Preliminary measured drawing

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Soane's architectural education: Royal Academy and Italy including measured drawings: 1770-1780
  - Soane in Italy: measured drawings made or copied, 1778-80
    - Italy: Rome: Baths of Livia (so-called, later Casa di Livia), 10 April 1780

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Reference number

SM 45/1/4

Purpose

Preliminary measured drawing

Aspect

Rough plan, section and detail

Inscribed

Baths of Livia, No Cieling remaining, bottom paved with tiles, Stucco 3 1/2 Inches, Nichia (sic), * no positive dimensions / taken for the height / of this Recess, plan labelled A, B, M, N and dimensions given

Signed and dated

April 10 1780

Medium and dimensions

Pen, hatching, pencil on thin laid paper (406 x 319)

Hand

Soane

Watermark

Britannia with olive branch within crowned roundel, and band (Hayward 209)

Notes

Soane measured and drew two chambers of 'part of the ruins of the imperial palace on the Palatine Hill, celebrated for their painted stucco ceilings which had remained intact' (du Prey, op.cit.,1977, p.291, citing Nicolas Ponce, Arabesques antiques des bains de Livie ... et de la ville ...Madame...Paris, 1789). However, Soane notes 'No Cieling remaining'. The Casa di Livia (modern name) has decorated walls belonging to'a phase intermediate between the Second and Third Pompeian Styles and are to be dated to the Augustan period (L.Richardson, jr, A New topographical dictionary of ancient Rome, Baltimore, 1992)

Literature

P.du Prey, John Soane's architectural education, 1977, pp.291-2, 536 fn.10

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

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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