Drawing 2 (upper right): Triglyphs from a tomb once near Ponte Nomentano

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Books

Italian Renaissance Drawings
- Codex Coner: Architecture and Antiquarianism in early sixteenth-century Rome, c.1513-15 with seventeenth-century additions (100 folios)
  - SM volume 115/75

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Reference number

SM volume 115/75b

Purpose

Drawing 2 (upper right): Triglyphs from a tomb once near Ponte Nomentano

Aspect

Plan and elevational extension

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:10

Inscribed

planta. Triglifo[rum] (‘Plan of the triglyphs’)

Signed and dated

c.1513/14
Datable to c.1513/14

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink and grey-brown wash over stylus lines

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

The plan, the first of two auxiliary drawings of the tomb once near the Ponte Nomentano, shows two abutting triglyphs at one of its corners, although it is not fully consistent with the main drawing in their relationship to the supporting order, and it is joined (rather confusingly) to a partial view of one of their fronts. It establishes that the entablature of each of the tomb’s faces ended with a triglyph, rather than, as Vitruvius had advised (De architectura, 4, chapter 3, 2–3), with a part of a metope, which means that the final triglyphs are not aligned with the centres of the pilasters beneath them. Because the triglyphs above the intervening half-columns are placed above their centres (this shown wrongly in Drawing 1), it follows that the three bays are unavoidably of unequal size. The side bays, according to an elevational drawing by Giovanni Francesco da Sangallo, were set out with two intervening triglyphs and three metopes, and this implies that the central bays, which are shown to be narrower in early plans (see Fol. 5 verso of flap/Ashby 8A), probably had one intervening triglyph and two metopes.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giovanni Francesco da Sangallo] Florence, GDSU, 2054 Av (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 102; Frommel–Schelbert 2022, 1, p. 215)

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 5r/Ashby 8; Fol. 45r/Ashby 75 Drawings 1 and 3

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 42
Census, ID 45041

Level

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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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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