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  • image Adam vol.26/175
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Reference number

Adam vol.26/175

Purpose

Record drawing of a candelabrum base, or possibly an altar, showing a dancing female figure in relief flanked by two sphinxes standing on rams' heads; above is a frieze of satyrs' heads and grotesque masks.

Aspect

Elevation

Signed and dated

  • Undated

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen 385 x 299

Hand

Unidentified eighteenth-century artist

Watermark

Villandry (?)

Notes

The tripod candelabrum base can probably be identified with one of two from the first-century bases originally found at Tivoli, Italy, but which in the eighteenth century were conserved in the Piazza San Marco in Venice (see P. Bober & R. Rubenstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, Oxford, 1986, p.122). The figure here is that described by Bober as 'a maenad wearing a long garment and nebris; her dance is a rapid stomp with head cast back in rapture and arms flung wide holding the ends of a mantle that passes behind her' (Bober & Rubinstein, op. cit., p.121). The drawing is probably a copy, and it may be compared with drawings of similar bases in Adam vol.26/65 and 173.

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).