Joseph Mallord William Turner

The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘Bridge on the Riva degli Schiavone’): ‘Perhaps meant for the Ponte della Cà di Dio but quite impossible’.1 In 1857 John Ruskin had called the composition ‘Bridge over the Rio dell’ Arsenale’,2 the next side canal east along the quays continuing from the Riva degli Schiavoni. In either case the view would be south-south-west over the Canale di San Marco towards the Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore and its distinctive church. Instead, turning all but ninety degrees,3 the distant prospect is westwards along the curving waterfront to the Palazzo Ducale (Doge’s Palace), with the campanile of San Marco (St Mark’s) rising beyond it in the haze. Aligned above the foreground arch, there seem to be faint indication of the domes of Santa Maria della Salute,4 almost lost in the colour of the surrounding sky.

Assuming the loosely rendered foreground is intended to represent a particular bridge and its setting,5 the building just to the west of the Ponte Ca’ di Dio, now the Ristorante Carpaccio, has a chimney stack projecting from the first floor upwards like the one shown on the right here; compare the detailed drawing of the building in the 1819 Venice to Ancona sketchbook (Tate D14504; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 9). The Ponte dell’Arsenale is a somewhat grander structure, crowned by four stone obelisks, and plainer buildings to either side. Another possibility is the Ponte della Veneta Marina, over the Rio della Tana, as subsequently suggested by Finberg;6 the next bridge to the east again, it is flanked by more varied buildings, including one with a projecting chimney to its west, and another with a dormer window or small penthouse opposite.

As G.S. Sandilands remarked in his brief survey of Turner’s watercolours: ‘The buildings are given character by what seems to be quite a casual scrawl. (Here, it should be noted that it would be unwise to accept as casual any of Turner’s scrawls. People who have visited places years after they were painted by Turner have been able to identify them from some apparently inconsequential brushmark.)’ Meanwhile, and perhaps equally to the point, he called the ‘bridge itself is a dream-structure within a dream’.7 J. Isaacs has described the structures as ‘solidified out of space by a Rembrandt-like scaffolding’,8 using ‘emphatic strokes of a brush charged with black wash’, as Lindsay Stainton noted.9 and Andrew Wilton observed: ‘Despite this perfunctoriness, the whole view has a luminosity that is characteristic of these drawings, making use, as they do to an unparalleled degree, of the whiteness of the paper to achieve an effect of all-pervasive light’.10