Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Italy: Rome, the Vatican. Record drawing for the decoration of a pilaster from the Vatican logge showing four relief medallions of different shapes, below which are two figures, with grotesque decoration of winged horses, other figures, foliage; to one side is a border with three stylised circular rosettes in foliage culminating in a stork, with flaming lamp.
  • image Adam vol.26/186
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

Adam vol.26/186

Purpose

Italy: Rome, the Vatican. Record drawing for the decoration of a pilaster from the Vatican logge showing four relief medallions of different shapes, below which are two figures, with grotesque decoration of winged horses, other figures, foliage; to one side is a border with three stylised circular rosettes in foliage culminating in a stork, with flaming lamp.

Aspect

Elevation

Inscribed

verso Inscribed in ink in an eighteenth-century hand P: 2S2S [?]

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1760 - 1763

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, watercolour, bodycolour, ink framing line 1266 x 358, three joined sheets

Hand

Giuseppe Manocchi (attributed to)

Watermark

fleur de lys in double circle

Notes

This drawing, together with those in Adam vol.26/188, 191-201 is part of a group attributed to Giuseppe Manocchi (c.1731-82), showing decoration of the Vatican logge. This drawing appears to be a variation on one of the Giovanni da Udine (1487-1564) pilasters from the Raphael logge (the verso note may refer to a specific pilaster). It does not correspond to any pilaster engraved by Ottaviani (see below), but it does seem to be a variation of Volpato's pilaster 5, which offers the same composition with winged horses at the base. Adam vol.26/188 and 191 show the other two sections of this pilaster. The side panels, however, are unlike those shown in Volpato's print.
The decoration of the Vatican logge appeared as engravings between 1772 - 1777 in three parts: Logge di Rafaele nel Vaticano (1772), Seconda Parte delle Logge di Rafaele nel Vaticano (1776) and Terza ed Ultima Parte delle Logge di Rafaele nel Vaticano (1777). Work on the project of recording was begun in 1760 and was more or less completed by 1768. The principal artists involved were the painter Gaetano Savorelli (d.1791) and the architect Pietro Camporesi (1726-81), and the engraver was Giovanni Ottaviani (1735-1808). The third volume was engraved by Giovanni Volpato (1733-1803), after drawings by Ludovico Tesio (1731-82).

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).