Turner & Italy
27 March – 7 June; National Gallery Complex

The walls of the RSA are painted dark, majesterial blues and greens, towering like Turner’s sublime Alpine cliff faces over the gallery team below. Eight figures pad around quietly, white-gloved, intent on getting Turner’s precious oils and watercolours from floor to wall with the utmost care. The exhibition’s curator and designer stand at a cloth-covered table, leafing cautiously through rare books from the artist’s own library, before they’re locked into place in their special cases.

By the end of this week over 100 works will fill the walls of Turner & Italy, Scotland’s most ambitious exhibition to date about the master of Romanticism. While others have capitalised on Turner’s association with Venice, this show aims to reveal the full extent of his Italian connections.

Turner is a perennial favourite, bridging the divide between traditional landscape painting and modern art. But until Friday, when the RSA’s oppressive walls will be brightened with spotlights and echoing with an eager public, the atmosphere will be one of calm, measured reverence for the Painter of Light.

If this show were being installed in London 170 years ago, it might have been a very different story. The galleries would have rung with the excited chatter of artists, gathered around the hunched figure of Turner himself. He loved to submit unfinished canvases to the Royal Academy, “without form and void,” as one contemporary put it, “like chaos before the creation”.

Then, on Varnishing Day – when artists gave their works one last coat of varnish before the exhibition opened – Turner would make a great display of finishing his painting with fingers, thumbs, rags and knives, as well as both ends of his brush. He was known to change the colour and brightness of a work entirely, just to upstage those which hung next to it.

The two “Rosebery” Turners – on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Scotland and central to this exhibition – are a case in point. Never varnished, and untouched by the ravages of well-meaning restorers, they have been found by the gallery’s conservators to contain a number of last-minute surface changes. These altered figures, buildings and animals could easily be the product of such showmanship from a man who understood the power of marketing.

The Rosebery Turners depict modern Rome, painted in the 1830s. The city, which Turner had by then explored inch by inch, sprawls into the distance, its ruined classical buildings a reminder of a once great empire. Bustling and atmospheric, the canvases form a centrepiece to the show, between the topographical concerns of Turner’s earlier Italian history paintings, and the shimmering near-abstraction of his later Venetian views.

Despite his life-long loyalty to the classically-oriented Royal Academy, Turner was the lynch-pin of Romantic art in Britain, celebrating sublime chaos in nature, and tragic drama in human history. Where forerunners had created set pieces in muted tonal harmonies, Turner’s palette became ever more vivid, and compositional details were swallowed up by misty veils of atmospheric effect.

Rome offered Turner a land peppered with ruins of an epic past, and peopled with peasants struggling to make a life for themselves in the shadow of that great empire. The long Anglo-French Wars prevented Turner from seeing the city for himself until he was 44, but by then he was firmly associated with Italian art, history and landscape.

From the age of 14 Turner had copied Italian paintings and engravings, and studied the country’s literary classics. He’d absorbed the work of his hero, 17th century Frenchman Claude Lorrain, who imbued an idealised Roman countryside with his own particular glow.

Turner applied these lessons to subjects such as Thomson’s Aeolian Harp, a painting later mistaken for a view of Italy, though it was set in the Thames Valley. When, in 1819, Turner made his first full journey through Italy, he sought out the idealised land he had dreamed of for so long, recording his excitement when he found “the first bit of Claude”.

Despite a tendency to lose much of his baggage (including paintings), Turner was a seasoned traveller. He carried a two-foot dagger in his umbrella handle on his way through bandit country to Rome. On his way back through the Alps, on two separate occasions, his coach crashed and he was forced to continue on foot through the January snows. Adventures such as these were good material for Turner’s sketchbooks, and far from putting him off, they whetted his appetite for more.

Turner made seven trips to Italy in all, Rome capturing his imagination for many years and Venice becoming his obsession later in life. He made thousands of drawings, and hundreds of watercolours, recording every view, building, and piece of art which might come in handy. He even set up a studio in Rome in 1828, in which to embark on major oil paintings. His only exhibition in the city was a spectacular flop, attracting media responses such as “crapped is not painted”, but for Turner, Rome remained the “Land of all Bliss”.

It wasn’t until 1834, when the artist was 59, that he made his first oil painting of Venice. Turner’s visits to the city totalled no more than four weeks in his whole life, but his name quickly become synonymous with Venice. The city “was surely built to be painted by the Canaletti and Turner” said a contemporary critic, and while Turner capitalised on Venice’s increasing popularity, he was also a major factor in its growing appeal.

Aged 65 on his last visit, Turner was as energetic as ever. He painted over 100 watercolours in two weeks, many at night, and some the morning after, with hints of female companionship stretched out on the bedsheets. The oil paintings inspired by this last trip are among the artist’s most groundbreaking, with land, sea and sky dissolving into a haze of shifting light. “People talk a great deal about sunsets,” said Turner, “but when you are all fast asleep, I am watching the effects of sunrise far more beautiful.”

Approach To Venice, 1844
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

When critic John Ruskin first saw Approach To Venice, it was, he thought, “the most perfectly beautiful piece of colour of all that I have seen produced by human hands, by any means, or at any period.” A dazzling painting, it depicts a misty Venice as seen over the Lagoon from a cluster of gondolas in the foreground.

Turner first exhibited the painting, as he often did, with a quote from Byron: “The moon is up, and yet it is not night,/ The sun as yet disputes the day with her.” A shimmering white moon sits low in the sky, reflecting its light all the way down to the lower edge of the frame. The sun is not visible, but two thirds of the sky blazes with its creamy, thick yellow light. It was in his Venice paintings that Turner began to use a white ground (the base coat), and here it’s covered with thin glazes of intense colour to achieve that magical, flickering quality.

Venice, in the distance, is there but not there. The distinctive bell-tower of San Marco rises up from the horizon, anchoring the low strip of land, which otherwise shifts in and out of focus, almost a figment of the imagination. Critics at the time were confused by this topographical vagueness, accepting uneasily that it was a “general impression” of the city. Thirty years later, scathing critics would apply the same word to Claude Monet, a devoted fan of Turner, and it would stick.

In the foreground, the gondolas are full of people, possibly on their way to a ball as in other related paintings. The boats’ once rich reds and greens were quick to fade, leaving a fickle Ruskin disgusted by the “miserable wreck of dead colours”. The critic must have been having an off-day: Approach To Venice was and still is a breathtaking poem of light.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 22.03.09