Codex Rootstein-Hopkins

The Codex is a volume of 44 highly finished, accurately measured architectural drawings in pen and ink depicting sixteen ancient buildings in Rome and the temples of Hercules and Castor and Pollux at Cori. It is attributed to Giovanni Battista da Sangallo, architect, theorist and member of the circle of High Renaissance artists engaged in the study of antique architecture around Raphael. It is the most important evidence of his ambitious and celebrated project to document and recreate the threatened monuments of ancient Rome on paper, proposed to Pope Leo X in c.1515-1519. Discovered in 2005 at Pallinsburn, Northumberland, the home of the Askew family, the Codex was first recorded in 1760 by the German scholar of classical antiquity Johann Winckelmann and had belonged to Baron Philipp von Stosch (1691-1757), a collector, antiquarian and sometime spy for the British state.