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  • image Adam vol.57/125
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/125

Purpose

Italy: Rome: unidentified location or capriccio. View or capriccio showing an obelisk with fountain at the base. Beyond this is part of a circular temple with columns opposite a series of niches with gardens above. In the foreground are part of an arch and architectural fragments.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 125

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 or 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Grey and brown washes; pencil framing line270 x 208

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

This may be a view towards the Forum Boarium, Rome, showing the circular Temple of Sybil (Vesta or Portunus), now Santa Maria del Sole, of which there is a view in Adam vol.57/47. However, the obelisk with fountain immediately in front of the temple could be that of the Obelisk of Constantine in the Piazza di S. Giovanni in Laterano, which has a fountain at its base, or that at the Villa Calimontare Mattei al Celio, which had a garden setting, or that in the Piazza del Popolo, of which there is a drawing in the Clerk Collection, Scotland (Clerk 95). Piranesi's Prima Parte di Architetture, 1743, gave several examples of obelisks (see 'Forma ideale del Campidoglio Capitol', pl.VII).

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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