Behind the façades of three townhouses in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London lies a complex warren of rooms with paintings, sculptures, and architectural fragments and models in every nook and cranny. This was the home of architect Sir John Soane (1753-1837), who used the building not just as a place to live and work, but also as a museum to educate and inspire architects of the future. The atmospheric museum is home, too, to 30,000 drawings – the most numerous part of the collection. A few are displayed framed in the public rooms, but most are shut away in volumes and drawers in different spaces across the building. A new exhibition presenting 22 of these works offers an intriguing taste of what lies hidden, and while it may be a numerically modest selection, Hidden Masterpieces still impresses with the quality of the drawings.
It was with Soane’s appointment as Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy, in 1806, that he began to collect drawings with great fervour. For his 12 Academy lectures on the history of architecture, he tasked his apprentices with completing colourful and accurate large-scale drawings of buildings that would be held up while he spoke. Featured among these lecture drawings is the magnificent ancient Greek Temple of Neptune at Paestum in southern Italy. Though Soane had produced his own drawings of the site, which he had visited on his Grand Tour in 1778-1780, this later 1806 work borrows more from the images of the influential Italian designer Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Soane, who met Piranesi in Rome in 1778, collected several of his works, including views of Paestum.
Different buildings are brought together in another lecture drawing, in which the apprentice Charles Tyrrell shows four of the great domed edifices of Italy and England side by side. First is Soane’s own work, the comparatively diminutive Rotunda at the Bank of England, built in 1785. Beyond that are the Radcliffe Library in Oxford, built in 1748, and then the 2nd-century AD Pantheon in Rome. Looming over them all is St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, its dome completed in 1590. Soane’s building and the Pantheon are shown in section, slicing through to the interior, which is perhaps intended as a visual link between the modern master’s work and the grandeur of ancient Rome.
