Joseph Mallord William Turner - A Villa (Villa Madama - Moonlight), for Rogers’s ‘Italy’, 1826-27

 

Joseph Mallord William Turner - A Villa (Villa Madama - Moonlight), for Rogers’s ‘Italy’, 1826-27
Pencil, pen and ink, and watercolour, approximately 130 x 132 mm on white wove paper, 240 x 297 mm
Tate, UK

This vignette was engraved by Henry le Keux and appears as the end-piece for the twenty-seventh section of Rogers’s Italy, entitled ‘An interview. 

Villa Madama is one of the most famous and widely imitated villas and terraced gardens of the High Renaissance. It was designed by Raphael who intended it to rival the villas of antiquity. The villa, on the Janiculum Hill in Rome, included a courtyard with a monumental flight of steps (seen here in the foreground) and an open air amphitheatre, which the poet describes at some length. Rogers’s final verses are nicely complemented by the dark and poetic exterior view shown here: 

"The rising moon we hailed,
Duly, devoutly, from a vestibule
Of many an arch, o’er-wrought and lavishly
With many a labyrinth of sylphs and flowers,
When Raphael and his school from Florence came,
Filling the land with splendour – nor less oft
Watched her, declining, from a silent dell,
Not silent once, what time in rivalry Tasso,
Guarini waved their wizard-wands,
Peopling the groves from Arcady, and lo,
Fair forms appeared, murmuring melodious verse, –
Then, in their day, a sylvan theatre,
Mossy the seats, the stage a verdurous floor,
The scenery rock and shrub-wood,
Nature’s own; Nature the Architect." (Italy, pp.134–5)

In addition to the Villa Madama, Turner’s vignette also shows the Villa Mellini, which appears in the upper right of the composition. The structures have been drawn according to two different perspective systems and are lit by opposing light sources: whereas Villa Madama appears to be illuminated from within, the exterior of Villa Mellini is brightly lit by the moon. Both of these ambiguities contribute to the overall sense of other-worldly mystery that dominates the scene.