To an approximate scale of 1:100

[Drawing] arci. domitiani. imp. (‘Arch of the Emperor Domitian’); [measurements]
[Mount] 52 [x2]

• c.1513/14
  Datable to c.1513/14

[Drawing] Pen and brown ink and grey-brown wash over stylus lines and compass pricks; on laid paper (164x233mm), rounded corners at left, inlaid
[Mount] Frame lines, in pen and dark brown ink, 10mm apart; window (155x221mm)

Bernardo della Volpaia

See recto

The ancient Roman arch known now as the Arco di Portogallo survived into the Renaissance and stood on the Via Lata, today’s Via del Corso, close to the junction of what is now the Via della Vite (LTUR 1993–2000, 1, pp. 77–79). It was constructed possibly under the Emperor Aurelian in the third century CE and was perhaps associated with his Temple of the Sun which was situated immediately to the east (Torelli 1992). In the sixteenth century, it was often referred to as the Arch of Domitian, which is how it was known to Bernardo Rucellai in his De urbe Roma (Valentini–Zucchetti 1953, p. 452) and by Francesco Albertini in his guide to Rome (1510, 2, chapter 8, fol. Pr), and how it is identified here, seemingly being confused with an arch built by Domitian also located the Via Lata but closer to the southern Piazza Venezia end (Platner–Ashby 1929, pp. 38–39). Later, it became increasingly known as the Arco di Portogallo (i.e. ‘Arch of Portugal’), on account of its proximity to Palazzo Fiano, the residence of Rome’s official Portuguese ambassador. It was finally demolished in 1662 for the benefit of the horse races that were staged on the Via Lata, and as part of an urban initiative recorded in a surviving seventeenth-century inscription (Krautheimer 1985, pp. 24–25; Davies–Hemsoll 2013, 1, pp. 300–01). As a result, the two large relief panels from the northern front, originally belonging to an earlier structure and showing the Emperor Hadrian’s beneficence and the apotheosis of his wife Sabina, were transferred to the Capitoline Museum, and the surviving columns were used for Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s enlargement of the Porta del Popolo (see Stucchi 1949–50). In design, the arch was distinctive both in having an entablature projecting forward over the paired side columns to either side of the central archway (like the Arch of the Sergii at Pula), and also in respect to the very unusual design of the column pedestals, which, with their bulging profiles, were used as a model for the façade pilasters of Raphael’s Villa Madama (1518; see Burns 1984, p. 435).

The drawing, like all other images of the monument, shows the arch’s northern front – its southern face having been destroyed in the twelfth century and used to build Santa Maria in Trastevere (Platner–Ashby 1929, p. 33). It represents the monument as freed from the contiguous structures on both its flanks and stripped too of any superstructure above the level of the entablature, possibly because it was thought to be post-antique in date. It restores the pair of columns on the right of the arch, which, in a drawing by Giovannantonio Dosio in the Uffizi (and a print of Giovanni Battista De’Cavalieri of 1569) are both missing, although Dosio’s later drawing at Windsor (and a print in Bernardo Gamucci’s Antichità of 1565) shows one of them as still standing, or conceivably re-erected (see Stucchi 1949–50, pp. 103 and 115; Campbell 2004, 1, p. 248). The Coner drawing also completes the fragmentary entablature, which had suffered losses both on the right and at the far left (although unlike most the other depictions it fails to represent the frieze as pulvinated). It excludes, however, the sculptural embellishments – the still-surviving relief panels and the figurative decoration on the prominent keystone – as was normal practice in the codex; and, rather more surprisingly, it also omits the plinth beneath the column pedestals, which exacerbates the squatness of the arch’s drawn proportions. It could be that that this bottom zone was left unrecorded simply because it was impossible to determine its height, although the bands linking the pedestals which then continue on the archway’s visible inner side are fictitious, as are the ones that continue the line of the arch’s imposts between the columns.

The drawing, nevertheless, was seemingly intended as some sort of architectural reconstruction of the ancient arch, which despite its own errors limited its restoration to those elements that were deemed certain. In this respect it differs from the earlier reconstruction by Giuliano da Sangallo in the Codex Barberini, which relied to a far greater degree on the draughtman’s imagination. In the Barberini drawing, the pedestals stand on a tall but invented socle zone, which similarly has upper and lower mouldings extending along the archway’s visible inner face, while the entablature carries a conjectured attic, likewise projecting forwards at either side, which in turn supports a fictional pediment framing a central arch. Later conjectural reconstructions include one recorded in a sketch by Sallustio Peruzzi, where the entablature again supports an attic that comes forwards at the sides, and two by Pirro Ligorio which both have attics although these are now continuous.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 22v (Hülsen 1910, p. 32; Borsi 1985, pp. 132–33); [Sallustio Peruzzi] Florence, GDSU, 443 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 123); [Pirro Ligorio] Windsor, RL, 10816r (Campbell 2004, 1, pp. 204–06); [Pirro Ligorio] Turin, Antichità XIV, fol. 19r (Census ID 63242); [Giovannantonio Dosio] Florence, GDSU, 2528 Ar (Acidini 1976, p. 60); [Giovannantonio Dosio] Windsor, RL, 10763 (Campbell 2004, 1, pp. 248–9); Gamucci 1565, p. 151; De’Cavalieri 1569 (unpaginated; see Borsi 1970, no. 28)

Ashby 1904, p. 35
Ashby 1913, p. 201
Census, ID 44381

Drawing

Digitisation of the Codex Coner has been made possible through the generosity of the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, Berlin

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