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 > Ancona to Rome Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Forte Sangallo, from the gorge at Civita Castellana 1819

Image 1 of 2
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Forte Sangallo, from the gorge at Civita Castellana’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 77 Verso:
Forte Sangallo, from the gorge at Civita Castellana 1819
D14804
Turner Bequest CLXXVII 77 a
Pencil on white wove paper, 110 x 186 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The town of Civita Castellana lies in the Viterbo province of Lazio, approximately seventeen miles south of Narni and thirty miles north of Rome. This sketch depicts the distinctive outline of the Forte Sangallo and the deep gorge which surrounds the town from the road to the south-west towards Castel Sant’Elia and Nepi. Turner has used rough areas of hatching and broad looping lines to describe the verdant, shady slopes of the ravine. The gorge was most famously depicted by the early French en plein-air artists such as Jean-Joseph-Xavier Bidauld (1758–1846), 1 Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819) and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875).2

Nicola Moorby
November 2008

1
See Philip Conisbee, Sarah Faunce and Jeremy Strick, In the Light of Italy: Corot and Early Open-Air Painting, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art, Washington 1996, p.141 and Anna Ottani Cavina, Un Paese Incantato: Italia Dipinta da Thomas Jones a Corot, exhibition catalogue, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Parigi and Palazzo Te, Mantova, Italy 2001, p.125.
2
See Peter Galassi, Corot in Italy, New Haven and London 1991, pp.174–195.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘Forte Sangallo, from the gorge at Civita Castellana 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, November 2008, 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-forte-sangallo-from-the-gorge-at-civita-castellana-r1138967, accessed 19 September 2024.