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  • image SM volume 115/162e
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Reference number

SM volume 115/162e

Purpose

Drawing 5 (lower right): Curving design with acanthus and zoomorphic figures

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 decorative composition depicted here (c.1515) has a base of acanthus and rises in an arc to include half of a winged male figure, a winged protome with a bird’s head, and a dolphin protome being ridden by a triton with a spiralling lower body. Although without an overall symmetry, Ashby again considered it to have been based on an ancient painted example that was perhaps seen in the Golden House of Nero, but again no precise parallel can be found. It is more likely to be a modern invention, like the other drawings on the sheet.

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 74
Census, ID 47233

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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