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 > Tivoli to Rome Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner View from Villa d'Este, Tivoli, including the Rocca Pia 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘View from Villa d'Este, Tivoli, including the Rocca Pia’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 37 Verso:
View from Villa d’Este, Tivoli, including the Rocca Pia 1819
D14995
Turner Bequest CLXXIX 37 a
Pencil on white wove paper, 112 x 186 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
This page contains a swiftly drawn landscape sketch from a hillside location looking towards distant hills. As Cecilia Powell identified, the tower in the middle distance represents part of the Rocca Pia, Tivoli’s fifteenth-century castle.1 Turner’s viewpoint therefore was the Villa d’Este, a sixteenth-century villa and formal Renaissance garden built for Cardinal Ippolito d’Este (1509–1572), the son of Lucrezia Borgia. The artist made several studies of the panoramic view from the terrace of the Gran Loggia, see folio 38 verso (D14997), and this sketch depicts the vista looking south-east towards Monte Catillo. A similar but more detailed composition can be found in the Tivoli sketchbook (Tate D15477; Turner Bequest CLXXXIII 11).
The drawing spills over onto the opposite sheet of the double-spread, see folio 38 (D14996).

Nicola Moorby
January 2010

1
Powell 1984, p.410.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘View from Villa d’Este, Tivoli, including the Rocca Pia 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, January 2010, 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-view-from-villa-deste-tivoli-including-the-rocca-pia-r1137627, accessed 20 September 2024.