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You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Italy: Rome: Palazzo Barberini. View of a delapidated wall, probably the cortile of Palazzo Barberini, with doorway, inscribed relief, small belfry and outside staircase. From the latter a water pipe projects, leaking into a sarcophagus below a trestle platform. On the ground is part of an obelisk.
  • image Adam vol.57/97
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/97

Purpose

Italy: Rome: Palazzo Barberini. View of a delapidated wall, probably the cortile of Palazzo Barberini, with doorway, inscribed relief, small belfry and outside staircase. From the latter a water pipe projects, leaking into a sarcophagus below a trestle platform. On the ground is part of an obelisk.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 97

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 or 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown washes on brown washed paper; pencil framing line132 x 247

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

The view shows the interior of the cortile of Palazzo Barberini, Rome with the Obeliscus Antonoi, possibly that which held the Guglia Giaconte at this time. The Obelisk had been removed from near the Aurelian Wall to the Palazzo in 1633, where it remained until 1768. In 1822 it was erected in the Pincio (see E. Nash, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Rome, London, 1968, vol.II, p.130). The inscribed panel of 1570 may be that which was later fixed to a pier of the Acqua Felice; the fountain similarly existed (see Nash, op.cit., p.133).

Level

Drawing

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

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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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