Part six of six

The connections highlighted here between the drawings of the North Italian Album and other artforms reveal the broad appeal of architectural forms in early modern Italy.

These links integrate the Album within an artistic culture that saw architectural design as a fundamental aspect of its practice, alongside increasingly standardised drawings like those in the Codex Coner.

Figures practicing across architecture and the arts are usually identified as painter-architects. The most famous are Raphael and Michelangelo, even though Michelangelo always thought of himself as a sculptor. In fact, the definition of ‘painter-architect’ is restrictive, excluding not just sculptors, but also metalworkers and woodcarvers, among others. The multimedia artworks gathered in this exhibition invite us to reconsider the label of the ‘painter-architect’ as much as they re-centre drawings like those of the North Italian Album within architectural history. 

Bernardo della Volpaia 
Doric capital and entablature from the Basilica Aemilia 
Pen, ink and grey-brown wash on paper
c. 1513/1514 
Codex Coner, SM volume 115/77 recto 
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London 

Hand unknown
Cornices, entablatures, a console and a base
Ink and pigment on parchment
c. 1500
North Italian Album, SM volume 122/65 
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London 

This drawing in the Codex Coner is an axonometric view of the entablature of the Basilica Aemilia in Rome (no longer extant). While it represents a measured record of a classical building, the entablatures and cornices on this page of the North Italian Album are invention studies. Yet, they include carefully selected classical elements like the ox skull and garland decoration, and the imperial eagle, modelled on a Trajanic high relief now at SS Apostoli in Rome. These drawings have different purposes and adopt different representational strategies, but they both testify to a meticulous engagement with the classical architectural heritage.

These studies are inventive elaborations of a Corinthian capital where a grotesque head and a bird replace the acanthus leaves.

Michelangelo Buonarroti
Capital studies
Ink on paper 
c. 1503-1504
Inv. 1895-9-15-496v (W 3v, Corpus 36 v) 
British Museum, London 

These studies are inventive elaborations of a Corinthian capital where a grotesque head and a bird replace the acanthus leaves. They reveal Michelangelo’s interest in the ambiguity of profiles which may be read in a number of ways, and his anthropomorphic approach to architecture. Both are derived from his practice as a skilled draughtsman of the human figure, and are not unlike the explorations of architectural ornament in the North Italian Album. 

A drawing on parchment of a doric capital.

Bernardo della Volpaia 
Doric capital and entablature of the Theatre of Marcellus
Pen, ink and wash on paper
c. 1513/1514
Codex Coner, SM volume 115/76 verso 
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London

Michelangelo Buonarroti 
Copy after the Codex Coner
Red chalk on paper
1515 – 1518
Inv. 1859, 0625.560.1 (W18r, Corpus 516r)  
British Museum, London 

Michelangelo made several copies of drawings in the Codex Coner, which was his main source of antique classical architecture. Although he retained some of the Codex’s representational strategies even in his later drawings, this comparison highlights the absence of numbers in Michelangelo’s copy, showing that he had little or no interest in measurements or precisely calculated proportions.

Hand unknown
Venetian palace façade
Ink and pigment on parchment
c. 1500
North Italian Album, SM volume 122/10-11 
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London 

In this palace façade, pilasters and ashlar masonry on the ground floor are matched by engaged columns and classically-inspired high reliefs on the first floor. The oculi in the mezzanine are playfully turned into balls for naked high relief figures to play with. The structure is carefully arranged and the sculptural decoration is so pivotal to the design that the ground-floor windows and the oculi above them are decentralised in order to be better integrated with the high relief figures next to them. This is a remarkable example of erudition, practical competence and invention.

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