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  • image SM volume 115/162c
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Reference number

SM volume 115/162c

Purpose

Drawing 3 (upper centre): Zoomorphic man riding a protome dolphin

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 brown chalk

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

The drawing (of c.1515) shows the right side of a composition that would have had at its centre a shell beneath a flowering plant and a meandering ribbon. Seen to the left is a triton riding a protome dolphin extending into a foliate scroll, with the triton’s frontal leg continuing as a tail spiralling around the portion of the scroll at its front. The scroll then terminates in a flower at its centre that is linked to another scroll (only partly drawn), indicating that the composition was to continue to the right. The design could be ancient but it is perhaps more likely to be a modern invention.

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 74
Ashby 1913, p. 210
Census, ID 47226

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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