Joseph Mallord William Turner

This sketch depicts the view looking south-west towards the Pincian Hill and the Villa Medici from the Casino di Raffaello, a summer-house near the grounds of the Villa Borghese, see folio 44 verso (D16233; Turner Bequest CLXXXVIII 43a). The drawing extends onto the opposite sheet of the double-page spread, see folio 47 (D16238; Turner Bequest CLXXXVIII 46). The Casino, destroyed during the siege of Rome in 1849, was one of a number of Roman sites popularly believed during the nineteenth century to have been connected to Raphael. This made it a celebrated landmark for artists and tourists to the city. The building is the subject of a celebrated painted tondo by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), Le Casin de Raphael 1806–7 (Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris) and a related drawing, c.1806–20 (Musée Ingres, Montauban).1 See also views by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875),2 Johann Wilhelm Schirmer (1807–1863),3 and Penry Williams (1802–1885).4.

Turner shared the fascination of the period with Raphael and sketched a number of Roman subjects owing to their supposed association with the artist, for example, the statue of Jonah in the Chigi Chapel, see folio 48 (D16240; CLXXXVIII 47), the façade of the Palazzo Vidoni-Caffarelli, see folio 64 verso (D16271; Turner Bequest CLXXXVIII 63a) and the Casa Cenci, another building in the Borghese Gardens popularly associated with Raphael, see folio 80 (D16302; Turner Bequest CLXXXVIII 79). The culmination of his interest was his large oil painting celebrating the tercentenary of the artist’s death, Rome from the Vatican exhibited 1820 (Tate, N00503).5 The composition of this sketch bears a strong resemblance to the so-called ‘Claudian’ landscape prominent in the foreground of the painting and inscribed along its lower edge, ‘Casa di Raffaello’.6 John Gage has furthermore noted a similarity between the painted depiction and a later vignette study inscribed ‘Raff Villa’ (see D27652 and D27659; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 135 and 142).7