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You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Italy: Aquino: Santa Maria Libera. Drawing of a wall sarcophagus in Santa Maria Libera at Aquino, showing a rectangular relief panel supported by two human head consoles, flanked by pilasters.
  • image Adam vol.57/37
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/37

Purpose

Italy: Aquino: Santa Maria Libera. Drawing of a wall sarcophagus in Santa Maria Libera at Aquino, showing a rectangular relief panel supported by two human head consoles, flanked by pilasters.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in pencil in a contemporary hand Madonna della Libera route de Naples; in ink 37

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 or 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, grey wash227 x 342

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

St Esprit type

Notes

Santa Maria Libera is an eleventh-century basilica incorporating the remains of the temple of Ercole Liberatore at Aquino, which Robert Adam probably visited after Monte Cassino on his way back to Rome in April 1755. The sarcophagus depicted was probably part of the extensive classical ruins around the church. Both Adam and Charles-Louis Clérisseau visited the site again in 1756 during their tour to Sora; there is a pen and wash drawing of the church made at that time in the Clerk Collection, Scotland (Clerk 159).

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.


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