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

This sketch depicts a view of Albano from the gate near the Via Appia, the road which leads from Rome to the south of Italy.1 The tower visible on the far right is a tomb, sometimes called the Tomb of Pompey, or Ascanius, a three-storey structure, approximately 45 metres in height which lies on the left of the road as soon as it enters Albano. The surface of the tower is punctuated by square blocks. Andrew Lumisden described it in 1812 as ‘the remains of a magnificent mausoleum ... incrusted with marble, and each story ornamented with columns, no doubt of different orders. Though robbed of these columns and the incrustation, yet the bells, or praecinationes of these stories, and the marble blocks to which they were fixed still remain, and point out its former state’.2 The tomb was recorded by Piranesi in his Antichità d’Albano e di Castel Gandolfo 1764,3 and in a 1796 drawing by Carlo Labruzzi, the artist who accompanied Richard Colt Hoare on his journey through Italy in 1789.4

Other sketches of the tomb appear on folios 2 verso, 17 verso and 83 of this sketchbook (D15299, D15326, D15454; Turner Bequest CLXXXII 2a, 17a and 82).