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  • image Adam vol.57/14
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/14

Purpose

Italy: Baia: the Temple of Diana. View of the interior of a domed temple, that of Diana at Baia. In the foreground are several large ruined flooded vaults.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in pencil in a contemporary hand Baia; in ink 14

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably April 1755.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, grey and brown washes207 x 310

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

Armorial

Notes

In April 1755 Robert Adam wrote of 'the Temples of Diana, Mercurey & Venus, of which my friend Clérisseau & I took sketches to enable our friends to partake of our pleasures' (National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh, Clerk of Penicuik Collection, GD18/4769); this is one of such drawings that has survived. Charles-Louis Clérisseau's version of the same view is shown in Adam vol.57/27. The Temple of Venus is, in fact, part of a large complex of baths and recreation rooms dating from the 1st-3rd centuries AD called the Baths of Nero, which included the Temple of Mercury and the Temple of Diana nearby. There is a contemporary account of the Temple of Diana in Paoli, Avanzi Delle Antichita Esistenti a Pozzuoli Cuma e Baja, Naples, 1768, f.31 and pl.LII; the vaulted ruins in the foreground of Adam's drawing are shown in pl.LV.

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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