Record drawing of a funerary altar with a rectangular inscription panel, flanked by two satyrs' heads. Between the heads is a swag that incorporates a lion attacking a deer, below which are two small birds, and, at the corners, are two eagles with raised beaks.

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Robert and James Adam travel drawings
- Adam Volume 26

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Reference number

Adam vol.26/63

Purpose

Record drawing of a funerary altar with a rectangular inscription panel, flanked by two satyrs' heads. Between the heads is a swag that incorporates a lion attacking a deer, below which are two small birds, and, at the corners, are two eagles with raised beaks.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Lettered on the funerary altar inscription panel ASPRE NATE [?] / DUJ. FRVIQR [?]/ PATRI SUIS. / TOR QVATUS [?] / PRIMUS [?]

Signed and dated

Undated, probably 1760 - 63

Medium and dimensions

Black chalk 265 x 200

Hand

Nicolas-François-David Lhuiller (attributed to)

Notes

This is a companion drawing to the altar shown in Adam vol.26/62, which may show another face of the composition. There is a similar drawing in a similar hand in the Sir John Soane's Museum (see SM 129/135). The classical inscription panels shows five lines of funerary text in Latin.
The drawings may both be studies of the two principal faces. The drawing is probably derived from similar forms shown in J. J. Boissard, Antiquitatum Romanorum, Frankfurt, 1598. Bernard de Montfauçon (1655-1741) used these in his section on 'Urnes Sépulcrales' (see L'Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures, Paris, 1719, 10 vols., vol.5 part 1).

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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.

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