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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1819-29 Italy and after > First Italian Tour 1819-20 > Albano, Nemi, Rome Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Two Sketches in Rome; The Pyramid of Cestius with the Porta San Paolo and the Aurelian Walls; and a Distant View of St Peter's 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Two Sketches in Rome; The Pyramid of Cestius with the Porta San Paolo and the Aurelian Walls; and a Distant View of St Peter's’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 42 Verso:
Two Sketches in Rome; The Pyramid of Cestius with the Porta San Paolo and the Aurelian Walls; and a Distant View of St Peter’s 1819
D15375
Turner Bequest CLXXXII 42 a
Pencil on white wove paper, 113 x 189 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The subject of this drawing is the Porta San Paulo (formerly called the Porta Ostiense), and the adjacent Pyramid of Cestius, a funerary monument of white marble built between 18–12 BC for the magistrate Gaius Cestius Epulo and later incorporated into the Aurelian Walls.1 Turner has depicted the tomb from the east and has included the outline of the walls with their square towers at regular intervals stretching towards the right. Part of the composition has been sketched over the top of an underlying drawing of St Peter’s, the continuation of the view on the opposite page, see folio 43 (D15376).
Further sketches of the Pyramid of Cestius can be found on folios 42 (D15374) and 45 verso (D15381). See also the Rome and Florence sketchbook (Tate D16500; Turner Bequest CXCI 9).

Nicola Moorby
May 2008

1
Raymond Keaveney, Views of Rome from the Thomas Ashby Collection in the Vatican Library, exhibition catalogue, Smithsonian Institution, Washington 1988, p.208.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘Two Sketches in Rome; The Pyramid of Cestius with the Porta San Paolo and the Aurelian Walls; and a Distant View of St Peter’s 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, May 2008, 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-two-sketches-in-rome-the-pyramid-of-cestius-with-the-porta-r1132670, accessed 26 April 2024.