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  • image Adam vol.26/111
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Reference number

Adam vol.26/111

Purpose

Italy: Rome, San Andrea della Valle. Study of Renaissance candelabrum attributed to Michelangelo with figures and grotesque decoration, supported by two volutes with lions and putti heads incorporating the Strozzi arms.

Aspect

Elevation

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink in an eighteenth-century hand, possibly that of Giuseppe Manocchi, Candeliere di S Andrea della Valle di Michelangelo

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1760 - 63

Medium and dimensions

Pen, brown wash (later, pencil) 466 x 173

Hand

Giuseppe Manocchi

Notes

This bronze candelabrum was one of a pair made for the Strozzi chapel in San Andrea della Valle, Rome. Like the drawing in Adam vol.26/110 there is a copy of this drawing in ink on tracing paper in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London with a Charles James Richardson (1806-71) provenance (see P. Ward-Jackson, Victoria and Albert Museum, Italian Drawings, 2 vols., London, 1979, II, p.154).
There is a candle design by Giuseppe Manocchi (1731-82) of c.1777 in the Drawings Collection (see J. Lever, Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects, L-N, London, 1973, p.64), which was attributed to Charles Heathcote Tatham and others in album five of the Hardwick drawings in the RIBA (see 5/4). There is another candelabra design attributed to Manocchi in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London that is described as 'in the antique Roman taste' (see Ward-Jackson, op.cit., II, pp.154-5). The inscription on both this sheet and Adam vol.26/110 is probably by Manocchi. Robert Adam possibly used these drawings as a source adapted for his Luton candelabra of c.1775, which he described as 'Bronzes executed in Italy in the Style of Mich. Angelo' (see The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam, London, 1773-79, part III, pl.VIII).

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.

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