Copy of a measured drawing

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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: Sicily: Taormina: Roman theatre

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Reference number

SM 45/3/46

Purpose

Copy of a measured drawing

Aspect

Part ground plan

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

Il Teatro à Tau[or v]ormina / in Sicilia and labelled Orchestra, Proscenium, Gallery, first Gallery and Second Gallery

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia wash, pencil, trace lines, partly pricked for transfer and with red sealing wax on 4 corners of verso, on laid paper (Italian made) (399 x 546)

Hand

Soane

Notes

Made in some haste, this must be a copy since the sheet has been pricked for transfer, and both bar scale and dimensions are lacking. First built in the fourth century B.C., that is, in the Hellenistic period and rebuilt under the Romans in the first to third centuries A.D. (Blue Guide, Sicily, 2003)

Literature

P.du Prey, John Soane's architectural education 1752-80, 1977, p.234
P.du Prey, John Soane: the making of an architect, 1982, p.140 ('although dated 9 June 1779 has all the appearance of a copy from a survey already carried out in French toises rather than English feet'. In fact, the drawing of the theatre at Syracuse (45/1/6) is dated thus while the Taormina drawing is undated, and there no evidence of a French scale)

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).