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

This apparently nocturnal scene of an extensive townscape ablaze beyond classical buildings was named ‘Rome burning’ by Finberg,1 and the vivid study has continued to be exhibited and published extensively under this title or close variants. Finberg was presumably thinking of the devastating fire of July 64 AD, during the reign of Emperor Nero, from classical accounts of which arises the well-known saying ‘Nero fiddled while Rome burned’. (Literary references appear for example in Talbot speech in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, ‘and like thee, Nero, | Play on the lute, beholding the towns burn’,2 or a passing allusion to how ‘Nero fiddled to the flames’ in Variety, a poem by William Whitehead (1715–1785) available to Turner in Anderson’s British Poets,3 a thirteen-volume anthology he had owned and studied since about 1798.4)

Following his long stay in the city during his second Italian tour of 1828–9, Turner painted Rome in its ancient and modern aspects in the latter half of the 1830s: see the unfinished Arch of Constantine, Rome of about 1835 (Tate N02066),5 Rome, from Mount Aventine, exhibited in 1836 (private collection),6 Ancient Italy – Ovid Banished from Rome, exhibited in 1838 (private collection),7 and the pairing Ancient Rome: Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus. The Triumphal Bridge and Palace of the Caesars Restored (Tate N00523)8 and Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles),9 shown in 1839. Ovid’s banishment by Augustus occurred in 8 AD and Germanicus died in 19 AD, so it is possible Turner was considering a further subject from this early period of Roman Imperial history. The arrangement here, with columns silhouetted in the elevated foreground, may be compared and contrasted with the peaceful setting of the ruined Forum of Modern Rome.

Lindsay Stainton has regarded Turner’s subject as ‘essentially a fantasy on the theme of fire, a subject which particularly interested him during the late 1830s and early 1840s’, comparing the technique and ‘the dramatic effect of intense light against a night sky’ with Tate D32248 (Turner Bequest CCCXVIII 29), an 1840 gouache of fireworks at Venice,10 among a grouping of nocturnal views of the city on similar brown paper; see also Tate D32229 (Turner Bequest CCCXVIII 10). The sensational, apocalyptic Biblical and classical paintings of John Martin (1789–1854) might have been in Turner’s mind in terms of approaching a dramatic composition, as Stainton and David Blayney Brow have suggested;11 compare Martin’s large painting of The Destruction of Pompei [sic] and Herculaneum at London’s Egyptian Hall in 1822 (Tate N00793).

Turner’s response to the burning of the Houses of Parliament in London in October 1834 (see under Tate D36235; Turner Bequest CCCLXIV 373) may have been an immediate stimulus, as Katherine Solender has suggested: ‘Given the political temper of the time and Turner’s tendency to draw analogies between contemporary and historical events, he may have felt such a picture [of Rome] would effectively allude to the present state of the British nation’12 and the potentially ‘destructive consequences of imperial ambitions’, as Sarah Taft has put it.13 Leo Costello has noted how ‘the great columns of Rome seem like flimsy pieces of board standing out against the deep background washes of crimson, a color which [John] Ruskin liked to note also symbolized large-scale bloodshed for Turner.’14 The artist also produced a series of fluid watercolours now identified as showing another major fire in London a few years later (see the ‘Fire at the Tower of London 1841’ section of this catalogue).

Verso:

Blank; laid down. Inscribed on the white wove backing sheet in pencil ‘15’ at centre, upside down; inscribed in pencil ‘CCCLXIV.370’ bottom centre; stamped in black with Turner Bequest monogram over ‘CCCLXIV – 370’ bottom right.