Inscribed
Inscribed in ink in a contemporary hand Villa Albani
Signed and dated
- Undated, probably 1760 - 63
Medium and dimensions
Black chalk
314 x 490
Hand
Nicolas-François-David Lhuiller (attributed to)
Watermark
name
Notes
This drawing is an unfinished detail of the side door of the salon of the Villa Albani, designed by architect Carlo Marchionni (1702-86). The salon decoration was finished in November 1761. There are several designs for this doorway in the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York (see 1938-88-486), which show the work to be by Marchionni in the antique style, incorporating fragments from the Albani collection. The antique source was shown in volume VI of Caylus, Recuil d'Antiquités, Paris, 1762. For James Adam's acquisition of the Albani collection of drawings in May 1762 see J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome (London, 1962, pp.297-8); the collection remained with Adam at the Casa Guarnieri for two months before its dispatch to London (see Fleming, op. cit., p.298). In the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, there is a larger variant of this drawing in red and black chalk in a similar hand (1966.11:35) (see C. Denison, Exploring Rome: Piranesi and His Contemporaries, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, 1993, p.47). This and comparable chalk drawings of classical subjects are attributed to the Piranesi circle and possibly from 'a unit directly from the artist's studio and preserved by a member of the family or by an early collector' (see F. Stampfle, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, 1978, p.ix). It is noted there that these 'drawings of details are conceivably of the character that might have been left to assistants for execution' and that Piranesi (like Adam) 'employed young artists for the rendering of tedious details'; this may have included Nicolas-François-David Lhuiller (d.1793).
Level
Drawing
Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation
Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural,
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