[6] Variant design

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Soane's architectural education: Royal Academy and Italy including measured drawings: 1770-1780
  - Soane's architectural education including theoretical designs made for the Royal Academy Schools and for exhibition at the Royal Academy, 1770-80, and in Italy, 1778-80
    - Designs for a 'Castello d'acqua', August 1779-1780, with later rough alternative designs by George Dance (10)

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Reference number

SM 45/1/20

Purpose

[6] Variant design

Aspect

Elevation of variant design and (feint pencil) part elevation

Scale

bar scale of 1/20 in to 1 ft

Inscribed

(on a tablet) JACOBUS INFANTA DI PARMA and pedestal to fountain labelled 40:0

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia and light blue washes, shaded, pencil additions within single ruled border on laid paper (352 x 518)

Hand

Soane and ? Carlo Labruzzi (P. du Prey's attribution)

Watermark

fleur-de-lis, crowned cartouche with GR below

Notes

du Prey (1982, op.cit., p.365, fn. 24) identifies the finishing touches added to this variant elevation as being made by Carlo Labruzzi, 1748-1817, a landscape painter who drew and painted views for foreign tourists. These set the Castello d'acqua in a piazza (a requirement of the Parma Academy's competition). Here, the dome is slightly steeper and plain masonry replaces the rustication shown in SM 45/1/21, the order is now Roman rather than Greek Doric and, rather strikingly, six naked figures sit on the parapet above the entablature holding a festoon; the seven standing figures with urns shown in SM 45/1/21 are omitted.

Literature

P. du Prey, John Soane's architectural education 1753-80, 1977, pp.274-8
P. du Prey, John Soane: the making of an architect, 1982, pp.184-6

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).