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  • image Adam vol.26/52
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Reference number

Adam vol.26/52

Purpose

Italy: Rome, Colonna garden. Record drawing of a large fragment of sculpture of the lower part of a male torso transmogrified into acanthus foliage; it is shown in a naturalistic setting.

Aspect

Detail

Inscribed

Inscribed in a contemporary hand Nero's frontispiece and in a different hand Colonna Garden - fragment of the Temple of the Sun / Rome.; and dimensions 16:3" long and 9:6 high.

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1760 - 63

Medium and dimensions

Black chalk 279 x 467

Hand

Nicolas-François-David Lhuiller (attributed to)

Notes

There is another study of the decorative sculpture in the Colonna gardens in Adam vol.26/69, and views of the gardens themselves are found in Adam volume 57 (see Adam vol.57/100 and 115). The rear wall of the temple (Serapis) was known in the eighteenth century as the 'Frontispizio di Nerone', and it was illustrated in E. Duperac, Vestigi dell'Antichità di Roma (Rome, 1575), before its destruction in 1630. The sculpture shown here is from that wall. The drawing is annotated with dimensions in feet and inches, and this and the other 'Colonna' inscription may be by James Adam's draughtsman, George Richardson (d.1813) (see J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, pp.368-9).

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

The Adam Brothers in Rome: Drawings from the Grand Tour, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 25 September 2008 - 14 February 2009

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).