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 > Vatican Fragments Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Studies of Sculptural Fragments and Reliefs from the Vatican Museums, Including the Sarcophagus of M. Sulpicius Pylades 1819

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Studies of Sculptural Fragments and Reliefs from the Vatican Museums, Including the Sarcophagus of M. Sulpicius Pylades’ 1819
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 8 Recto:
Studies of Sculptural Fragments and Reliefs from the Vatican Museums, Including the Sarcophagus of M. Sulpicius Pylades 1819
D15117
Turner Bequest CLXXX 7
Pencil on white wove paper, 161 x 101 mm
Inscribed by the artist in pencil (see main catalogue entry)
Inscribed by John Ruskin in red ink ‘7’ bottom left, descending left hand edge
Stamped in black ‘CLXXX 7’ bottom left, descending left hand edge
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
During his 1819 stay in Rome, one of Turner’s most extensive sketching campaigns was the large number of pencil studies made from the sculpture collections of the Vatican Museums (for a general discussion, see the introduction to the sketchbook). This page contains sketches of three or four distinct objects, which were probably found in the Galleria Lapidaria (Lapidary Gallery) of the Museo Chiaramonti. The studies are numbered from top left to bottom right:
a.
Cecilia Powell has identified the largest sketch on the page as depicting the sarcophagus of M. Sulpicius Pylades,1 found in the Galleria Lapidaria (Lapidary Gallery) of the Museo Chiaramonti.2 Turner has recorded the Latin inscriptions from the object as ‘DM | M SYL’ at the top, and ‘PICUS | LADIS’ within the shield. The first part translates as ‘D[is] M[anibus]’, ‘To the spirits of the departed’, and is a common phrase found on Roman funerary monuments.
b.
The sketch in the bottom left-hand corner appears to depict part of an unidentified funerary altar.
c.
The bottom centre sketch represents the top of another unidentified funerary altar
d.
In the bottom right-hand corner, parallel with the bottom of the page, is an unidentified monument which Turner has inscribed with an indecipherable annotation ‘[...?nide] and [?Lo...].

Nicola Moorby
November 2009

1
Powell 1984, p.412.
2
See Walther Amelung, Die Sculpturen des Vaticanischen Museums, Berlin 1903–8, vol.I, ‘2. Galleria Lapidaria Seite 161–308’, no.159, pp.282–3, reproduced pl.29.

How to cite

Nicola Moorby, ‘Studies of Sculptural Fragments and Reliefs from the Vatican Museums, Including the Sarcophagus of M. Sulpicius Pylades 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, November 2009, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-studies-of-sculptural-fragments-and-reliefs-from-the-vatican-r1139529, accessed 22 December 2024.