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  • image Adam vol.26/129
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Reference number

Adam vol.26/129

Purpose

Record drawing of a Corinthian capital.

Aspect

Elevation

Inscribed

Inscribed in pencil in a nineteenth-century hand Capital of the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1760 - 1763

Medium and dimensions

Red chalk 411 x 442

Hand

Nicolas-François-David Lhuiller (attributed to)

Watermark

fleur de lys in two circles

Notes

This Corinthian capital may be from the Temple of Sybil (Vesta) at Tivoli, Italy. There are two capitals from Tivoli illustrated in G.L. Taylor & E. Cresy, The Architectural Antiquities of Rome, (2 vols., London, 1821, vol.II, p.7), both with fluted columns unlike this drawing. It is also possible that this may be a capital from Palestrina that matches the cone-shaped rosette centre. There is a black chalk drawing in a similar hand showing half of a Corinthian capital among the Piranesi (1720-78) drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (see F. Stampfle, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, 1978, pl.27, p.xxxiii).

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).