Imagination, interpretation, observation. The sketches of J.M.W. Turner around the Gulf of Naples

The genius of J.M.W. Turner is referable both to his talent, and to the continuous exercise of accurate observation of the landscape, and of freehand drawing on sketchbook with pencil and/or watercolour. The Master recorded his every visual stimulus on the pocket sketchbooks, and today leafing through those pages means retracing his experiences and the places he visited from England to the Mediterranean. On the bicentenary of his first voyage to Italy, this paper analyses some drawings of the Gulf of Naples through a new digital analytical method, which combines the spatiality of the drawings on the sheet, and the drawing of the perspective space, perceived by the draftsman. At the end of the synthetic examination, Naples can be considered as the place where Turner began to experiment carefully his characteristic artistic technique, able to translate his emotions in watercolour nuances, triggering as many emotions in the observer of the paintings