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

This vignette appears as the headpiece for the twenty-third section of Rogers’s Italy, entitled ‘Florence’.1 It was engraved by Edward Goodall, who was one of the most prolific and skilled interpreters of Turner’s designs.2 Goodall produced plates for nearly all of Turner’s print commissions, engraving eleven out of the twenty-five designs that the artist made for Italy. According to Luke Herrmann, Turner and Goodall’s partnership was at its most effective in Florence and another Italy vignette, Venice (see Tate D27710; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 193).3

Rogers devotes most of his verses on Florence to praising the city’s artistic heroes – Masaccio, Raphael, Ghiberti, and Michelangelo – and ends with a tribute to Filippo Strozzi, who helped to lead a republican uprising against the Medici rule in 1527. However, the poet opens the sections with a brief description of the city itself:

Rogers’s bold celebration of Florence’s beauty may have come as a surprise to some of his readers. As Cecilia Powell has written, English visitors during the nineteenth century such as William Hazlitt, often judged the city harshly, finding the narrow streets claustrophobic and the architecture dark and oppressive.4 Roger’s poem suggests that it was Florence’s cultural treasures, rather than its overall physical appearance, that made it an essential stop for those on the Grand Tour.5 In fact, Turner produced a preparatory study of the Ponte Vecchio with the Uffizi and the Palazzo Vecchio shown nearby (see Tate D27612; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 95) and it seems likely that he intended this composition to complement Rogers’s lengthy description of the city’s artistic riches. In the end, however, Turner illustrated ‘Florence’ with a traditional distant view of the city seen from the nearby hill town of Fiesole.

The vignette shows three monks in the foreground, standing close to what appears to be a monastery wall. Several books and an hourglass lie on the ground nearby, although these items are more difficult to discern in the finished engraving. Jan Piggott lists these details along with the ‘funereal cypress trees’ also pictured here, among the many references to death and the passage of time that appear throughout Turner’s Italy vignettes.6

The central subject of this vignette is Florence itself, which appears from a great distance, crowned by an oversized version of Brunelleschi’s Duomo. Turner’s illustration compensates for the near absence of landscape description in Rogers’s verses, while also reusing an image that was sure to be familiar and appealing to contemporary viewers. ⁷ Turner recorded many distant views of Florence during his first visit there in 1819, including several showing the much admired view of Florence seen from Fiesole (see Tate D16542, D16543, D16609, D16610, D16619, D16627; Turner Bequest CXCI 30a, 31, 74a, 75, 79a, 84). However, while he may have referred back to his sketchbook records, Florence is clearly based upon a watercolour that Turner produced for James Hakewill’s outstandingly popular Picturesque Tour of Italy, published 1818–20 (private collection),8 an illustration derived from original drawing by Hakewill himself.9 The illustrations of Florence that Turner produced for Picturesque Tour and Italy both include a group of monks in the foreground and show the city seen from Fiesole. Turner’s illustration for the 1828 edition of The Keepsake (untraced) also bears some relation to these two compositions.10

Cecilia Powell has noted that faint pencil lines drawn around the vignettes were made by the engravers during the process of squaring-up the designs for reduction.11 The inscribed numbers along the edges would also have been part of this exercise.

Verso:

Inscribed by unknown hands in pencil ‘12’ top left and ‘8 | a’ upper centre and ‘CCLXXX.156’ bottom centre and ‘D.27673’ bottom left. Also in ink ‘009’ bottom left
Stamped in black ‘CCLXXX 156’ lower centre