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 Study of a Sarcophagus in the Vatican Museums 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Study of a Sarcophagus in the Vatican Museums’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 15 Recto:
Study of a Sarcophagus in the Vatican Museums 1819
D15131
Turner Bequest CLXXX 14
Pencil on paper 101 x 161 mm
Inscribed by the artist in pencil (see main catalogue entry)
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘14’ bottom left, descending left-hand edge
Stamped in black ‘CLXXX 14’ bottom left, descending left-hand edge
 
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). Cecilia Powell has identified the subject of this sketch as a sarcophagus,1 found in the Galleria Lapidaria (Lapidary Gallery) of the Museo Chiaramonti.2 The object is decorated with a frieze of figures across the top, ornamental Corinthian columns at the side topped by sculptural heads, and a strigil pattern across the front. Turner has only sketched a couple of the strigils and left the rest of the drawing blank. In the centre of the sarcophagus, is a panel with a sleeping Cupid and a Latin inscription starting ‘D[is] M[anibus]’, which translates as ‘To the spirits of the departed’, a common text on Roman funerary monuments.

Nicola Moorby
November 2009

1
Powell 1984, p.413.
2
See Walther Amelung, Die Sculpturen des Vaticanischen Museums, Berlin 1903–8, vol.I, ‘2. Galleria Lapidaria Seite 161–308’, no.177, pp.291–3, reproduced pl.29.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘Study of a Sarcophagus in the Vatican Museums 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-study-of-a-sarcophagus-in-the-vatican-museums-r1139543, accessed 17 May 2024.