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 Ancona to the North, from below the Cittadella 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Ancona to the North, from below the Cittadella’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 85 Verso:
Ancona to the North, from below the Cittadella 1819
D14646
Turner Bequest CLXXVI 81a
Pencil on white wove paper, 111 x 184 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The drawing continues across folio 86 recto opposite (D14647; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 82). The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘Ancona’): ‘from the heights near the Citadel’.1 The viewpoint is the Campo Trincerato area east of the fortress, although later trees and buildings make placing the exact spot difficult; on this page the view is north-west past the elaborate campanile (since reduced to a stump) of the former church of San Francesco ad Alto.
To the left of the church is the outline of the distant lighthouse which formerly stood on the pier along the north side of the port, seen continuing to the right of the tower with the Arch of Trajan towards the gutter. Beyond and below San Francesco ad Alto, a zigzag indicates the spiralling top of the campanile of the church of the Blessed Sacrament (Santissimo Sacramento).
As foliated, this panorama is the last of Turner’s Ancona views; for Cecilia Powell and James Hamilton’s comments on Turner’s varied and extensive coverage of the city, which takes up most of the last quarter or so of this sketchbook, see under folio 69 verso (D14514; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 65a).2

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.519.
2
See Powell 1984, pp.92–3, 466 note 109, Powell 1987, pp.25, 202 note 45, and James Hamilton, Turner: A Life, London 1997, p.198.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Ancona to the North, from below the Cittadella 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-ancona-to-the-north-from-below-the-cittadella-r1186382, accessed 25 April 2024.