Copy of a measured drawing from an Italian source

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Soane's architectural education: Royal Academy and Italy including measured drawings: 1770-1780
  - Soane in Italy: measured drawings made or copied, 1778-80
    - Italy: Verona: Theatre: ? Teatro Filarmonico

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Reference number

SM 45/3/45

Purpose

Copy of a measured drawing from an Italian source

Aspect

Plan showing a deep stage with fixed scenery, and a horseshoe auditorium

Scale

bar scale of piedi Veronesi (see note below)

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, some pricking through, within single ruled border on laid paper (462 x 588)

Hand

Soane

Watermark

J Honig & Zoonen and bend on shield with bell below, surmounted by fleur-de-lis

Notes

Soane's rough plan and comments on the San Carlo theatre in Naples, built 1737 (note/sketchbook 'Italian Sketches and Mem^a', 1778-9, SM volume 164, ff.20-22) do not correspond with this plan. Neither do two theatres that he mentioned in his sketch/notebooks. That is, Palladio's theatre at Vicenza ('Italian Sketches', 1779, SM volume 39, f.43v) and 'the great Theatre' at Milan - La Scala? ('Notes Italy & Italian language &c', 1780 SM volume 162, f.154). The scale bar corresponds with that inscribed 'Piedi Veronesi' on the copy of a measured drawing of the Palazzo Publico, Verona (q.v.), which suggests that this is a building in Verona.

If the theatre is indeed in Verona it would be the Teatro Filarmonico built from 1716 to the design of Francesco Galli Bibiena and opened in 1732. Severely damaged by fire in 1749, it was rebuilt to Bibiena's original design and re-opened in 1754. In February 1945, it was almost totally destroyed in an air raid and was again rebuilt to a design based upon the original and re-opened in 1945.

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).