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

The drawing was made with the page turned horizontally. As Finberg recognised, the approach to the Arsenale dockyards complex1 towards the eastern end of the city is shown, looking north-north-east up the Rio dell’Arsenale from far enough out on the Canale dei San Marco for the distant spire of San Francesco della Vigna to be shown over the quayside Riva di Ca’ di Dio buildings on the left. The feature to its left appears to be a slight indication of the shallower top of the nearer campanile of San Martino.

In the right foreground, the most detailed attention is reserved for the pedimented Baroque west front of the church of San Biagio, seen obliquely, with its brick coupled half-columns and pilasters (with stone dressings) and central arched doorway. A five-storey hotel block built along its south side appears to be a later addition. From 1817 it had been the navy’s parish church, and is now part of the Museo Storico Navale di Venezia,2 housed in the large, plain building to the left of the church, where the main feature of interest was the rectangular high relief plaque of the winged Lion of St Mark. The church’s small integral belfry is at the far right, and the whole scene is somewhat laterally compressed to bring in features at the outer edges.

The key subsequent development is the Ponte San Biasio delle Catene, a shallow stone bridge with balustrades and a cluster of four obelisks, linking the Riva di Ca’ di Dio with the Riva San Biagio at the point where the substantial sailing vessel is shown moored here. To its right, at the far end of the canal, is the right-hand castellated tower of the pair flanking the entrance to the Arsenale basins. The immediately equivalent prospect is now impeded by the bridge, which itself serves as a useful viewpoint.

Turner had made a detailed view in the same direction from up the Rio dell’Arsenale, showing both towers and the adjacent Porta Magna, in the 1819 Milan to Venice sketchbook (Tate D14419; Turner Bequest CLXXV 55), and the towers are seen in the distance to the east on folio 71 verso (D32061) of the present book; the quick study of the Piraeus lion statue beside the Porta Magna and towers on folio 52 recto (D32027) may have been made on the same occasion. Turner perhaps moved straight from the present viewpoint south-west to the harbour of San Giorgio Maggiore, shown on folio 74 recto (D32065), meanwhile making sketches of fishing boats on the verso (D32064). For this sketchbook’s somewhat convoluted general sequence, including Hardy George’s broad overview,3 see its Introduction.

The artist had only paused to record one tower in detail in 1819, possibly to save time, but perhaps, as Ian Warrell has suggested, the ‘presence of Austrian soldiers ... may have discouraged Turner from making more than a couple of pencil sketches’.4 On the present occasion he was far enough off not to be conspicuous, but in 1840 he did skirt the high, forbidding walls perimeter walls along narrow canals and make a few hurried drawings, as discussed in the entry for an atmospheric watercolour associated with that tour (Tate D32164; Turner Bequest CCCXVI 27).