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 > Pompeii, Amalfi, &c., Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Porta Capuana and the Piazza San Francesco, Naples 1819

Image 1 of 2
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Porta Capuana and the Piazza San Francesco, Naples’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 79 Verso:
Porta Capuana and the Piazza San Francesco, Naples 1819
D15884
Turner Bequest CLXXXV 77 a
Pencil on white wove paper, 113 x 189 mm
Inscribed by the artist in pencil ‘Yell’ above sketch of arcade bottom left and ‘vegetables’ bottom centre
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
As Cecilia Powell first identified, the subject of this sketch is the Porta Capuana in Naples, a marble arch enclosed by two cylindrical towers (Honour and Virtue) which stands on the eastern side of the city near the former royal residence of Castel Capuano.1 Rising above the adjoining buildings on the right is the dome of the Church of Santa Caterina a Formiello, whilst in the foreground is the former Piazza San Francesco (present-day Piazza Enrico de Nicola). The gate is still in existence today although the upper storey visible in Turner’s sketch was removed during the early twentieth century.2

Nicola Moorby
October 2010

1
Powell 1984, p.425.
2
Compare a painting by Ercole Gigante (1815–1860), Porta Capuana 1855 (Certosa e Museo di San Martino, Naples), reproduced online at http://museosanmartino.campaniabeniculturali.it/, and a nineteenth-century photograph in the Archivi Alinari-archivio Brogi, Firenze (BGA-F-005658–0000), reproduced on the Alinari website, http://www.alinariarchives.it/internal/home.aspx, accessed October 2010.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘Porta Capuana and the Piazza San Francesco, Naples 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, October 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-porta-capuana-and-the-piazza-san-francesco-naples-r1138355, accessed 26 April 2024.