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

The viewpoint is west of the Sanctuary of the Madonna di San Luca, set high above Bologna, looking east along the Via di San Luca to the church, with details continuing the dome and cupola in the sky to its right; the view continues across folio 41 verso opposite (D14563; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 37a). The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘Madonna di San Luca’), noting that the building is ‘to right [with] distant Bologna to l [to the north-east on the other page] | from the height to the West of the Monte della Guardia’1 (the hill on which the church stands).

Cecilia Powell has noted: ‘Many tourists in Bologna in the early nineteenth century made the ascent to the church ... three miles away, chiefly in order to admire the view of the towers, spires and domes of Bologna in the plain beneath, and we can see that Turner was no exception’.2 She observes that he was ‘interested in the church itself, an imposing mid-eighteenth-century work by C.F. Dotti, in the porticus of 666 arches which links church and city, and in the magnificently baroque Arco del Meloncello, also by Dotti’3 at the bottom end of the arcade (see folio 37 recto (D14554; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 33). James Hamilton has noted its ‘unbroken sequence’ as being ‘longer than any line of arches in Europe’.4

Powell has discussed at length Turner’s interest in Baroque architecture, unusual at that date, as shown in many of his Italian sketches, concluding: ‘We may perhaps link Turner’s liking of the baroque with an enjoyment of complexity and exuberance which is foreign to the early nineteenth century’.5 She has also suggested that the artist’s ‘evident fascination’ with the arcade, ‘as it leads gradually upwards in a seemingly endless series of stretches, each containing a monotonous row of uncountable arches, may reasonably be linked to the eighteenth-century concept of the sublime’,6 and discussed this explored this in relation to Edmund Burke’s 1757 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and his concept of ‘Succession and Uniformity’ tending towards infinity.7

For other views of the arcade, the church and the extensive views from it, see folios 26 recto, 29 recto, 34 verso, and most of the pages between folios 35 verso and 41 recto (D14534, D14540, D14549, D14551–D14562; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 26, 26f, 30a, 31a–37). For general remarks on Bologna and Turner’s numerous views on adjacent pages, see under folio 24 recto (D14532).