Design for a ceiling after the antique with a circular central panel showing a female figure reclining on a cloud; around the central circle are four angels between rectangular panels, which are above four more panels each topped with an urn; all connected by arabesques.

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Robert and James Adam travel drawings
- Adam Volume 26

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Reference number

Adam vol.26/189

Purpose

Design for a ceiling after the antique with a circular central panel showing a female figure reclining on a cloud; around the central circle are four angels between rectangular panels, which are above four more panels each topped with an urn; all connected by arabesques.

Aspect

Ceiling plan

Signed and dated

Undated, probably 1760 - 1763

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, watercolour, bodycolour; black border 453 x 451

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 composition, though not the detail, may be compared with the Tomb of Lucina of the second century (see D. Stillman, the Decorative Work of Robert Adam, London, 1966, p.104).

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).