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  • image Adam vol.26/95
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Reference number

Adam vol.26/95

Purpose

Possibly unfinished record drawing of a ceiling design showing nine roundels, each containing three full-length figures, and four diamond-shaped panels without decoration. All are set within foliage and small rosettes.

Aspect

Ceiling plan

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1760 - 63

Medium and dimensions

Pen, yellow, brown and purple washes 375 x 399

Hand

Giuseppe Manocchi

Notes

This is a similar drawing to the more complete ceiling designs in Adam vol.26/93 and 94 and like them it is in Giuseppe Manocchi (c.1731-82)'s hand. According to McCormick, 'A drawing entitled 'Bain delinié au palais des empereurs', is the original of the corresponding Soane drawing of diamonds and roundels. The copies seem flat and linear in comparison with the richly plastic Clérisseau original' (T. McCormick, Charles-Louis Clérisseau and the Genesis of Neo-Classicism, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, 1990, p.148). He also states that this composition and that in Adam vol.26/28 are 'by one of the draftsmen'. The composition is based on a ceiling from the nymphaeum complex in Nero's Domus Transitoria, Rome (see R. Ling, Roman Painting, Cambridge, 1991, p.86, pl.91).

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).