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

As Finberg recognised,1 the setting is the cavernous interior of the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, not far east of the Rialto; for views of the outside of the church and its surroundings, see under folio 32 verso (D31989), and for this sketchbook’s general sequence, including Hardy George’s broad overview,2 see its Introduction.

The drawing was made with the page turned horizontally, and is the lower half of a double-spread vertical view, continued across folio 35 recto opposite (D31993). In that half Turner indicated the tops of some of the ten plain, cylindrical columns supporting the vaulted ceiling and defining the spaces of the nave and aisles, but the drawing fades out towards the gutter on both pages. Instead of presenting the columns literally in this half, severely obstructing the view of monuments and artworks, his solution after decades drawing complex interiors was to imply their presence by vertical bands of diagonal hatching. Presumably, his depiction of the features beyond would have involved shifting once or twice to obtain clear sightlines. Compare the less detailed treatment of Salzburg’s shadowy Franziskanerkirche in the Salzburg and Danube sketchbook, used earlier on this tour (Tate D30222; Turner Bequest CCC 47), and the double-page view of the basilica of San Marco (St Mark’s), unimpeded by columns, on folios 53 verso–54 recto (D32030–D32031).

The foreground is filled with people likely attending a service at a side altar near Turner’s viewpoint in the south aisle, judging from the only relatively individualised figure, shown kneeling to the left near the bottom centre, with an apparently related comment scrawled beneath.

Turner had evidently been here in 1819 on his first visit to Venice, despite a lack of drawings of the building, as he had sketched a foreground detail from Titian’s large and renowned altarpiece of the death of St Peter Martyr in his Milan to Venice book (Tate D14390; Turner Bequest CLXXV 40a), having composed an extensive commentary in the Studies in the Louvre sketchbook when he encountered the painting in Paris in 1802 (Tate D04306–D04308; Turner Bequest LXXII 27a, 28, 28a). On the present occasion, he did not seek to add directly to his visual or written notes beyond indicating the picture’s location within the church,3 albeit without drawing specific attention to it among various cursorily drawn monuments. It hung on the wall of the north aisle in the arched marble setting shown right of centre here; beside it is a note only of the red of the plain surrounding brickwork. Today, since the original was destroyed by fire in 1867 while stored elsewhere in the building, its place is occupied by an eighteenth-century replica by Nicolò Cassala.

The west wall, in the left-hand half of the sketch, includes three elaborate Renaissance tombs of doges from the Mocenigo family, their classical architectural settings filled with sculpture on allegorical and religious themes. Turner only hints at the numerous individual figures, particularly on the left and at the top, high above the central west door. The other notable detail is the equestrian bronze commemorating Orazio Baglioni set high on the north wall to the left of the Titian; the lightly indicated monuments to the right of the painting also remain recognisable.4

In referring to this page, John Gage suggested5 that G.B. Piazzetta’s airy Rococo ceiling painting of St Dominic in glory (1727), in the saint’s chapel off the south aisle behind Turner’s viewpoint, may have influenced the vortex-like compositions of Turner’s later square canvases such as Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – the Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1843 (Tate N00532).6 However, Ian Warrell has questioned whether Turner would have studied Piazzetta’s work,7 and has shown that his sustained interest in Venetian painting centred on the major Renaissance figures.8