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

Finberg later annotated his 1909 Inventory entry (‘Distant buildings’): ‘Island of San Pietro di Castello’.1 The Turner scholar C.F. Bell marked another copy in the same way,2 and used the phrase again in a copy of Finberg’s 1930 book In Venice with Turner.3 The page’s title was amended by Ian Warrell to ‘Distant View of the Church and Campanile of San Pietro di Castello’ in 2003, in connection with his concurrent Turner and Venice exhibition at Tate Britain.4 The drawing was made with the page turned horizontally.

The church, aligned west-north-west to east-south-east on the Isola di San Pietro, and the tower to its south-west are seen from the south, with the thermal window of the south transept thus slightly off-centre in relation to the central dome. A roughly equivalent albeit constricted view today is from the Rio del Giardini; Turner seems to have been a little further east on what were then the open waters of the Lagoon east of the Giardini Pubblici, now occupied by the largely reclaimed island of Sant’Elena, forming the substantial tail end of the Castello district and named after the monastery which then stood in isolation on a smaller island.

The feature on the left has been identified by Warrell5 as the campanile of Sant’Isepo (more formally San Giuseppe di Castello) north of the gardens and south-west of the first church; it was then not far from the Lagoon waterfront. A ‘w’ beside each tower indicates white stone. To the right is the distant skyline of mountains on the mainland; what is today in any case a notional prospect from this angle would be obscured by the north-eastern extension of the Arsenale dockyards beyond San Pietro. Folio 16 verso opposite (D31957) shows other aspects of the northern Lagoon from nearby.

Warrell has observed that on this second trip to Venice Turner explored ‘parts of the city he had previously neglected, such as the eastern district of Castello, near the church of San Pietro, and the long northern waterfront of the Fondamente Nove’;6 see also folios 41 verso–42 recto, 55 recto and verso and 56 recto (D32006–D32007, D32033–D32035).7 The present sketch falls within what was perhaps a single waterborne excursion (folios 10 verso–24 recto; D31945–D31972) out around the eastern end of Venice and then westwards across the Lagoon along the southern shores of the islands of San Giorgio Maggiore and the Giudecca, before turning back for the Bacino at the heart of the city along the Canale della Giudecca. For this sketchbook’s somewhat convoluted general sequence, see its Introduction.

Turner explored this relatively remote part of the city again in 1840, making sketches around San Pietro in the Venice and Botzen sketchbook (including Tate D31840, D31843, D31878; Turner Bequest CCCXIII 26, 27a, 45).