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 > Venice to Ancona Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Porta Pia and Lazzaretto, Ancona 1819

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Porta Pia and Lazzaretto, Ancona’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 75 Recto:
The Porta Pia and Lazzaretto, Ancona 1819
D14625
Turner Bequest CLXXVI 71
Pencil on white wove paper, 111 x 184 mm
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘71’ bottom right (now faint)
Stamped in black ‘CLXXVI – 71’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The Turner scholar C.F. Bell extended Finberg’s 1909 Inventory entry (‘Triumphal arch on pier at Ancona’): ‘of Clement XII’.1 In fact, while that smaller arch north of the harbour is shown on folio 69 verso (D14514; Turner Bequest CLXXVI 65a) and other pages, the most prominent subject here is rather the Baroque Porta Pia, as Cecilia Powell recognised,2 on the south-eastern side at the corner of the Banchina on what is now the Via XXIX Settembre.
The viewpoint is near the modern roundabout where it meets the Via Guglielmo Marconi, looking north-west along the turreted outer wall of the Lazzaretto to its rusticated gateway on the left. The complex is shown linked to the mainland by a bridge (since replaced by a more substantial one), with the Porta Pia to the north-north-west; the fortifications immediately adjoining it do not survive. Lightly outlined at the centre is the substantial lighthouse which once stood in the distance on the north side of the harbour, as shown more clearly in other views.
For Cecilia Powell and James Hamilton’s comments on Turner’s varied and extensive coverage of Ancona, which takes up most of the last quarter or so of this sketchbook, see under D14514.3

Matthew Imms
March 2017

1
Undated MS note by C.F. Bell (died 1966) in copy of Finberg 1909, Tate Britain Prints and Drawings Room, I, p.519.
2
See Powell 1984, p.407.
3
See ibid., pp.92–3, 466 note 109, Powell 1987, pp.25, 202 note 45, and Hamilton 1997, pp.198, 325 note 13.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘The Porta Pia and Lazzaretto, Ancona 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, March 2017, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, July 2017, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-porta-pia-and-lazzaretto-ancona-r1186361, accessed 25 April 2025.