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Professor du Prey (February 2009) noted that the drawing catalogued here relates to SM 45/2/21, SM 44/9/14 and SM 44/9/13 for the Villa Doria Pamphili in Rome (Soane in Italy: measured drawings: Rome: Villa Doria Pamphili). The four are by the same hand, which appears to be that of Giuseppe Manocchi (c. 1731-1782) who was a Roman draughtsman of whom little is known. There are drawings signed by him (and dated 1765 or 1766) in the Adam collection at the Soane Museum and also in the 'Thomas Hardwick albums' at the Royal Institute of British Architects Drawings Collection, that are dated between 1759 and 1770.
P.du Prey, (J.Lever editor), Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects, volume G-K, 1973, p.942-3
P.du Prey, John Soane's architectural education 1753-80, 1977, pp.287-8; P. du Prey, John Soane: the making of an architect, 1982, pp.151-6
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.
Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).