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  • image Adam vol.57/150
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/150

Purpose

Capriccio of the ruined interior of a domed circular temple entered through a coffered vault with a pedimented doorway on the left, showing three-bay and single-bay niches, and a cornice on two projecting columns with the dome above.

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 150

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 or 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown and grey washes270 x 392

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

six-pointed star

Notes

The scale of this circular building suggests a source in the Pantheon, of which Robert Adam made interior and exterior studies that are found in the Clerk Collection, Scotland (Clerk 7 - 10). There is a similar capriccio by Adam in Adam vol.56/92. The character of the niches and free-standing columns may have been inspired by the interior of San Salvatore at Spoleto (see Clerk 143 and 168), which Adam visited in September 1755 (see J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.180).

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).