Joseph Mallord William Turner

This vignette appears as the headpiece for the twenty-third section of Rogers’s Italy, entitled ‘Florence’.1 It was engraved by Edward Goodall, who was one of the most prolific and skilled interpreters of Turner’s designs.2 Goodall produced plates for nearly all of Turner’s print commissions, engraving eleven out of the twenty-five designs that the artist made for Italy. According to Luke Herrmann, Turner and Goodall’s partnership was at its most effective in Florence and another Italy vignette, Venice (see Tate D27710; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 193).3

Rogers devotes most of his verses on Florence to praising the city’s artistic heroes – Masaccio, Raphael, Ghiberti, and Michelangelo – and ends with a tribute to Filippo Strozzi, who helped to lead a republican uprising against the Medici rule in 1527. However, the poet opens the sections with a brief description of the city itself:

Rogers’s bold celebration of Florence’s beauty may have come as a surprise to some of his readers. As Cecilia Powell has written, English visitors during the nineteenth century such as William Hazlitt, often judged the city harshly, finding the narrow streets claustrophobic and the architecture dark and oppressive.4 Roger’s poem suggests that it was Florence’s cultural treasures, rather than its overall physical appearance, that made it an essential stop for those on the Grand Tour.5 In fact, Turner produced a preparatory study of the Ponte Vecchio with the Uffizi and the Palazzo Vecchio shown nearby (see Tate D27612; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 95) and it seems likely that he intended this composition to complement Rogers’s lengthy description of the city’s artistic riches. In the end, however, Turner illustrated ‘Florence’ with a traditional distant view of the city seen from the nearby hill town of Fiesole.