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Cordingley’s investigation of the structure was carried out in collaboration with the archaeologist and future British School at Rome director Ian Richmond. Their important study ‘The Mausoleum of Augustus’ was published along with the drawings in the Papers of the British School at Rome 1927. Access to the Mausoleum was difficult owing to the accumulation of later structures, much of the exterior wall of the rotunda was hidden and investigations into the drum needed to be made through basements. As noted by Richmond ‘On the left of the entrance it is blocked by a mass of fallen concrete and other debris, on the right by indiscriminate rubble. Elsewhere its walls appear only once in a cellar on the north-west, where the inner one leans against the outer at an angle of sixty degrees’.
This pencil drawing of the South elevation shows the ancient entrance in the centre, below the modern street level, and patches of Roman-era masonry are visible in places around the rotunda. Cordingley superbly captures the chaotic density of the neighbourhood and the sense of the Mausoleum being hemmed in by the later structures built adjacent to and hard against it.

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