J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner View from the Janiculum Hill, Rome, with the Villa Aurelia, Fontana dell'Acqua Paola and San Pietro in Montorio 1819

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
View from the Janiculum Hill, Rome, with the Villa Aurelia, Fontana dell’Acqua Paola and San Pietro in Montorio 1819
D40049
Pencil and traces of watercolour on white wove ‘Valleyfield’ paper, 228 x 366 mm
Stamped in black ‘CLXXXIX 27’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Turner’s choice of viewpoint for this pencil study was a spot near to the Porta San Pancrazio on the Janiculum Hill, looking east towards the centre of the city. There are three key structures dominating the foreground: on the right is the Church of San Pietro in Montorio; in the centre is the back of the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola (Pauline Fountain); and the building on the far left is the Villa Aurelia, a seventeenth-century residence built for Cardinal Girolamo Farnese (also known as the Casino del Giardino Farnese sul Monte Gianicolo, now part of the American Academy in Rome).1 During the French invasion of Rome in the mid-nineteenth century the house was used as the headquarters of General Garibaldi and suffered considerable damage from bombardment. Although the façade of the villa was restored, the roof was rebuilt in a different style to that depicted by Turner. It can be seen, however, in an eighteenth-century topographical print by Giuseppe Vasi,2 and in the background of an engraving of the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola by Giovanni Battista Piranesi.3 A related and similar coloured view can be found on the recto of this sheet (D16353; Turner Bequest CLXXXIX 27). Unlike Turner’s other drawings of views from the Janiculum Hill, there does not appear to be an artistic precedent for this rather unusual choice of composition.
For other sketches of the Janiculum Hill see the entry for D16353.

Nicola Moorby
July 2009

1
2
3
See Luigi Ficacci, Piranesi: The Complete Etchings, Köln and London 2000, no.912, reproduced p.708.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘View from the Janiculum Hill, Rome, with the Villa Aurelia, Fontana dell’Acqua Paola and San Pietro in Montorio 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, July 2009, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-view-from-the-janiculum-hill-rome-with-the-villa-aurelia-r1132476, accessed 19 September 2024.