliano da Sangallo’s Taccuino Senese, who is playing a pipe. Unusually among the Coner drawings of helmets, this one includes a face, which could either be that of the soldier who wears it, like a helmet drawing on an earlier page (Fol. 90v/Ashby 150), or part of the helmet itself.

OTHER DRAWINGS MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Siena, BCS, Ms. S.IV.8 (Taccuino Senese), fol. 38v; (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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