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You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Italy: Rome, the Vatican. Record drawing of the decoration of a pilaster showing four relief panels. Below these is grotesque decoration, a Diana of Ephesus idol on an animal base flanked by two stags, various other panels and two rampant lions.
  • image Adam vol.26/199
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Reference number

Adam vol.26/199

Purpose

Italy: Rome, the Vatican. Record drawing of the decoration of a pilaster showing four relief panels. Below these is grotesque decoration, a Diana of Ephesus idol on an animal base flanked by two stags, various other panels and two rampant lions.

Aspect

Elevation

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1760 - 1763

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, watercolour 1471 x 270, four 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 study of the decoration of pilaster 6, and the subjects of the four relief panels correpond to both Ottaviani's engraving (see below) and according to Dacros: putto, two young men, horsemen, faun and dog (see N. Dacros, Le Logge di Raffaello, Rome, 1986, p.269). It does not show the naturalistic landscape panels of the base or the side border. There is an unnumbered version of this pilaster showing the side panel in Sir John Soane's Museum, Soane volume 130/6, and one of the Ephesus figure of 'Manocchi's Roman period' in P. Fuhring, Design into Art, Drawings for Architecture and Ornament (2 vols., London, 1989, I, p.60). The draughtsmanship of the larger scale figures may be compared with that in Adam vol.26/151.
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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