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  • image Adam vol.26/169
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Reference number

Adam vol.26/169

Purpose

Design for a rectangular ceiling with an irregular central compartment surrounded by eight panels, each containing two or three figures, divided by grotesque decoration.

Aspect

Ceiling plan

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1760 - 1763

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, watercolour, bodycolour; red border 584 x 585

Hand

Giuseppe Manocchi

Notes

This is one of ten (Adam vol.26/168, 169, 179-182, 185, 187, 189, 190), highly-finished, coloured drawings by Giuseppe Manocchi (1731-82), which parallel those found in Adam volumes 15 and 16. The composition here can be compared with a ceiling of the Palace of Augustus (Livia) (see C. Cameron, The Baths of the Romans, 1772, pl.LIV) and may be one of the drawings commissioned by James Adam in 1762 as from 'Livia's Baths'; there are others in Adam vol.26/93 and 94. The subject-matter of the eight panels here differs from those shown in Cameron. There are several copies by Manocchi of Cameron ceiling drawings amongst the Hardwick albums in the RIBA (see J. Lever, Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects, L-N, London, 1973, p.163).

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

'Bob the Roman': Heroic Antiquity and the Architecture of Robert Adam, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 27 June - 27 September 2003; New York School of Interior Design Gallery, 29 September - 4 December 2004

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).