To an approximate scale of 1:160

cum./ cana/libus. (‘With flutes’); sine./ cana/libus. (‘Without flutes’); Sant’Angelo in Pescheria [early seventeenth-century hand]

• c.1513/14
  Datable to c.1513/14

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

Bernardo della Volpaia

This drawing is of the Portico of Octavia, an ancient structure later reused to form the entrance to the church of Sant’Angelo in Pescheria (referred to in the caption) near the Theatre of Marcellus. In antiquity, it belonged to a large enclosure of covered walkways originally laid out in the second century BCE and restored by the Emperor Augustus in memory of his sister Octavia (after 27 BCE), before it was largely rebuilt under Septimius Severus. The enclosure surrounded a pair of temples, and this part-surviving ‘propylaeum’ served as a monumental entrance at the centre of its southwestern side (Lauter 1980/81; LTUR 1993–2000, 4, pp. 141–45). It is hexastyle and pedimented, and open at both front and back, each face having four monolithic columns arranged in antis between fluted antae (square-sectioned columns) at either end, projecting slightly from flanking side walls just beyond with arches at their centres. The entablature above the frontal colonnade is unusual in being faced with a very long plaque for a dedicatory inscription, which, like those on the Arch of the Argentarii (Fol. 37v/Ashby 60) and the Temple of Vespasian (Fol. 41r/Ashby 67), is superimposed on the architrave and frieze, and extends across almost the whole of the façade’s entire width.

What survives of the portico, which includes just the left-hand pair of the frontal columns, is judiciously restored in the drawing to accord with the structure’s original condition. The existing medieval arched and brick infill, which extends from the second column all the way to the right-hand anta, is thus replaced by two further columns, and the back of the structure, which had all but vanished, is reconstructed to match the front. The annotations record that the antae are fluted whereas the columns are not, while the entablature is shown in simplified form, as is common in the elevational drawings in the codex, although in this case the drawing’s left-hand half omits the overlaid dedicatory plaque, whereas the right-hand half instead shows the plaque’s position.

The drawing is very similar to one by Giuliano da Sangallo in his Codex Barberini. It adopts almost exactly the same viewpoint, set just beyond the building’s right corner, as is usual for elevations in the codex, and it greatly exaggerates the perspectival angling of the structure’s right flank; and this, like in the Sangallo drawing, makes the right-side arch too small in comparison with its counterpart seen under the portico on the other flank. It also repeats one of the Barberini drawing’s errors, namely the insertion of a horizontal moulding tangential to the top of the arch on the right side that has no basis in reality. In other respects, however, the errors of the Barberini drawing are corrected or avoided. The invented ceiling shown in the Barberini drawing is omitted, as is the attached walkway to the left, which although ancient may not have considered a part of the original structure; and an extension of the collarino near the top of the anta is continued along the structure’s right side, this being perhaps based on a fragment of damaged stonework still visible there. In these latter respects, the drawing broadly accords with the principle of showing only those elements of the structure for which some evidence existed. Among other early drawings, the one in the Codex Strozzi is also notably similar. It again includes a raking view of the portico’s side (albeit here the left side), and it again depicts the extended collarino, which now continues onto the side walls at the height of just above the side arch, and so corresponds with the unfounded side mouldings seen in the Coner and Barberini drawings. It also shows the entablature in a manner similar to that in the Coner drawing, being drawn first as a full entablature and later overlaid with the inscription panel. What all this suggests is that the Strozzi and Coner drawings are very closely related and depend on a common source. An early copy drawing by Palladio likewise includes a raking side view and shows it with an extended collarino, and this may again have a shared ancestry. The Coner drawing was itself copied later by Amico Aspertini.

The annotation ‘Sant’Angelo in Pescheria’, the only one in a seventeenth-century hand found on one of the compilation’s original drawings, was needed to identify the structure and distinguish the drawing from those preceding it that are all of the Pantheon. Why the drawing was included on this particular sheet is unclear, but it cannot be because no further elevational drawings of the Pantheon were required, since a further Pantheon drawing appears soon after (Fol. 40r/Ashby 65). The reason may be that it relates to the drawings of long columnar façades with monumental pediments on the sheet’s other side (Fol. 39v/Ashby 64).

RELATED IMAGES: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 35v (Hülsen 1910, pp. 52–53; Borsi 1985, pp. 187-91); [Anon.] Florence, GDSU, Codex Strozzi, 1605 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 26); [Andrea Palladio] Vicenza, Museo Civico, D 26r [Zorzi 1958, p. 59; Puppi 1989, p. 103] [Amico Aspertini] London, BM, Aspertini Sketchbook II, fol. 41v (Bober 1957, p. 89)

Ashby 1904, p. 37
Census, ID 44638

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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