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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner View of the Forum, Rome, with the Capitol and San Lorenzo in Miranda 1819

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 34 Verso:
View of the Forum, Rome, with the Capitol and San Lorenzo in Miranda 1819
D16453
Turner Bequest CXC 39 a
Pencil and grey watercolour wash on white wove paper, 130 x 255 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This sketch depicts a view of the north-west end of the Roman Forum. Turner’s viewpoint is a position just to the left of Temple of Romulus looking towards the Capitoline Hill. Rising above the trees in the background is the bell-tower of the Palazzo Senatorio, whilst on the right is the dome of Santi Luca e Martina. Dominating the right-hand side of the vista is the Church of San Lorenzo in Miranda, a seventeenth-century Baroque building which incorporates the classical portico of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina. This ruined Roman temple was first dedicated to Faustina, the wife of Emperor Antoninus Pius in the second century AD but was later converted into a church following the belief that St Lawrence had been condemned to death there. Just visible through the trees in the foreground is the Arch of Septimius Severus. Like many drawings within this sketchbook, the composition has been executed over a washed grey background and Turner has created areas of pale highlights by lifting or rubbing through to the white paper beneath.
As Cecilia Powell has pointed out,1 the sketch relates to part of the finished oil painting, Forum Romanum, for Mr Soane’s Museum exhibited 1826 (Tate, N00504).2 As the title suggests, the work was originally intended for the gallery of Turner’s friend, the architect Sir John Soane (1753–1837), although the commission was never in fact accepted. The composition was based upon an amalgam of several sketches from Turner’s 1819 sojourn in Rome and this sketchbook page appears to have informed the depiction of the buildings visible in the background between the Arch of Titus and the Basilica of Constantine. A similar view can also be found in the Rome: C. Studies sketchbook (see Tate D16351; Turner Bequest CLXXXIX 25).

Nicola Moorby
June 2009

1
Powell 1984, p.255 and Powell 1987, p.122.
2
Butlin and Joll 1984, no.233.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘View of the Forum, Rome, with the Capitol and San Lorenzo in Miranda 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, June 2009, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-view-of-the-forum-rome-with-the-capitol-and-san-lorenzo-in-r1132542, accessed 20 September 2024.