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

The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘A bridge and church tower’), crossing out the second element and plausibly writing: ‘Milestone’.1 The elaborate structure, with aedicule panels supporting a fluted column with what seems to be a statue at the top, may be a Roman monument, similar in form to that depicted in William Pars’s 1770 watercolour A Roman Monument at Igel in the Dutchy of Luxemburgh (Tate T09405).

Tantalisingly, Turner’s scrawled inscription appears to transcribe passages in Latin and/or Italian, presumably from a carved text. He recorded longer passages with much care later in the sketchbook (see folios 60 verso and 63 recto; D14598, D14603; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 56a, 59), so his lack of precision here may reflect haste in a travel break or perhaps the decayed state of the original, which includes ‘C I [backwards C]’, the variant Roman numeral form indicating 1000 (usually ‘M’), a few words effectively illegible beyond their capital letters, the phrase ‘Miglia XXX’ (thirty miles), and what reads as ‘S R Q D’ but probably indicates the familiar ‘SPQR’ initials (for Senatus Populusque Romanus).

Potentially the most interesting word is in the previous line, and may read ‘Rubicon’, indicating the river at the boundary of Cisalpine Gaul and Italy, which Julius Caesar famously crossed with his army in 49 BC, declaring that ‘the die is cast’ and precipitating civil war. The river is mentioned in the notes made from the 1815 edition of J.C. Eustace’s A Classical Tour through Italy in the contemporary Italian Guidebook sketchbook (Tate D13938; Turner Bequest CLXXII 4, transcribed and catalogued by Nicola Moorby), one line of which, between mentions of Cesena and Rimini, reads: ‘2 Miles in the Pisatello or Rubicon.’ Eustace discussed the controversy over the identity of the river, noting:

Eustace’s visit had been in 1802; it is unclear whether the monument had been reconstructed by 1819, or whether Turner even depicts the same place. Today, there is a monument to the event with a statue of Caesar beside the later bridge on the Via Giacomo Matteotti in Savignano sul Rubicone, midway between Cesena and Rimini; the town, which suffered severe damage in the Second World War including the destruction of its Roman bridge, was renamed in honour of the still somewhat debatable connection in the twentieth century, having previously been known as Savignano di Romagna.3

Cecilia Powell’s has noted that Turner ‘barely recorded’ his route between Venice and Bologna, roughly eighty miles to the south-west, making only a handful of sketches (folios 21 verso–24 recto; D14528–D14532; also folio 90 verso; D14652; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 86a, and the sketchbook’s Introduction);4 James Hamilton has characterised them as ‘nondescript’.5

Technical notes:

There are faint yellowish stains on the left, apparently offset from folio 22 recto opposite (D14529); they appear to have saturated the following two leaves, before fading off at folio 24 recto (D14532).