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  • image Adam vol.57/27
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/27

Purpose

Italy: Baia: ? 'Temple of Venus'. View of the interior of a ruined temple, probably that of Venus at Baia, showing the dome and window openings. In the foreground is a tree and vegetation.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in pencil in a contemporary hand Baia; in ink 27

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil on grey paper, overlaid with grey and brown washes, heightened with white chalk and lead white, oxidised; pencil framing line238 x 323 (trimmed)

Hand

Charles-Louis Clérisseau

Notes

There is another view of this temple by Robert Adam (see Adam vol.57/14), taken from much the same viewpoint as this view by Charles-Louis Clérisseau, although there are significant differences in the handling of the foreground vegetation and lower ruins, and in the use of white heightening for the clouds. Apart from the more elaborate technique employed, this view demonstrates Clérisseau's greater compositional and atmospheric abilities.A view of the same temple by Cunego after Clérisseau was published in London in 1766, as part of a set of fourteen prints.

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).