|

Notes to editors

• For further information and/or images contact: Lorna Gemmell - 020 7307 3761
  lorna.gemmell@inst.riba.org
• The RIBA Trust manages the cultural assets of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), including the internationally recognised collections of the British Architectural Library. It is the UK's national architecture centre, delivering the RIBA's various award schemes, including the Royal Gold Medal;; Architecture Week (with Arts Council England and the Architecture Centre Network); and a full programme of educational activities, lectures, exhibitions, tours and other events.
• Giovanni Battista da Sangallo, was an architect and theorist. He came from an architectural and artistic family of Florentine origin working very largely in Rome that included his uncles Giuliano da Sangallo and Antonio da Sangallo and his brother Antonio da Sangallo the younger. Giovanni Battista acted as a quantity surveyor and builder's estimator on a wide variety of schemes, but the few architectural works that have been recorded as entirely his work have all, with one exception, been altered or destroyed. He worked often with his brother, the leading High Renaissance architect in Rome after the death of Raphael in 1520, and the Codex has great potential for research into the ways in which the brothers worked together.
• The Codex contains 23 leaves of laid paper, about 278 x 210mm. All but one of the leaves carry on both sides measured drawings by Giovanni Battista da Sangallo of ancient buildings in Rome and Cori, probably carried out in about 1520. The drawings are carried out in pen and ink. The leaves are bound in vellum folded over boards, the vellum dating from the early 1760s, as indicated by watermarks on the end papers. The leaves have been numbered twice: in ink at the same date as the present binding, starting at the back, and earlier in graphite, i.e. some time after 1600. The condition of the codex is fair; a number of the sheets have sustained some damage and weakening from water and abrasion, and the cover is loosely attached.
• The volume's provenance before the 18th century is unknown, but it can be identified with a volume of 'twenty something' sheets of drawings that in 1760 was in the collection in Florence that had belonged to Baron Philip von Stosch (1691- 1757), famous for his collection of ancient gems, and less so for his role as a spy on the Jacobite court. The drawing was described in a letter of 1760 from the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann to Louis XV's Keeper of Medals, and in 1762, in his published Anmerkungen über der Baukunst der Alten. Winckelmann believed (at any rate by 1762) that he had found Raphael's actual drawings from his project on ancient Rome. Scholars have been looking for it ever since. The volume resurfaced in the library at Pallinsburn, Northumberland, prior to its sale by Lyon and Turnbull, Edinburgh on 12 July 2005.
• Giovanni Battista translated twice the only surviving Roman treatise on architecture - De Archectura by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio – and made illustrations that he bound into a copy of the first printed edition of Vitruvius (c. 1486). Both he and his brother Antonio thought of themselves as true followers of Vitruvius and were so judged by their contemporaries. Behind the reconstructions in the Codex lies a study of Vitruvius, both in the overall approach adopted and to enable him to supply missing elements. In some instances, such as the Arch of Titus, at that date largely incorporated into a medieval building, Sangallo's ideas of completion do not match modern archaeology. In other cases, such as the vaulting of the temple of Portinus, his drawings are valuable records of elements that have now disappeared.
• The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest is an independent body, run by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, which advises the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport on whether a cultural object, intended for export, is of national importance under specified criteria. Where the Committee finds that an object meets one or more of the criteria, it will normally recommend that the decision on the export licence application should be deferred for a specified period. An offer to purchase may then be made from within the United Kingdom at or above the fair market price. Visit www.mla.gov.uk
• The British Architectural Library Trust exists to raise funds to support the RIBA British Architectural Library outside its core activities. It was the body charged with raising the £5.5 million to enable the British Architectural Library's Drawings & Archives Collections to move to the V&A and the creation there of the Architecture Gallery, part of the V&A+RIBA Architecture Partnership.
• The Art Fund is the UK's leading independent art charity. It offers grants to help UK museums and galleries enrich their collections and campaigns widely on behalf of museums and their visitors. It has 80,000 members. Since its foundation in 1903, The Art Fund has helped UK public collections acquire over 850,000 works of art, ranging from Bronze Age treasures to contemporary works of art
• In 2005 The Art Fund offered over £4.1 million to museums and galleries and distributed 12 gifts and bequests. Independent of government, The Art Fund is uniquely placed to campaign on behalf of public collections across the UK. It was at the forefront of the campaign for free admission in 2002 and the campaign to save the Macclesfield Psalter in 2005. The Art Fund is currently undertaking a groundbreaking survey of UK museum and gallery acquisitions, to build a comprehensive picture of collecting activity in the 21st century. The key findings