Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Design after the antique for a ceiling composed as a circle within a square with rectangular and circular panels serving as the base for standing figures radiating from a central circle containing a figure.
  • image Adam vol.26/180
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

Adam vol.26/180

Purpose

Design after the antique for a ceiling composed as a circle within a square with rectangular and circular panels serving as the base for standing figures radiating from a central circle containing a figure.

Aspect

Ceiling plan

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1760 - 1763

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, watercolour, bodycolour; black border 416 x 464

Hand

Giuseppe Manocchi

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 antique source for this composition is similar to that shown in Robert Adam's 1750 copy of Bartoli, Picturae Antiquae Cryptarum Romanarum (p.107, pl.3).

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
Paper Palaces: the Topham Collection as a source for British Neo-Classicism, The Verey Gallery, Eton College, 16 May - 1 November 2013

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).