Elevation of doors of Sant'Adriano, Rome, after Sangallo’s drawing in the Barberini Codex (Rome, Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. lat. 4424, fol. 31v). The extant Paper Museum contains a total of 54 copies of architectural drawings from the Barberini Codex. The copies were produced by two draughtsmen, identified in dal Pozzo A.IX as the Codex Ursinianus Copyist and the Sangallo Copyist 2. Virtually all the copies are mechanical 1:1 replicas, probably traced. Annotations and measurements are usually omitted. For further, see A.IX, pp. 479-482. 

The drawing is copied from the Sangallo original of the doors of Sant'Adriano (the old Curia or Senate House) in the Roman Forum. Like the other two copies from the Baberini Codex of bronze doors (RCIN 910414, 910415), details are omitted, namely the bosses round one of the vertical divisions of the door and the ornament inside the top vertical panel. This is the only one of the series of three copies of door drawings without an identifying legend but with a ‘Pozzo’ number. Montano again provided a much more detailed drawing of the doors (London, Sir John Soane’s Museum, vol.125, fol. 127).

Julius Caesar began building the Senate House on its present site and Augustus completed it. The doors, originally 5.8m high by 3.57m wide, may date from the Domitianic restoration of AD 94, although the structure was completely rebuilt by Diocletian c. 300, following a fire in 283. It was converted in the seventh century into the church of Sant'Adriano. In 1656 the doors were removed and enlarged to Borromini’s design for reuse as the main doors of St John Lateran, where they remain (S. Episcopo, ‘Il reimpiego di porte bronzea romane al Laterano’, in Le Porte di bronzo: dall’antichitá al secolo XIII, 1990, p. 48).

There is no extant drawing in the Paper Museum devoted solely to the Senate House, although it is in the background of three of Dosio’s views (RCIN 910786, 910393, dal Pozzo A.IX.87, private collection; previously Stirling-Maxwell Architecture album, fol. 64(i)). Its absence may be explained by the fact that there was a good view of it by Dupérac, reprinted in Sadeler’s Vestigi (pl. III; A. Grelle, Vestigi delle antichità di Roma … et altri luoghi, 1987, p. 101, pl. IV), which was in the dal Pozzo library.

On the Senate House, see A. Bartoli, Curia Senatus, 1963; C. Morselli and E. Tortorici, Curia, Forum Iulium, Forum Transitorium, 1989, pp. 1–263; Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae, I, s.v. ‘Curia Iulia’.

Numbering: 27

Text adapted from Ian Campbell, The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo: A Catalogue Raisonné. A.IX: Ancient Roman Topography, London, 2004, cat. 195.