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

Turner noted inside the front cover of this sketchbook (D41050) that he arrived in Milan at noon on a Wednesday (14 January), complaining of ‘Snow all the way’. This is the first of ten works in the sketchbook depicting the city’s Duomo, formally known as the Basilica cattedrale metropolitana di Santa Maria Nascente. Turner sketched the Duomo from multiple angles and distances, circling around his subject: see also folios 11 recto, 12 recto, 13 recto, 15 recto and 60 verso–62 verso (D21684, D21686, D21688, D21692, D21760–D21764). Turner had previously sketched this subject during the outward leg of his 1819–20 tour of Italy, producing several exterior and interior views: for further commentary and a list of relevant works, see Matthew Imms’s entry for the Milan to Venice sketchbook in the present catalogue (Tate D14328; Turner Bequest CLXXV 2).

Here, rather than focusing on the cathedral’s more familiar front façade, Turner sketched the back of the building, glimpsed from one of the streets branching off the Piazza del Duomo. His vantage point was from La Corsia dei Servi, a wide thoroughfare since redeveloped and renamed the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II. Looking south-west towards the cathedral, which is partially obscured by buildings in the foreground, Turner swiftly outlined its flying buttresses, pinnacles, tracery and other architectural features. The tall lantern spire, an addition to the cathedral from the 1760s, is partially cropped out and completed as a separate detail to the left.1 The spire is surmounted with a gold statue of the Virgin Mary, known as Madonnina.