'The Cascatelli and the Santuario di Ercole Vincitore, Tivoli, seen from the Valley', Joseph Mallord William Turner

Artwork details

Artist

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775‑1851)

Title

The Cascatelli and the Santuario di Ercole Vincitore, Tivoli, seen from the Valley

From Tivoli Sketchbook

Turner Bequest CLXXXIII

Date 1819

MediumGraphite on paper

Dimensionssupport: 200 x 253 mm

Collection

Tate

Acquisition Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856

Reference

D15506

Turner Bequest CLXXXIII 39

View this artwork by appointment, at Tate Britain's Prints and Drawings Rooms

Turner's sketchbooks

View this artwork in the Tivoli Sketchbook

Catalogue entry

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851

Folio 39 Recto:

The Cascatelli and the Santuario di Ercole Vincitore, Tivoli, seen from the Valley 1819

D15506
Turner Bequest CLXXXIII 39

Pencil and grey watercolour wash on white wove paper, 200 x 253 mm
Inscribed by ?John Ruskin in faded red ink ‘39’ bottom left, descending left-hand edge, and by an unknown hand in pencil ‘39’ bottom left, descending left-hand edge
Stamped in black ‘CLXXXIII 39’ bottom left, descending left-hand edge

Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856

References

Turner’s exploration of Tivoli included a large number of landscape sketches drawn from the river valley to the north. He was particularly attracted by the spectacle of the town’s ancient ruins perched above the steep, wooded gorge and streaming waterfalls. This study depicts the view looking south from the opposite side of the gorge. On the left-hand side are the cascatelli (or cascatelle), the lesser cascades caused by a branch of the River Aniene emerging from an underground passage below the northern tip of the town. The vista rises to a medieval watch-tower, situated near the Piazza dell’Olmo (present-day Piazza Domenico Tani) and the campanile of the Cathedral (Duomo) of San Lorenzo. Immediately to the right is the campanile of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, above the Villa d’Este, and whilst situated along the top of the slope at the centre of the middle distance are the long arcades of the Santuario di Ercole Vincitore (Sanctuary of Hercules the Victor), a first-century BC Roman temple dedicated to the cult of Hercules. Like many drawings within this sketchbook, the composition has been executed over a washed grey background. Turner has created highlights within the work by rubbing or lifting out the wash to reveal the white paper beneath, principally to create the silvery streams of falling water, and the pale disc of the sun above the horizon.

Formerly known as the Villa of Maecenas, the Santuario di Ercole Vincitore was one of Tivoli’s most famous landmarks. Its picturesque qualities were described by Revd John Chetwode Eustace in A Classical Tour Through Italy, first published in 1813, who recommended the view from the opposite side of the valley:

As the traveller, following the bend of the hill, comes to the side of the road opposite to the town, he catches first a side glimpse, and shortly after a full view of the Cascatelli, or lesser cascades, inferior in mass and grandeur, but equal in beauty to the great fall in the town. They are formed by a branch of the Anio turned off from the main body of the river, before it reaches the precipice, for the uses of the inhabitants, and after it has crossed the town bursting from a wood on the summit of the hill, and then tumbling from its brow in one great and several lesser streams, first down one and then another declivity, through thickets and brambles spangled with dew drops or lighted up with a rainbow. The elevation and mass of these cascades; the colours and broken masses of the rocks down which they tumble; the shrubs, plants and brambles that hang over the channel and sometimes bathe themselves in the current; the river below fretting through a narrow pass under a natural arch; the olives that shade that arch, and the vines that wave around it; the bold bendings and easy sweeps of the surrounding mountains; and the towers of the town rising on the top of the hill beyond the cascade, with the ruins of Maecenas’s villa on its shelving side, form one of the most delicious pictures for softness and beauty, wildness and animation, that can be imagined.1

Turner made notes on this passage in the Italian Guide Book sketchbook (see Tate D13952; Turner Bequest CLXXII 11a). He would also have been familiar with other artists’ depictions of the temple.

Compositional precedents for the view include John ‘Warwick’ Smith (1749–1831), Villa of Mecenas, an engraved plate from the publication Select Views in Italy, which Turner copied in the Italian Guide Book sketchbook (see Tate D13966; Turner Bequest CLXXII19), and a watercolour by John Robert Cozens (1752–1797), which Turner studied as a young man, see Tivoli, Villa of Maecenas, after John Robert Cozens ?circa 1794–7 (Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California). Compare also a contemporaneous drawing by James Hakewill (1778–1843), Villa of Maecenas and Cascatelle. Tivoli 1816 (British School at Rome Library), engraved for Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour of Italy, published in 1819.2

The temple features in many of Turner’s 1819 sketches looking both up and down the valley, and he also made detailed tonal studies of the architecture and the arched passageway underneath the ruin’s substructures, see folio 5 (D15471). It was the vista from the north-east however, which seems to have held the greatest visual appeal. Similar views can be found on folios 1 verso, 3, 4, 17, 23, 31, 35 (D41397, D15469, D15470, D15483, D15489, D15498, D15502), as well as in the Tivoli and Rome sketchbook (D15013–D15014, D15018, D15025, D15029–D15030; Turner Bequest CLXXIX 46a–7, 48a, 53a, 55a–56), and in the Naples: Rome C. Studies sketchbook (Tate D16120 and D16121; Turner Bequest CLXXXVII 32 and 33). Turner later considered developing the view for the Tivoli vignette illustration for Rogers’s Italy, 1830 (see Tate D27605; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 88), and ultimately revisited it within an oil sketch, Tivoli, the Cascatelle circa 1827–8 (Tate, N03388) and an unfinished painting, Tivoli: Tobias and the Angel circa 1835 (Tate, N02067).3

John Chetwode Eustace, A Classical Tour Through Italy, London 1815, 3rd edition, vol.II, pp.237–9.

Tony Cubberley and Luke Herrmann, Twilight of the Grand Tour: A Catalogue of the drawings by James Hakewill in the British School at Rome Library, Rome 1992, no.5.3, p.226, reproduced.

Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, revised ed., New Haven and London 1984, nos.311 and 437.

Verso:
Blank, except for traces of grey watercolour wash

Nicola Moorby
February 2010

Read this catalogue entry in full

This catalogue entry is part of: David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, December 2012.