To an approximate scale of 1:500

Palatii mercenatis [text hidden by mount] (‘Of the Palace of Maecenas’); [measurements]

• c.1513/14
  Datable to c.1513/14

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

Bernardo della Volpaia

The drawing purports to show a pedimented frontage of a building identified here as the ‘Palace of Maecenas’, the name traditionally assigned (see Ashby) to the enormous Temple of Serapis on the scarp of Rome’s Quirinal Hill near to today’s Piazza del Quirinale. It is one of the earliest representations of this building to survive, although what it actually depicts is problematic. By the early sixteenth century very little of the building was still standing, aside from the ruins of an enormous block of covered staircases ascending from the valley floor. All that remained of the temple itself was a corner of the plain rear wall (demolished 1630), which is recorded in sixteenth-century topographical images (see e.g. Brothers 2002), such as a drawing by Giovannantonio Dosio and a dependent print produced by Giovanni Battista De’Cavalieri in 1569. This fragment was of full height and was capped with an entablature and the end of a pediment supporting a high-level pedestal (cf. Fol. 48r/Ashby 81), and it also included a small portion of the flank, which was linked to an anta, or square-sectioned column. Its appearance, therefore, is not readily reconcilable with the drawing, although the drawing may well be indicative of debates about the building that were surfacing at this particular time.

Investigation of the site had begun sometime earlier, when it was examined by Giuliano da Sangallo, who produced various drawings of the structure that he included in his Codex Barberini (fols 65r–v), one an overall plan, which reconstructs the building as a palace with a central courtyard, colonnaded flanks opening onto terraces, and with end elevations that are unadorned and extend further outwards at either side. This highly conjectural layout, however, did not match readily with the then-extant corner fragment (such as by not indicating any actual rear corner), and alternative reconstructions of the building were also being considered. One appears in a drawing in the Uffizi seemingly by Bernardo da Volpaia himself (see Buddensieg 1975, pp. 95–96), which shows the left half of a pedimented façade of a reduced height, with measurements similar although not always identical to those found on the Coner drawing, and this could have been made to calculate the height of the actual pediment. Another is documented by a drawing, produced by a Florentine draughtsman in the Codex Strozzi, which is labelled as the ‘Palace of Maecenas’ (Mecenata), and depicts a pedimented elevation (possibly the front façade) of identical width (100 braccia), to the façade shown in the Coner drawing, but with the left half adorned with six pilasters (pilastri), thereby implying a full façade with twelve pilasters and of eleven bays in extent.

As for the Coner drawing itself, this would appear to represent an attempt to marry, or combine, the same putative reconstruction of the façade with the surviving rear fragment – even though the two were actually incompatible. The right-hand part of the drawing corresponds with the surviving fragment, and the short raking view of the flank indicates, albeit indistinctly, the anta at its rear, while the lacuna at the bottom would presumably correspond with the lower parts of the surviving fragment that were hidden by abutting structures, as seen in the Dosio drawing. This part of the ancient building was then extended sufficiently to the left to form a symmetrical composition, with a central opening (rectangular rather than arched as in the Codex Strozzi), and a sequence of six closely spaced pilasters adorning the frontage’s left half – despite the fact that there was no evidence on the surviving fragment of any such pilasters. The most likely conclusion to draw from all this is not just that the Coner and Strozzi drawings are related, which is not so surprising considering that the Strozzi draftsman evidently knew Bernardo della Volpaia, but that the two draftsmen were probably availing themselves of the same surveys and reconstructions of the building (now lost) that had been produced a short time before.

It was only later that the building was recognised to be a temple with a colonnaded portico at the opposite end, as is shown by Sallustio Peruzzi and, subsequently, Andrea Palladio. Palladio’s reconstruction of the building, however, with a façade twelve columns wide still accords in its extent with the versions of the frontages shown in the Codex Strozzi and Codex Coner.

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini), fol. 65r (Hülsen 1910, p. 69; Borsi 1985, pp. 228–36); [Bernardo della Volpaia] Florence, GDSU, 3966 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 109; Buddensieg 1975, pp. 95–96; Frommel–Schelbert 2022, 1, pp. 227–29); [Anon.] Florence, GDSU, Codex Strozzi, 1586 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 29); [Sallustio Peruzzi] Florence, GDSU, 664 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 120); [Giovannantonio Dosio] Florence, GDSU, 2512 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 137); [Giovanni Battista De’Cavalieri] Speculum romanae magnificentiae (Speculum Chicago 1973, I, C 392); [Andrea Palladio] London, RIBA, Palladio 11, 23r (Zorzi 1958, p. 75); Palladio 1570, 4, pp. 41–47)

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 48r/Ashby 81

Ashby 1904, p. 37
Buddensieg 1975, pp. 95–96
Census, ID 44789

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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