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  • image Adam vol.57/51
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/51

Purpose

Italy: Rome: the Colosseum. View of the Colosseum from the slopes of the Monte Celio, with a small three-bay villa with roof loggia and the ruined arches of the Baths of Titus on the right. In the distance is the dome of San Luca e Martina.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 51

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 or 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen and grey washes; pencil framing line (bottom)180 x 295

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

This view by Robert Adam from the Monte Celio may have been made at the same time as he was drawing in the garden of the Villa Celimontana (see Adam vol.57/50). The diagonal umbrella pine, which appears in Adam vol.57/48 - 57/52, suggests a similar type of landscape and also reveals Adam's limited compositional skills. A late seventeenth-century view of the Colosseum by Israel Silvestre (1621-1691) is taken from the same point and clearly shows its 'fantastic setting' of surrounding villa architecture (see R. Keaveney, Views of Rome, London, 1988, pl.23, p.120). A more detailed view may be constructed from G. Nolli, Nuova Pianta di Roma, 1748, which describes the building in the centre as 'Fenile prima sped. di S. Gio. Laterano', and the gardens as those of the Guidi and Pini.

Level

Drawing

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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