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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > First Italian Tour 1819-20 > Vatican Fragments Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Studies of Sculptural Fragments from the Vatican Museums, Including the Grave Altar of Attia Agele 1819

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Studies of Sculptural Fragments from the Vatican Museums, Including the Grave Altar of Attia Agele’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 31 Recto:
Studies of Sculptural Fragments from the Vatican Museums, Including the Grave Altar of Attia Agele 1819
D15162
Turner Bequest CLXXX 30
Pencil on white wove paper 101 x 161 mm
Inscribed by the artist in pencil (see main catalogue entry)
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘30’, bottom left, descending left-hand edge
Stamped in black ‘CLXXX 30’ bottom left, descending left-hand edge
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
During his 1819 stay in Rome, one of Turner’s most extensive sketching campaigns was the large number of pencil studies made from the sculpture collections of the Vatican Museums (for a general discussion, see the introduction to the sketchbook). This page contains two sketches of funerary monuments from the Museo Chiaramonti. The studies are numbered from left to right:
a.
Cecilia Powell has identified the sketch on the left-hand side of the page as a grave altar in the Museo Chiaramonti.1 The object is inscribed with the Latin text ‘DIS | MANIBVS | SACRVM’, a common text on Roman funerary monuments which translates as ‘Sacred to the spirits of the departed’.
b.
Powell has further identified the sketch on the right-hand side of the page as the grave altar of Attia Agele, also in the Museo Chiaramonti.2 The monument is inscribed with the Latin text ‘DIIS MANIBVS | ATTIAE.AGELE’.

Nicola Moorby
November 2009

1
Powell 1984, p.414; see Walther Amelung, Die Sculpturen des Vaticanischen Museums, Berlin 1903–8, vol.I, ‘Museo Chiaramonti I Seite 309–560’, no.198, pp.447–8, reproduced pl.46, bottom centre.
2
Powell 1984, p.414; see Amelung 1903–8, vol.I, no.322F, pp.523–4, reproduced pl.54, bottom left.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘Studies of Sculptural Fragments from the Vatican Museums, Including the Grave Altar of Attia Agele 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, November 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-studies-of-sculptural-fragments-from-the-vatican-museums-r1139574, accessed 19 April 2024.