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  • image SM volume 115/161ad
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Reference number

SM volume 115/161ad

Purpose

Drawing 4 (second row, centre): Helmet with horns and surmounting dragon

Aspect

View of side

Scale

Not known

Signed and dated

  • c.1515
    Datable to c.1515

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

The burgonet, schematically drawn here (c.1515), has a peak seemingly conceived as an animal’s face (cf. Fol. 97 and flap recto Drawing 6), although with horns emerging perversely from its eye sockets. The flange at the back has a pronounced scroll at the bottom and a further horn seen emerging from the ear. The skull is embellished with a small acanthus leaf just above the peak and, at the top, a comb in the form of a dragon, rather like on the helmet in Andrea del Verrocchio’s relief of Alexander the Great in Washington’s National Gallery (Butterfield 1998, pp. 230–31).

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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