Drawings Attributed to Andreas Coner. 5
the papers at my request. Nor was any information to be had either in
the Royal Library or in the Royal Archives at Bamberg, as I am informed
by Herr Fischer, librarian of the former. A search made in the records of
the German churches in Rome, S. Maria dell' Anima (Liber Confraternitatis
B. Marie de Urbe, Rome, Typ. Propaganda Fide 1875 ; Nagl, Urkundliches
zur Geschichte der Anima in Rom—Rom. Qaartalsckr. Suppl. xii) and
S. Spirito (extracts from the Liber Confraternitatis made by Mgr. de
Waal, which he was good enough to allow me to consult) proved equally
fruitless: nor was the name to be found on any of the German tomb
inscriptions in Rome, as far as I could learn from a thorough examination
of a copy of the sections of Forcella's Iscrizioni delle chiese di Roma whicli
concern these churches, with MS. additions by Mgr. de Waal, which is in
the library of S. Maria in Camposanto. His name does not occur, either,
in any of the ordinary books of reference such as Nagler's Kiinstlerlexicon,
nor, as far as I can discover, had he any relations with Durer, in whose
correspondence he is not mentioned. Nor in any of the drawings which I
have examined, or others have examined for me, can any trace of the
same handwriting be found. In fact, it is not going too far to say that
Andreas Coner seems to be, up to the present time, entirely unknown and
unheard of.
It is, it will be seen, impossible to affirm with certainty that he is the
author of the earlier series of drawings, inasmucli as no authenticated
specimen of his handwriting has come to light: but the insertion on a
blank leaf, opposite to the drawing of the della Valle sundial, of his letter
relating to it, is in itself a strong argument : and what we know of the man
seems to confirm it. In any case, I shall use the name in speaking of the
drawings by the earlier hand, if only for brevity's sake. The drawings
themselves are most carefully executed in ink, guiding lines having
previously been marked on the paper with a sharp instrument, and the
walls coloured in bistre ; and their fineness and accuracy are quite remark-
able. The notes to them are uniformly written in Latin, which would be
surprising if the artist were not a man of some learning, while some of the
errors in orthography may indicate a non-Italian authorship: and the
small handwriting and the delicacy of the lines of the drawing seem
characteristically German. Baron von Geymuller is inclined to think in fact
that 'the author was not Italian, but had entirely adopted the manner of
drawing of the Italian masters.' Whoever the artist was, he was apparently