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 > Venice to Ancona Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Entrance to the Rocca at Forlimpopoli; a Rocky Adriatic Headland 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Entrance to the Rocca at Forlimpopoli; a Rocky Adriatic Headland’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 47 Verso:
The Entrance to the Rocca at Forlimpopoli; a Rocky Adriatic Headland 1819
D14575
Turner Bequest CLXXVI 43a
Pencil on white wove paper, 111 x 184 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘A gateway’): ‘Rimini?’.1 However, the subject is the machicolated central gateway across a drawbridge on the south side of imposing Renaissance Rocca at Forlimpopoli,2 a town between Forlì and Cesena. The west side, round the corner to the left, is show on folio 46 recto (D14572; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 42).
Cecilia Powell has commented on the relatively uneventful phase of Turner’s journey between leaving Bologna and reaching Rimini (folios 43 recto–60 verso; D14566–D14598; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 39a–56a);3 for his overall route south-east between Bologna and Ancona, see the sketchbook’s Introduction.
The outer third of the page is partitioned off by a vertical pencil line, with rocky cliffs or a headland somewhat randomly shown inverted relative to the other drawing. Forlimpopoli is roughly twenty miles from the sea at Rimini along Turner’s route, and the feature was presumably recorded somewhat later as he travelled along the Adriatic coast towards Ancona (see under folio 69 verso; D14614; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 65a). Compare the distant formation on folio 65 recto (D14613; CLXXVI 65).

Matthew Imms
March 2017

1
Undated MS note by C.F. Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Tate Britain Prints and Drawings Room, I, p.518.
2
See Powell 1984, p.406.
3
See Powell 1984, pp.89–90, 465 note 98.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The Entrance to the Rocca at Forlimpopoli; a Rocky Adriatic Headland 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, March 2017, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, July 2017, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-entrance-to-the-rocca-at-forlimpopoli-a-rocky-adriatic-r1186311, accessed 02 April 2026.