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Purpose

Italian time-keeping

Notes

Soane's puzzling references in his sketch/notebooks to '18 o'clock', '21 clocks' and '23 o'clock' reflect 'Ore Italiane', the current system of time-keeping based on the 24-hour clock. Traditionally, the start of the day was fixed at sunset, but from the mid-17th century it was usually reckoned half an hour later. Thus sunset was timed at 23 hours 30 minutes, while the times of sunrise and noon varied through the year by about 3½ to 4 hours depending on latitude. (From M. Talbot, 'Ore Italiane: the reckoning of the time of day in pre-Napoleonic Italy', Italian Studies, XL, 1985, pp.51-9.)

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).