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

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner Inscriptions by Turner: Notes on Pietro Bartoli c.1808-11

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 4 Verso:
Inscriptions by Turner: Notes on Pietro Bartoli circa 1808–11
D07965
Turner Bequest CXIV 4a
Pencil on white wove paper, 117 x 87 mm
Part watermark ‘J What | 180’
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘Peter Bartoli | Pietro Bartolo | Antonini col 1681’ at top
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The upper part of the page, turned vertically, is taken up with the following notes:
Peter Bartoli
Pietro Bartolo
Antonini col 1681
Pietro Santi Bartoli (1615–1700) was a painter and engraver who had been a pupil of Nicolas Poussin, and published many prints of Roman monuments.1 Maurice Davies notes that he was the ‘author of several works on Roman antiquities’, and is correct in tentatively reading the last line as a reference to the ‘Antonine’ Column2 in Rome, i.e. the Column of Marcus Aurelius (Antoninus Augustus).
Bartoli’s Columna Antoniniana Marci Aurelii Antonini Augusti rebus gestis insignis, with seventy-five plates of the column, is in the British Library, London, although that copy is dated in the catalogue to ‘1672?’. Turner consulted various perspective treatises and related books then held at the British Museum in preparation for his Royal Academy perspective lectures, first delivered in 1811 (see the Introduction to the present sketchbook and to the Perspective sketchbook: Tate; Turner Bequest CVIII). He represented parts of the Column of Marcus Aurelius in two of his lecture diagrams, as correctly identified by Andrea Fredericksen in her entries for the present catalogue (Tate D17121, D17124; Turner Bequest CXCV 150, 153).3

Matthew Imms
January 2012

1
See Annamaria Negro Spina, ‘Bartoli, Pietro Sante [Santi]’, Grove Art Online, accessed 26 February 2010, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T006590.
2
Davies 1994, p.290.
3
Finberg 1909, vol.I, p.594, as ‘Lower part of Trajan’s Column’ and ‘Top of Trajan’s Column’ respectively).

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Inscriptions by Turner: Notes on Pietro Bartoli c.1808–11 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, January 2012, 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-inscriptions-by-turner-notes-on-pietro-bartoli-r1134741, accessed 28 March 2024.