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 > Venice to Ancona Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Arco del Meloncello, Bologna 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Arco del Meloncello, Bologna’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 37 Recto:
The Arco del Meloncello, Bologna 1819
D14554
Turner Bequest CLXXVI 33
Pencil on white wove paper, 111 x 184 mm
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘33’ bottom right (now faint)
Stamped in black ‘CLXXVI – 33’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The Turner scholar C.F. Bell amended Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry to read less speculatively: ‘Church of the Madonna di San Luca’.1 In fact, as Cecilia Powell recognised, the subject is the ‘magnificently baroque’ Arco del Meloncello,2 marking the opposite end of the arcade winding up to the Sanctuary of the Madonna south-west of Bologna, shown here receding to the left but now obscured by trees and buildings.
The east side is shown from the short elevated arcade on the north side of the Via Saragozza. Powell has closely analysed this sketch as an example of the artist’s shifting his viewpoint while making an ostensibly conventional drawing of the structure:
from the tempietto beside it, as is made clear by the foreground ledge and the angle at which we look up into the spandrels of the arch. However, in order to avoid confusion and distortion in his depiction of the outer portions of the arch – the pyramid-shaped finials and the round and triangular pediments – Turner has moved about forty feet, down a number of steps and out onto the road to sketch them.
In this way the depiction is ‘not a record of one given spot from another given spot, but a composite record which is not only more pleasing than the actuality but more useful and accurate from an architectural point of view’.3
For Powell’s general comments on Turner’s views of Bologna from a distance and around the Sanctuary (folios 32 verso–39 recto; D14545–D14558; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 28a–35), see under D14545;4 for the arcade and the Sanctuary itself, under folio 42 recto (D14564; CLXXVI 38);5 and for Bologna in general and numerous views on adjacent pages, under folio 24 recto (D14532).

Matthew Imms
March 2017

1
Undated MS note by C.F. Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Tate Britain Prints and Drawings Room, I, p.517.
2
Powell 1984, pp.84–5; see also pp.88, 406, 463 note 82.
3
Powell 1984, p.88.
4
See Powell 1984, pp.92, 466 note 110, and Powell 1987, pp.25, 202 note 46.
5
See also Powell 1984, pp.84–6.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The Arco del Meloncello, Bologna 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, March 2017, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, July 2017, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-arco-del-meloncello-bologna-r1186290, accessed 24 April 2024.