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

This vignette was engraved by Henry le Keux and appears as the end-piece for the twenty-seventh section of Rogers’s Italy, entitled ‘An interview.’1 It is arguably the most dramatic of the moonlit scenes that Turner produced for Rogers’s Italy, the other two being Galileo’s Villa and Villa on the Night of the Festa di Ballo (see Tate D27680; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 163 and Tate D27682; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 165).

Villa Madama is one of the most famous and widely imitated villas and terraced gardens of the High Renaissance. It was designed by Raphael who intended it to rival the villas of antiquity. The villa, on the Janiculum Hill in Rome, included a courtyard with a monumental flight of steps (seen here in the foreground) and an open air amphitheatre, which the poet describes at some length. Rogers’s final verses are nicely complemented by the dark and poetic exterior view shown here:

In addition to the Villa Madama, Turner’s vignette also shows the Villa Mellini, which appears in the upper right of the composition. The structures have been drawn according to two different perspective systems and are lit by opposing light sources: whereas Villa Madama appears to be illuminated from within, the exterior of Villa Mellini is brightly lit by the moon. Both of these ambiguities contribute to the overall sense of other-worldly mystery that dominates the scene.

The drawings of the Villa Madama that Turner made during his 1819 visit to Italy show the building from a different vantage point and bear little formal relation to the vignette (see for example, Tate D16182; Turner Bequest CLXXXVIII 13a). The building was in a state of decline by the time Rogers and Turner visited it, though this fact is far from clear in the vignette.2 Instead, Turner here seems to show the building restored to its former glory. Given the fluid movement between past and present that occurs throughout Rogers’s text, as well as in Turner’s vignettes, this imaginative recreation of the building as it might have once looked is neither surprising nor out of place. Turner appears to do the same in Paestum, in which he depicts the central temple restored to its original state (see Tate D27665; Turner Bequest CCLXXX 148).3

Although the building shown here is now generally agreed to have been modelled after the Villa Madama, there has been some question in the past regarding its identity. When it appeared as part of the portfolio of Italy engravings published by Cadell and Moxon in 1838, this design was simply titled ‘A Villa’ and Finberg would later incorrectly identify the subject as ‘Verona: Moonlight.’4 Jan Piggott has pointed out that the arcaded structure in the middle distance reappears in another contemporary work, Claudian Harbour Scene, 1828 (Tate, N03382),5 which Turner produced as a study for Dido Directing the Equipment of the Fleet,1828 (Tate, N00506).6

Technical notes:
Watermark ‘NotBleac’ [‘NotBleached’]

Verso:

Inscribed by unknown hands in pencil ‘NG’ (underlined) along top and ’10 | b’ centre and ‘CCLXXX.159’ bottom centre. There are also two perpendicular pencil lines forming a corner at the centre of the sheet.
Stamped in black ‘CCLXXX 159’ centre