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

Finberg later annotated his 1909 Inventory entry (‘River with town’): ‘Trent, the Castle, from river’.1 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell marked another copy: ‘Trento’.2 With the page turned horizontally, the view is east to the perimeter of the old city, looking across the former course of the River Adige (Etsch), since straightened to flow across the foreground of this view. Roads, railway tracks, buildings and trees combine beyond the new reach to preclude the open prospect shown here; an approximately equivalent viewpoint is across the Ponte San Lorenzo, from the traffic island south of the Church of Sant’Apollinare.

Near the centre, the most prominent feature is the Torre Vanga, guarding the old wooden bridge to the city’s Portella gateway. The height of the tower has since been somewhat diminished, as it has lost its enclosed upper level and shallow roof and acquired battlements instead. The Via Torre Vanga now marks the old curving course of the river, here flowing into the foreground from the left. The city walls to the right do not survive. Within them, the next notable landmark is the campanile of Santa Maria Maggiore, with its dark dome, south-west of the tower, with loose indications of the castellated Torre Civica beside the cathedral, further off in the same direction.

In the distance beyond the bridge is the Castello del Buonconsiglio, with the Torre d’Augusto at its left-hand end. Returning to the foreground, just to the left of the bridge is the campanile of the Church of San Lorenzo, now between the railway station and the Giardini Pubblici. The rugged peaks of the Fiemme Dolomites form a carefully rendered backdrop. There is a view of the tower and city from the north end of the bridge on folio 41 verso opposite (D31678).

Compare the similar prospect in an engraving of Trent (sic), showing the arches below the tower in the immediate foreground, after Turner’s friend and rival Clarkson Stanfield, in Leitch Ritchie’s Travelling Sketches in the North of Italy, the Tyrol, and on the Rhine, which was published in 1832 as the first of the ‘Heath’s Picturesque Annual’ series. See the introduction to Caroline South’s ‘Wanderings by the Seine (Rivers of France) c.1832–3’ section in the present catalogue for Turner’s own involvement with Ritchie and Charles Heath around this time. For other views of Trento on adjacent pages of this sketchbook and its place in Turner’s itinerary, see under folio 37 recto (D31669).