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 > Vatican Fragments Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Studies of Sculptural Fragments and Reliefs from the Vatican Museums, Including an Ornamental Capital and the Gravestone of T. Fl. Iulius 1819

Image 1 of 2
  • Enhanced image
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Studies of Sculptural Fragments and Reliefs from the Vatican Museums, Including an Ornamental Capital and the Gravestone of T. Fl. Iulius’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 11 Verso:
Studies of Sculptural Fragments and Reliefs from the Vatican Museums, Including an Ornamental Capital and the Gravestone of T. Fl. Iulius 1819
D15124
Turner Bequest CLXXX 10 a
Pencil on white wove paper, 161 x 101 mm
Inscribed by the artist in pencil [see notes]
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
During his 1819 stay in Rome, one of Turner’s most extensive sketching campaigns was the large number of pencil studies made from the sculpture collections of the Vatican Museums (for a general discussion, see the introduction to the sketchbook). This page contains sketches of various objects found in the Museo Chiaramonti. The studies are numbered from top left to bottom right:
a.
Cecilia Powell has identified the three ornamental components within the sketch at the top as details of a capital from the Museo Chiaramonti.1
b.
Powell has furthermore identified the bottom sketch as the Gravestone of T. Fl. Iulius,2 from the Galleria Lapidaria (Lapidary Gallery) of the Museo Chiaramonti.3 Turner has transcribed the Latin inscription from the front of the monument as ‘D M | T. Fl. IVLIO. SESQ. EQSING | AVG. TVR. VLPI. ITALICI.NAT | NORICVS. VA XXX MILA. | XIII T AVRELIVS. VICTORINV | VIXILARIVS. HET. T. FL. FLOREN | TINVS MIL.CO H. X I. VRBANAE.SEC | H AMICO OPTIMO | FAC . CVR’. The first part translates as ‘D[is] M[anibus]’, ‘To the spirits of the departed’, and is a common phrase found on Roman funerary monuments.

Nicola Moorby
November 2009

1
Powell 1984, p.412; reproduced in Walther Amelung, Die Sculpturen des Vaticanischen Museums, Berlin 1903–8, vol.I, pl.69, bottom centre.
2
Powell 1984, p.412.
3
See Amelung 1903–8, vol.I, ‘2. Galleria Lapidaria Seite 161–308’, no.137, l, p.268, reproduced pl.28.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘Studies of Sculptural Fragments and Reliefs from the Vatican Museums, Including an Ornamental Capital and the Gravestone of T. Fl. Iulius 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, November 2009, 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-studies-of-sculptural-fragments-and-reliefs-from-the-vatican-r1139536, accessed 02 November 2025.