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

Cecilia Powell plausibly identified this drawing, made with the page turned horizontally, as a view of the Schlossberg at Graz;1 for numerous views of that city and its similar hilltop castle on adjacent pages, see under folio 41 verso (D30079).2 However, as the Slovenian art historian Jakob Klemenčič has shown,3 the scene here is Ljubljana, now the capital of Slovenia, then governed by Austria and generally known as Laibach (another common form being Lubiana, in Italian).

The view is east-south-east from outside the Ursuline Church of the Holy Trinity along Kongresni trg (Congress Square, or Kongressplatz in German), with trees in the park on the left. The castle stands high on the skyline at the centre, with the smaller Šance (Schanze) fortifications below to its right. The carefully rendered castle is the most detailed element of the drawing, with the middle distance comparatively loosely recorded; the larger of the gabled buildings at the bottom centre is the Baroque Theatre of the Carniolan Estates, destroyed by fire in 1887 and replaced by what is now the Slovene Philharmonic Hall.

The separate Baroque spire at the top left is likely that of the Teutonic Knights’ Church of Our Lady of Mercy, some way to the south-east; it was possibly then visible from the same point but now obscured by later developments.4 The main view is directly comparable with that in Georg Pajk’s coloured lithograph of about 1836.5

There is another view of the city and castle on folio 48 verso (D30093).