After the 2022 exhibition "John Constable. Landscapes of the soul", the Reggia di Venaria presents another extraordinary exhibition on the theme of landscape dedicated this year to William Turner.

The exhibition draws from the vast collection of the artist's works held at Tate UK . Counting around forty pieces, the selection includes evocative and imposing oil paintings (made by Turner to be exhibited at the Royal Academy in London), but also smaller oil sketches and watercolors in which the artist gave free rein to his creativity in reproduction of landscapes inspired by the themes of classical mythology .

Active during the first half of the 19th century, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) is one of the best-loved and best-known British artists. He is famous for his remarkable variety of landscape paintings, extraordinary inventiveness and expressive use of color. His career developed during the current of Romanticism which saw painters move away from binding artistic subjects and the controlled manipulation of the neoclassical period to develop a much more personal figurative language.

However, Turner, after two trips to Italy made in 1819 and 1828, and influenced by Richard Wilson, a British artist who lived for a long period between Rome and Naples in the second half of the eighteenth century, began to choose Italian landscapes (real or generic) as a backdrop for his mythological subjects by choosing more intense colors and rich atmospheric effects. The Bay of Baiae with Apollo and the Sibyl (1823) is an excellent example of Turner's mythological works more mature. The backdrop of Roman ruins and the figure of the Cumaean Sibyl, whose voice will fade over time, are the representation of some of the themes that Turner had most at heart: beauty and decadence, glory and decline, the fragility of life and the disappearance of empires .