Drawing 2: Pilaster base of the Temple of Serapis

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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 115/81

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Reference number

SM volume 115/81b

Purpose

Drawing 2: Pilaster base of the Temple of Serapis

Aspect

Cross section and raking view of front, with measurements

Scale

To an approximate scale of 1:18

Inscribed

[Drawing] Exitus. est. b. 3. M[inuta]. 11. (‘The projection is 3 braccia 11 minutes’); b. 2. minuta. sunt. 4 (‘They are 2 braccia 4 minutes’);
.B[ase]. sub. istam. Coronamercen[n]atis (‘Base beneath this cornice of Maecenas’); [measurements]

Signed and dated

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

Medium and dimensions

[Drawing] Pen and brown ink and grey-brown wash over stylus lines

Hand

Bernardo della Volpaia

Notes

To judge from its placement on the sheet, this drawing may have been executed after the one of the entablature. It is also of differing representational format, combining a cross section with a raking view, like many other drawings in the Codex Coner. The base is almost certainly that of the then-surviving pilaster, or more properly anta, on the building’s flanking wall, seen in various later drawings and prints depicting what still remained of the building (see e.g. Brothers 2002). Its design was a variation of an attic base, with an added astragal above the upper torus, and it was of colossal size, the plinth measuring 4 braccia 45 minutes (2.77m, well over nine Roman feet) in width. Previously, it was drawn twice by Giuliano da Sangallo in the Codex Barberini, as well as by the anonymous draughtsman of the Codex Strozzi, but these are all orthogonal representations. Michelangelo copied the base’s profile from this drawing.

RELATED IMAGES: [Michelangelo] Florence, CB, 4Ar: left side (De Tolnay 1975–80, 4, p. 49; Agosti–Farinella 1987, pp. 124–25)

OTHER IMAGES MENTIONED: [Giuliano da Sangallo] Rome, BAV, Barb. lat. 4424 (Codex Barberini, fols 15r and 68v (Hülsen 1910, pp. 26 and 71–72; Borsi 1985, pp. 104–08 and 228–36); [Anon.] Florence, GDSU, Codex Strozzi, 1586 Ar (Bartoli 1914–22, 6, p. 29)

OTHER DRAWINGS IN CODEX CONER OF SAME SUBJECT: Fol. 39v/Ashby 64; Fol. 48r/Ashby 81 Drawing 1 on this page

Literature

Ashby 1904, p. 43
Census, ID 49892

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

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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