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  • image Adam vol.57/159
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Reference number

Adam vol.57/159

Purpose

Italy: Tivoli: Temple of Vesta. View of the ruined Temple of Vesta (Sibyl) seen from eye-level. At the top of the sheet is an unrelated pencil sketch of a small head.

Aspect

Perspectiveverso details

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink 159

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 or 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, black chalk, with grey, purple and brown washes221 x 295

Hand

Charles-Louis Clérisseau

Verso

Black chalk drawing of the profile of an architrave and cornice.

Notes

This view is very close to an unfinished drawing of the same temple on grey paper in the Clerk Collection, Scotland (Clerk 192). There are numerous drawings by Charles-Louis Clérisseau on this subject, with outstanding watercolour examples in The Hermitage (see Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) Dessins du musée de l'Ermitage Saint-Petersbourg, catalogue of exhibition in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, 1995, p.121) and in the British Museum. There are also capricci rather than views of the temple in Adam vol.57/112 by Robert Adam. The view in Adam vol.57/135 by Jean-Baptiste Lallemand is a more accurate depiction of the temple. The viewpoint taken here by Clérisseau is much the same as that in the 1761 print by Piranesi, 'Altra Veduta del Tempio della Sibilla in Tivoli', in Vedute di Roma, except that Clérisseau does not include the adjoining church of San Giorgio.

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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