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  • image Adam vol.55/128
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Reference number

Adam vol.55/128

Purpose

Unfinished academic study showing a plan for an octagonal building with a central circular court with columns and niches, surrounded by alternating square and oval halls, some of which have two staircases. The main façade has a three-bay portico.

Aspect

Plan verso section, details

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 128 verso inscribed in pencil Villa. and Justiniani/ Abbe Stonor

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, black chalk 132 x 127, trimmed at base

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Capriccio in pencil and pen showing part of a section through a domed building. Also on the sheet are three drawings of a penis. Inscription: Abbé Christopher Stonor was in Rome from 1748 (see J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, pp.153, 219; also J. Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701-1800, New Haven and London, 1977, p.900). The 'Villa Justiniani' presumably means the Villa Giustiniani at San Giovanni in Laterano, Italy (see I. Barsali, Ville di Roma: Lazio, Milan, 1970, p.393).

Notes

This plan is a variation of the square plan in Adam vol.55/170; there are other centralised plans of this type in volume 9 (see Adam vol.9/2, 40 and 68) and in Adam vol.2/188, which may have been drawn at a later date.

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).