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Inscribed
Signed and dated
- Undated, probably 1760 - 63
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Notes
The decoration of the Vatican logge appeared as engravings between 1772 - 1777 in three parts: Logge di Rafaele nel Vaticano (1772), Seconda Parte delle Logge di Rafaele nel Vaticano (1776) and Terza ed Ultima Parte delle Logge di Rafaele nel Vaticano (1777). Work on the project of recording was begun in 1760 and was more or less completed by 1768. The principal artists involved were the painter Gaetano Savorelli (d.1791) and the architect Pietro Camporesi (1726-81), and the engraver was Giovanni Ottaviani (1735-1808). The third volume was engraved by Giovanni Volpato (1733-1803), after drawings by Ludovico Tesio (1731-82).
The numerous drawings that Manocchi made of the Vatican decoration at this time would suggest that he was the draughtsman of this series (Adam vol.26/3-12), especially in view of James Adam's reference to 'My arabesque' of 1763. There is another incomplete set of 12 logge drawings in Sir John Soane's Museum Soane volume SM 130, also in Manocchi's hand, which may too have had an Adam provenance. According to Fuhring, there are Manocchi drawings for the Raphael logge in the Berlin Kunstbibliothek that may be c.1755 (see P. Fuhring, Design into Art, Drawings for Architecture and Ornament, 2 vols., London, 1989, I, pp.59-60). There are also several unfinished logge compositions in album four of the Hardwick drawings in the RIBA (see 4.12-14, 21). These have a lettered colour key and some have the note 'non, Fecci due pichole / none fatto', which indicates their provisional role. There were at least two sets of logge prints in the Adam sales, lot 58 in the first day of the 1818 sale and lot 124 in the first day of the 1821 sale (see A. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, 2 vols., London, 1922, II, pp.330, 335). Like Nicolas-Francoise-David Lhuiller (d.1793), Manocchi was connected with Charles-Louis Clérisseau and there are several Manocchi copies in the Hermitage, St Petersburg (see Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) Dessins du musée de l'Ermitage Saint-Petersbourg, catalogue of an exhibition held at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, 1995, p.92).
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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).