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

The page’s basic 1909 Inventory title (‘Buildings’)1 was amended by Ian Warrell to ‘View on a Side Canal, Probably the Rio del Palazzo; The Campanile and Dome of Santa Maria Formosa’ in 2003, in connection with his concurrent Turner and Venice exhibition at Tate Britain.2 The two separate drawings were made with the page turned horizontally, and the cramped canal view on the left, notable in showing three juxtaposed bridges immediately ahead, was subsequently suggested by Warrell3 as instead showing the Rio del Mondo Nuovo (off the northern end of the Rio del Palazzo – see folio 30 verso and the recto of this leaf; D31985–D31986)

Despite the relative slightness of the sketch, it does indeed show the view north-east along the canal before it turns a corner under the Ponte di Ca’ Venier on the left. The Rio del Rimedio is to the right and the Rio di Santa Maria Formosa ahead, under the two-part Ponte Pasqualigo e Avogadro; the heavy corbels dashed in towards the right are key details, remaining under the pavement between the two spans, and other swiftly rendered arches and balconies nearby are still evident.

As Warrell recognised, the other study here shows the campanile and dome of the large church of Santa Maria Formosa, with Renaissance and Baroque elements, not far north of this junction, set back on a broad quay beside the Rio del Mondo Nuovo. The sketch appears somewhat notional, since this aspect, as if approaching from the south, is obscured by a large projecting block immediately to the right of the pedimented west end, which is seen in more detail from the north-west a few pages later, on folio 36 verso (D31996), likely after Turner had explored the neighbourhood as far as the better-known church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo (see under folio 32 verso; D31989).

Another view from that direction is on folio 59 verso (D32042), where the church’s cramped canal-side situation is particularly apparent (albeit a spacious campo opens out behind it); the latter is part of another short sequence showing the same area, up to folio 61 recto (D32042–D32045). For this sketchbook’s somewhat convoluted general sequence, see its Introduction.

Both drawings here are continued a little way upwards over the gutter onto folio 32 recto opposite (D31988), with only a cursory mark in the case of the canal view, but more crucially showing the top stages of Santa Maria’s campanile.