Italy: Pozzuoli: the Forum. View of the ruins of the market building at Pozzuoli, showing the remains of the central circular pavilion surrounded on four sides by a portico, of which three columns remain. In the background are more ruins and a castello.

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Robert and James Adam travel drawings
- Adam Volume 57

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Reference number

Adam vol.57/35

Purpose

Italy: Pozzuoli: the Forum. View of the ruins of the market building at Pozzuoli, showing the remains of the central circular pavilion surrounded on four sides by a portico, of which three columns remain. In the background are more ruins and a castello.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in pencil in a contemporary hand Puzzoli; in ink 35

Signed and dated

Undated, probably 1755.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown, grey and blue washes228 x 513 (two joined sheets)

Hand

Charles-Louis Clérisseau

Watermark

Dove on monti in circle

Notes

This view by Charles-Louis Clérisseau clearly sets out the new excavations and reconstruction of the market area of Pozzuoli dating from the first half of the 2nd century AD. It was a successful attempt to make what is largely an archaeological drawing stimulating and attractive, in the style of similar drawings by Piranesi. The more conventional bird's-eye view of the site is shown in Paoli, Avanzi Delle Antichita Esistenti a Pozzuoli Cuma e Baja, Naples, 1768, pl.XLII, and, rather more attractively, in Filippo Morghen, Le Antichita di Pozzuoli, Baja e Cuma, 1769, pl.II. Abbé de Saint-Non, Voyage Pittoresque en Sicile et Naples, Paris, 1781-6, vol. II, p.162, shows an imaginative depiction of the ruins, partly reconstructed. A version of Clérisseau's view was issued as one of a suite of 14 prints by Domenico Cunego in London in 1766. For an account of the site and its appeal in the late eighteenth century, see I. Jenkins and K. Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes, catalogue of an exhibition at the British Museum, London, 1996 pp.164-5.Clerisseau's drawing, using two joined sheets of paper, is of similar size to those in Adam vol.57/12 and 57/30.

Literature

A. A. Tait, Robert Adam, The Creative Mind: from the sketch to the finished drawing, catalogue of an exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 1996, cat.5, illus. p.2

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
The Adam Brothers in Rome: Drawings from the Grand Tour, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 25 September 2008 - 14 February 2009

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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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