J.M.W. Turner's Vortex: Painting, Alchemy, and Literature in the Perspective Lectures and Sketchbooks

Indianapolis, IN

English landscape painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) deepened the notion of sublimity in landscape painting through depictions of catastrophic storms at sea and treacherous mountain passes. While these particular works by Turner are often regarded as expressions of Romanticism or as precursors to abstraction, this research is focused on the possible literary references involved in the churning vortices of natural energy from many of Turner's oil canvases. Special attention has been paid to Turner's preparations for lectures to Royal Academy students and personal notebooks, where a copious amount of energetically scrawled notes document Turner's fascination with antiquity, poetry, and theories of color and design. Elemental, destructive, but also generative, Turner's painted vortices reflect the cosmological vortex of natural philosophers Empedocles and Anaxagoras. Though the largely self-educated Turner lacked formal training in the classics, it can be argued that from reading works by Vitruvius, Giambattista della Porta, Mark Akenside, and James Thomson, Turner gained an understanding of the vortex as science, magic, myth and literary conceit.