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  • image Adam vol.55/35
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Reference number

Adam vol.55/35

Purpose

Capriccio showing a sketch for an elevation for a symmetrical villa with shallow dome over a three-bay centre, linked by colonnades to single-bay pavilions with hipped roofs.

Aspect

Elevation

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 35

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Pen86 x 205

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

This is a simpler version of the elevation shown in Adam vol.55/34. Both are developments of the Palladian villa elevation, particularly the Villa Trissino illustrated in A. Palladio, I Quattro Libri Dell'architettura, II, 1570, p.60. Robert Adam only visited Vicenza and the Palladian villas on his way home from Italy in the summer of 1757, so such studies would have been derived from the woodcut illustrations in I Quattro Libri, a copy of which he owned and is now in Sir John Soane's Museum (see vol.54 addenda, SM AL6A. There are similar but smaller designs in Adam vol.9/5 and 9/135.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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.

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).