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 sketches of two objects, one or both of which were found in the Museo Chiaramonti. The studies are numbered from top to bottom:
a.
Cecilia Powell has identified the three sketches at the top as depicting a table-leg in the form of a lion, found in the collections of the Museo Chiaramonti.
1 However, they may also represent three different lion heads from a series found in the Sala degli Animali.
2b.
Powell has identified the inverted sketches at the bottom as depicting a statue of Winter from the Museo Chiaramonti.
3 Turner has drawn the object twice from two different angles and has also made a separate study of the face. The large female deity is surrounded by five smaller figures of erotes.
Gerald Finley has suggested that the
amoretti or erotes (winged gods of love) around the sculpture of Winter may have inspired the winged infant visible beneath the marble statue of a reclining figure in Turner’s large oil painting,
Rome from the Vatican. Raffaelle Accompanied by La Fornarina, Preparing his Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia exhibited 1820 (Tate,
N00503).
4
Nicola Moorby
November 2009
