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You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Italy: Rome: ? Palatine Hill. View of an overgrown, vaulted two-storied ruin, possibly on the Palatine, with square coffering on each vault, with a large rectangular opening in the upper vault and three small openings at the base of the lower vault. In the distance are further ruins.
  • image Adam vol.57/105
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/105

Purpose

Italy: Rome: ? Palatine Hill. View of an overgrown, vaulted two-storied ruin, possibly on the Palatine, with square coffering on each vault, with a large rectangular opening in the upper vault and three small openings at the base of the lower vault. In the distance are further ruins.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 105

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 or 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, grey and brown washes253 x 192

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Unfinished black chalk drawing of a coffered vault, similar to that on the recto.

Notes

This view is possibly of the Palatine ruins in Rome; there is a similar, more detailed wash drawing in the Clerk Collection, Scotland (Clerk 104), also by Robert Adam, which may be a view of the ruins of the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Palestrina and which is inscribed in pencil 'Palestrina'. Robert Adam intended to visit Palestrina (Praeneste) in September 1755 (see J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.180). The original composition by Charles-Louis Clérisseau is in The Hermitage, St Petersburg, Russia (2393), and is larger and more sophisticated than the Adam drawing.

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.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).