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  • image Adam vol.26/179
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Reference number

Adam vol.26/179

Purpose

Design after the antique for a ceiling composed in cruciform with a central circle containing a head with pointed aureole and four tripartite semi-circular panels containing figures. Between these are four heads encircled by foliage.

Aspect

Ceiling plan

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1760 - 1763

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, watercolour, bodycolour; black border 434 x 494

Hand

Giuseppe Manocchi

Watermark

partail name

Notes

This is one of a set of highly-finished, coloured drawings of a similar size (see Adam vol.26/168, 169, 179-182, 185, 187, 189 and 190) by Giuseppe Manocchi (1731-82), which parallel those found in Adam volumes 15 and 16. The ceiling design in Adam vol.26/185 is almost identical to this one, as is the detail of the central head, and the broad composition is repeated in Adam vol.26/181 although in a circular form. The faces and figures may be compared with those in Robert Adam's 1750 copy of Bartoli, Picturae Antiquae Cryptarum Romanarum (p.107, pl.4). There is a version of this composition, partially coloured, in the Manocchi 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.93), which is inscribed in a contemporary hand 'Villa Hadriani'.

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).