Joseph Mallord William Turner

The drawing is inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation. Finberg subsequently annotated his descriptive 1909 Inventory entry (‘The Piazzetta, looking towards Isola di S. Giorgio Maggiore; part of the Ducal Palace in the foreground, on the left, with the two granite columns on the right’), transcribing Turner’s notes: ‘“Soldiers White Red collar and Flaps Blue Braces(?) [‘Rosettes’ inserted above] and Shoes. | Officers green Red Col. and Sash yellow – (diagram) yellow Band.”’1 He incorporated this information into his more detailed listing for the sketchbook in 1930’s In Venice with Turner.2

The view is south-south-east towards San Giorgio Maggiore, past the south-west corner of the Doge’s Palace and shipping moored off the Molo. The viewpoint on the west side of the Piazzetta is similar to that used for the sketch looking north on folio 45 recto (D14399). Finberg has observed that Turner drew the palace and the column with the winged lion of St Mark (only recently recast after being taken to Paris by the French during the Napoleonic occupation),3 ‘but then arises the problem of getting in S. Giorgio and the second column’. He continued:

The steps at the base of the right-hand column, while actually set on the same level, thus appear to rise from a considerably higher plane. Finberg considered that as a result the drawing ‘is of course hopelessly entangled, as it is made from two points of view, but Turner was quite satisfied with it. ... If he painted the subject, he knew he could rearrange the details in a satisfactory or plausible way.’5 Compare another view of the columns on folio 52 recto (D14413), where difficulty with the perspective is again evident.

In fact, as Ian Warrell has noted,6 Turner did use the present sketch much later for his long untraced painting Ducal Palace, Venice, exhibited in 1833,7 known from the 1854 engraving, Venice – The Piazzetta, Venice, showing it in an unusual vertical arched format (Tate impression: T06299).8 Turner seems to have continued to struggle to combine the elements in ‘plausible’ perspective, introducing a strong diagonal pattern of paving suggesting a rather higher viewpoint and scattering dozens of figures in picturesque costume about as a distraction.