Part two of six

The North Italian Album’s drawings are centred on architectural structures and ornament, but because they do not feature ground plans, sections, or even measurements, they are often attributed to draughtsmen closer to the environment of painters rather than architects, possibly aiming to provide models for stage sets or marquetry (wood inlays). 

But the Album includes references to built architecture too. They are so precise and numerous as to suggest a concerted and thoughtful engagement with architectural practice, while the high level of detail and addition of pigment give the drawings an aesthetic appeal that points to an extremely vivid and dynamic understanding of architectural forms. 

If we contextualise the Album not just alongside other architectural drawings but within artistic practice more broadly, we start to see that it is part of a larger fascination with architectural forms as a kind of cultural capital.

Baldassarre Peruzzi 
Comedic stage set 
Pen and ink on paper 
1515
Inv. D.C. 15728 
Biblioteca Reale, Turin 
© Courtesy of the Mic–Musei Reali

Hand unknown
Cityscape
Ink and pigment on parchment
c. 1500 
North Italian Album, SM volume 122/13 
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London

The first of these two stage sets was designed by a successful draughtsman active as a painter and as an architect. Its street view evokes perspectival cityscapes in the North Italian Album such as this on second design, and can be associated with Sebastiano Serlio’s directives for theatre stages detailed in his architectural treatise.

Bernardo della Volpaia
Colosseum, perspectival elevation and section, 
Pen, ink and wash on paper 
c. 1513/1514
Codex Coner, SM volume 115/41 
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London

Hand unknown
Circular building (the Colosseum?)
Chalk, ink and pigment on parchment
c. 1500
North Italian Album, SM volume 122/43 
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London 

In this drawing of the Colosseum in the Codex Coner, a remarkable collection of early sixteenth-century architectural drawings, the draughtsman includes a section stripped of all decorative detail and three-dimensionality, while for the elevation he uses perspective to render the building’s curved walls and the volume of the half-columns and pilasters. This rendition is similar to the drawing in the North Italian Album which probably represents the Colosseum too. If this stands out for its exuberant perspective, the elevation and section in the Coner differentiate themselves by the addition of notes and numerous measurements.

The Façade of Scuola Grande di San Marco, a white marble church in Venice.

Hand unknown
Elevation of the east end of a church 
Chalk, ink and pigment on parchment
c. 1500
North Italian Album, SM volume 122/3 
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London

Pietro, Tullio and Antonio Lombardo, Giovanni Buora, Mauro Codussi 
Façade, Scuola Grande di San Marco 
1485 – c.1505
Polychrome marble 
Venice

This drawing of the east end of a church presents distinctive features found in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Venetian architecture: a tripartite arrangement with semicircular pediments and sculptural decorations on top of them, oculi (round openings), geometric inlaid decorations, and a lead-plated dome. These are all visible, for example, on the façades of the Scuola Grande di San Marco, and of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, whose east end includes domes recalling those of the Basilica di Sant’Antonio (known as Il Santo) and Santa Giustina in Padua.

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