J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > First Italian Tour 1819-20 > Rome and Florence Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence; Also Part of a View of Florence from the North 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence; Also Part of a View of Florence from the North’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 69 Verso:
Courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence; Also Part of a View of Florence from the North 1819
D16602
Turner Bequest CXCI 69 a
Pencil on white wove paper, 113 x 189 mm
Inscribed by the artist in pencil ‘Painting’ below the windows and ‘Ducal Pao Florence’ bottom centre
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The main sketch on this page depicts the first courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio (also known as the Palazzo della Signoria), a Romanesque palace which stands on the Piazza della Signoria at the historic heart of Florence. Designed during the fifteenth century by Michelozzo, the space is richly decorated with sixteenth-century frescoes and stuccos by Giorgio Vasari. Cecilia Powell has described how Turner’s study uses one column as a repoussoir (a foreground object which pushes the eye of the viewer into the main composition).1 She has noted that the artist placed himself on the eastern side of the courtyard, exactly where he could see the statue of Perseus by Benvenuto Cellini situated on the far left-hand side of the Loggia dei Lanzi, just visible through the doorway of the palace opening onto the Piazza della Signora beyond.2
In the top right-hand corner of the page is part of a view of Florence which is continued on the opposite sheet of the double-page spread, see folio 70 (D16603).

Nicola Moorby
January 2011

1
Powell 1987, p.91.
2
Ibid.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘Courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence; Also Part of a View of Florence from the North 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, January 2011, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-courtyard-of-the-palazzo-vecchio-florence-also-part-of-a-r1138495, accessed 20 April 2024.