Italy: Rome, the Vatican. Record drawing of the decoration of a pilaster showing four relief panels of different shapes; below are four naturalistic rosettes in scrolling foliage that incorporates birds and animals. To one side is a border of grotesque work ending in a spiral.

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Robert and James Adam travel drawings
- Adam Volume 26

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Reference number

Adam vol.26/196

Purpose

Italy: Rome, the Vatican. Record drawing of the decoration of a pilaster showing four relief panels of different shapes; below are four naturalistic rosettes in scrolling foliage that incorporates birds and animals. To one side is a border of grotesque work ending in a spiral.

Aspect

Elevation

Signed and dated

Undated, probably 1760 - 1763

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, watercolour, bodycolour 1193 x 340, three joined sheets

Hand

Giuseppe Manocchi (attributed to)

Notes

This drawing, together with those in Adam vol.26/186, 191-201 is part of a group attributed to Giuseppe Manocchi (c.1731-82), showing decoration of the Vatican logge. This drawing is a reasonably accurate version of pilaster 9 in Ottaviani's engraving (see below); Adam vol.26/195 is a less accurate one. According to Dacros, the subject matter of the four reliefs are: putto with snake, posing male, dogs and boars, Medusa head (see N. Dacros, Le Logge di Raffaello, Rome, 1986, p.273). TThe composition of the scrolling foliage with animals is close to Ottaviani's engraving, as is the grotesque border. The Manocchi drawing in Sir John Soane's Museum in SM130/2 shows this border to a different pilaster decoration, and there is another variant in SM130/1.
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

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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.

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