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  • image Adam vol.26/114
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Reference number

Adam vol.26/114

Purpose

Record drawing of a relief panel of trophies showing shields, weapons and insignia of legionaries.

Aspect

Elevation

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1761 - 1763

Medium and dimensions

Pen, brown wash on buff washed paper 162 x 551.

Hand

Unidentified eighteenth-century artist

Notes

There are a number of drawings of this sort of subject in Adam vol.26/112-117 that are all probably after the undercut reliefs from the pillars in the Uffizi in Florence (see also Adam vol.26/88). There were two pillars each with four relief panels. The columns were removed from Rome to Florence in 1588 and in the eighteenth century were set up at the entrance to the Uffizi Gallery (see P. Bober and R. Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, Oxford, 1986, p.206). In February 1761 James Adam admired the Palazzo Vecchio of the Uffizi and wrote in his journal: 'Palazzo Vecchio, where there are in the Cortile some columns wrought in the antique style in the most superb manner. The apartments of the palace are full of grotesque ornaments, but of a kind superior to any I ever saw, which made me form the project of employing a young painter to copy them in my absence' (see James Adam, The Library of the Fine Arts, II, 1831, p.175).
There are similar compositions in Adam volume 19 (see particularly Adam vol.19/101-2). The drawings are probably tracings on very fine oiled paper, now rearranged.

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).