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  • image Adam vol.57/15
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/15

Purpose

Italy: Baia. View of two vaulted chambers, ruined and flooded. In the distant landscape is the Temple of Diana at Baia.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in pencil in a contemporary hand Baia; in ink 15

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably April 1755.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, grey, brown and blue washes; pencil framing line193 x 302 (trimmed)

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

monti within circle (a clear Italian watermark that is found frequently amongst Adam's drawings of the 1755-57 period)

Notes

This is one of a number of drawings made of the temple complex at the same time as that of the Temple of Diana in Adam vol.57/14. There are other views of the Temple of Diana in Adam vol.57/33 and 57/38, the latter by Charles-Louis Clérisseau, which also shows the Temple of Venus. Both temples were part of the same large complex of baths dating from the 1st to 3rd centuries AD. A plan and an account of these buildings is given in Paoli, Avanzi Delle Antichita Esistenti a Pozzuoli Cuma e Baja, Naples, 1768, f.32, and a view of the vaults that Robert Adam depicted appears as pl.LV, 'che chiamansi Truglio', that is, 'cave'. Two vaults are shown in the foreground here, while in Adam vol.57/23 three vaults are shown, with the Temple of Venus in the distance. All three drawings show Adam and Clérisseau assessing the picturesque values of each scene.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Robert Adam, The Creative Mind: from the Sketch to the Finished Drawing, Sir John Soane's Museum, 4 October 1996 - 1 March 1997; The Frick Collection, New York, December 1997 - April 1998; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, May - June 1998; The Octagon Museum, Washington, July 1998 - January 1999; Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, February - March 1999

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).