Joseph Mallord William Turner The Piazza San Marco (St Mark's Square), Venice, with the Basilica and Campanile 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 44 Recto:
The Piazza San Marco (St Mark’s Square), Venice, with the Basilica and Campanile 1819
D14397
Turner Bequest CLXXV 44
Turner Bequest CLXXV 44
Pencil on white wove paper, 112 x 185 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘G R W’, ‘G B’, ‘[?5] B’, ‘R’ and ‘R’ top centre, beside top of campanile, and ‘Composite’, ‘[?F...]’, ‘[?Mldg] | double’, ‘5’, ‘Female Head and | Lion at [diagram of keystone]’ and ‘Trophies and Putti’ right of centre, sloping in line with perspective of façade
Inscribed by John Ruskin in blue ink ‘44’ top right and ‘300’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CLXXV 44’ bottom right
Inscribed by Turner in pencil ‘G R W’, ‘G B’, ‘[?5] B’, ‘R’ and ‘R’ top centre, beside top of campanile, and ‘Composite’, ‘[?F...]’, ‘[?Mldg] | double’, ‘5’, ‘Female Head and | Lion at [diagram of keystone]’ and ‘Trophies and Putti’ right of centre, sloping in line with perspective of façade
Inscribed by John Ruskin in blue ink ‘44’ top right and ‘300’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CLXXV 44’ bottom right
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Exhibition history
1904
National Gallery, London, various dates to at least 1904 (602c, as ‘St. Mark’s Place’, one of ‘Twelve Leaves from a Book of Sketches at Venice’).
References
1904
E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn eds., Library Edition: The Works of John Ruskin: Volume XIII: Turner: The Harbours of England; Catalogues and Notes, London 1904, pp.303 no.255, as ‘St. Mark’s Place’, 636 no.602, as one of ‘Twelve Leaves from a Book of Sketches at Venice’.
1909
A.J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, London 1909, vol.I, p.513, CLXXV 44, as ‘Piazza S. Marco. Exhibited Drawings, No.602c, N.G.’.
1930
A.J. Finberg, In Venice with Turner, London 1930, pp.28, 31, 164, as ‘The Piazza, looking towards S. Mark’s. Scaffolding round top of turret of the Campanile; with separate details of Campanile, pattern of tiling in Piazza, and various notes in writing on the New Procuratie; e.g. – “Trophies and Putti.” “Female Head and Lions”, “Composite”, etc.’.
Finberg subsequently annotated his 1909 Inventory entry (‘Piazza S. Marco’): ‘looking twds. S. Mark’s’.1 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated another copy: ‘looking towards the Basilica’.2 The view is east-north-east along St Mark’s Square; Finberg later noted Turner’s viewpoint as ‘standing beside the fourth column from the entrance to the square’.3 The campanile is dominant from this angle at the centre, with the basilica to its left, the Palazzo Ducale (Doge’s Palace) to its right, and various supplementary details of its upper stages alongside, as Finberg set out: ‘the scallop decorations of the four arches at the top of the brickwork, then the simple shaft and capital of one of the four arches of the stone belfry, and then all [Turner] could see of the figure seated between two lions on the tower above’.4
At the gutter is the Torre dell’Orologio (clock tower), and the view continues a little way onto folio 43 verso opposite (D14396), where the Procuratie Vecchie range north of the square balances the composition opposite the regular façade of the Procuratie Nuove advancing along the south side here. Turner has typically only drawn the nearest bays in detail, while adding more written notes. Finberg observed: ‘One width of the lower storeys was sufficient, as they were all alike, but two widths of the upper storeys was necessary, because the entablatures of the windows are crowned alternately with triangular and semi-circular pediments’. He called this ‘an excellent example of Turner’s systematic note-taking’.6
The great height of the campanile left Turner with little room for manoeuvre along the bottom of the view, and he added a study of the squares paving in the sky above San Marco. For other drawings made in the vicinity and an overview of Turner’s coverage of Venice, see the sketchbook’s Introduction.
Technical notes:
A horizontal tear at the gutter, presumably connected to the extraction of this page for display in the nineteenth century, has been repaired; the glue has subsequently darkened.
Matthew Imms
March 2017
How to cite
Matthew Imms, ‘The Piazza San Marco (St Mark’s Square), Venice, with the Basilica and Campanile 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