Joseph Mallord William Turner

From the south end of the Piazzetta, the view in this night scene is north-north-west towards the Torre dell’Orologio at the centre, flanked by the Libreria Sansoviniana and the campanile of San Marco (St Mark’s) on the left, and the domed Basilica beyond the Palazzo Ducale (Doge’s Palace) on the right. It is a deliberately ‘pictorial’, atmospheric treatment of a scene very familiar to Turner, with various incidental inaccuracies compared with his detailed pencil records over the years, such as Tate D14399 (Turner Bequest CLXXV 45) in the 1819 Milan to Venice sketchbook. Andrew Wilton has suggested a connection with a looser pencil sketch from much the same angle in the 1840 Venice and Botzen book (Tate D31814; Turner Bequest CCCXIII 12a),1 and remarked on the ‘theatrical quality of the composition and the lighting’, comparable with the dramatic contemporary watercolour Lightning in the Piazzetta (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh).2

The present scene is, as Ian Warrell has put it, ‘given an unfamiliar air of fantasy by the transforming qualities of moonlight’3 from behind the viewer, illuminating a crowd towards the left, including one or two in strongly marked red costumes and flecks of other bright colours among the blue shadows, perhaps in Wilton’s view ‘consciously recalling the Venetian views of Canaletto or Guardi’4 and ‘enlivened in a ghostly manner through chiaroscuro contrasts’ as Inge Herold observed.5 Compare the bright touches here and there in some of the shadowy figure scenes and interiors in a parallel Venice subsection of this catalogue.

Lindsay Stainton has further suggested that Turner shows a ‘procession of figures apparently dressed in the red Senatorial robes of pre-Revolutionary Venice’, contrasted with the reality of the silhouette of the lone Austrian sentry by the striped sentry box and cannon below the palace on the right.6 With reference to Lord Byron’s poetry, which did so much to shape his generation’s attitude to the city, David Blayney Brown has remarked that this was ‘doubtless done no more than observe contemporary fact ... but the inevitable contrast between the city’s past and its debased present makes this a thoroughly Byronic image.’7 The box is shown again in a contemporary colour study of the palace and Piazzetta from the Bacino (Tate D32180; Turner Bequest CCCXVIII 1).8