J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

Cecilia Powell, ‘Turner on Classic Ground: His Visits to Central and Southern Italy and Related Paintings and Drawings’, unpublished Ph.D thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London 1984, pp.340, 440, 533 note 166
Cecilia Powell, Turner in the South: Rome, Naples, Florence, New Haven and London 1987, pp.163, 207 note 128

In his 1909 Inventory of the Bequest, Finberg tentatively transcribed Turner’s inscriptions on the remnant of this torn-out page as ‘Villa Madama’ and ‘St. John Lateran’.1 More recently, Cecilia Powell has interpreted the upper inscription as ‘Villa Massimo’, referring to the Villa Giustiniani Massimo in Rome, a seventeenth-century villa located south-east of the Colosseum. As Powell noted, at the time of Turner’s visit in 1828, a number of German painters associated with the Nazarene school (including Schnorr, Veit, Koch and Overbeck) had recently completed a series of frescoes illustrating scenes from the Italian poets.2 The lower inscription ‘S^t John Lateran’ refers to the nearby Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano. The meaning of the third inscription, which appears to read ‘Fune Costi’, is unclear.

Technical notes:

The remnant of the torn-out page is uneven, extending to a maximum height of 40 mm. It has been made good with modern laid paper, increasing the height to 132 mm to match the sketchbook’s intact leaves.