Modern Italy: The Pifferari
J. M. W. Turner·1838
Historical Context
Modern Italy: The Pifferari, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1838 alongside its companion Ancient Italy: Ovid Banished from Rome, depicts the pifferari — bagpipe-playing shepherd musicians who came down from the mountains to Rome each Advent to play before the shrines and nativity scenes of the city. The pifferari were a celebrated feature of Roman winter life described by every Grand Tourist and famously painted by several German Nazarene artists, who saw in these mountain pipers a surviving remnant of ancient pastoral simplicity. Turner's treatment contrasts deliberately with the Nazarene approach: where the German painters sought precise ethnographic detail and linear clarity, Turner dissolves the pifferari into a warm, luminous Italian landscape where the musicians function as chromatic accent rather than ethnographic subject. The pair of paintings — ancient and modern Italy — poses an implicit question about historical time and artistic tradition that was one of Turner's central preoccupations in the late 1830s: what survives of the past in the living present of the Mediterranean landscape.
Technical Analysis
Turner renders the Italian scene with warm, golden light and atmospheric depth, using the genre figures as a compositional anchor within a broadly painted landscape of characteristic luminosity.
Look Closer
- ◆Look for the pifferari themselves — the Italian street musicians playing their characteristic bagpipe-like instruments, their traditional dress distinguishing them as figures from the timeless Roman rural world.
- ◆Notice the modern Rome in the background — buildings and streets that contrast with the ancient costume of the musicians, Turner's 'Modern Italy' title emphasizing this contrast between contemporary and traditional.
- ◆Observe the warm Italian light that Turner uses throughout — the golden quality of Roman light in winter, when the pifferari traditionally came to the city to play during Advent.
- ◆Find the Claudian elements Turner includes — classical ruins or architecture in the background that connect the contemporary street scene to the long history of Italian musical and artistic tradition.
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