Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Italy: Rome, Borghese Palace. Study for an interior wall elevation showing a chimneypiece with mirror above; above the door entablature is an elaborate Pompeian decoration with an eagle in a wreath, above which is a painting of two animals. To the left-hand side is the elevation and profile of a chair.
  • image Adam vol.26/30
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

Adam vol.26/30

Purpose

Italy: Rome, Borghese Palace. Study for an interior wall elevation showing a chimneypiece with mirror above; above the door entablature is an elaborate Pompeian decoration with an eagle in a wreath, above which is a painting of two animals. To the left-hand side is the elevation and profile of a chair.

Aspect

Elevations, profile

Inscribed

verso inscribed in pencil in a nineteenth-century hand interior of a room in the Palace Borghese at Rome / finished by Mario Asprucci Architect - 1805

Signed and dated

  • Dated on verso 1805 - see note below

Medium and dimensions

Pen, watercolour 265 x 378

Hand

Mario Asprucci

Watermark

3 lines of names

Notes

It seems probable that this drawing was added to the volume between 1821 and 1833 during the time it was in the possession of Charles Heathcote Tatham (1772-1842). The verso pencil inscription cannot be completely relied upon, for Mario Asprucci died in 1804. There are drawings for the Villa (Palazzo) Borghese in another album now in the RIBA, which includes decorative schemes for the Borghese interior by 'Maria' Asprucci, presumably Mario. They were acquired by Tatham 'in the years 1794-5 and 96' when he was in Rome (see his sale catalogue of July 1833 at Christie's). (For the relationship between Asprucci and Tatham in Rome see F. Salmon, 'Charles Heathcote Tatham and the Italian Academies', Burlington Magazine, 140, 1998, p.89.) The Borghese eagle is probably that above the door in this elevation.

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).