It is often said a picture is worth a thousand words; on the other hand, sometimes it's words or music that provoke a visual image. And while visual artists and writers may be colleagues, rarely do such artists intersect their disciplines.

But Joseph Mallord William Turner, the 19th-century English artist, made his reputation as a painter of literary texts, including classical, Biblical and contemporary works. That Turner's role as a "literary" artist has been largely forgotten has mainly to do with the vagaries of the critical reaction that greeted his art - although from the outset, the public received his work with great approbation. Today, many people tend to think of Turner as a creator of luminous, almost lyrical essays in landscapes.

Fisher Gallery is treating visitors to a glimpse of Turner's literary side with its current exhibition, "Ut Poesis Pictura: J.M.W. Turner's Illustrations to the British Poets," on view Feb. 26-April 19. The show features a nearly complete set of the engravings Turner produced to illustrate the works of John Milton, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron and other British poets of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. It is the most comprehensive exhibition of Turner engravings ever shown in the United States.

Last exhibited in England in 1975, the collection was assembled by Mordechai Omer, now director of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Moshe Lazar, then dean of humanities at Tel Aviv University, acquired the engravings in the late 1970s as he was leaving Israel to become a USC professor in comparative literature.

Sonia and Moshe Lazar have made the entire collection available to Fisher Gallery for this exhibition. "It's a rare collection," Lazar said. "It's very unusual to have all the illustrations together. I'm really pleased to be able to share it with others and to provide this occasion for the exchange between literature and the visual arts."

The exhibition title playfully reverses Horace's famous phrase Ut pictura poesis ("As in pictures, so in poetry"). The work not only suggests Turner's versatility as an artist but also infers the dynamic interplay between the poets' words and the images of Turner's illustrative art. In particular, it exemplifies the artist's extraordinary talent for expressing his vision of the writers' words.

Students in the Museum Studies Program curated the show, which represents the culmination of their formal studies at USC. They are: Laura Landau, Leah McCrary, Natalie Nelson, Elizabeth Morín, Sharyn Church, Jeanna L. Yoo, Jeanette LaVere and Laura Tetlow.

The program, which began in 1980, has been led by Fisher Gallery director Selma Holo since 1981. Students participate in all aspects of mounting an exhibition, including writing a catalog essay, coordinating public programs and selecting works to be exhibited. Jennifer Jaskowiak, Fisher Gallery's curator and exhibitions coordinator, acts as the academic liaison between students and the gallery.

The student curators were charged with mastering an immense body of Turner scholarship before the exhibition. They were helped by faculty advisers Lynn Matteson, associate professor of art history, and Max F. Schulz, distinguished professor emeritus of English. Matteson, a Turner scholar, conducted a seminar last spring providing contextual background about the artist. Schulz, now curator of exhibitions at Fisher Gallery, provided students with a scholarly and curatorial focus.

Although Turner (1775-1851) is best known for his oil and watercolor paintings, his sense of adventure and desire to experiment led him to work in print media as well. The exhibition of Turner's delicate and complex engraved illustrations offers a unique opportunity to discover the artist's range and explore the dynamic interplay between words and images, Matteson said.

Even when Turner depicts pure landscape, more often than not a poetic passage is appended to the image; Byron, Milton, and Crabbe were his favorite poets. Turner's enthusiasm for such poetic attachments also included his own poetry. A fragmentary and unfinished work that he entitled The Fallacies of Hope can be characterized as an unfortunate experiment, Matteson said, but has remained of interest to scholars, who often find in the verse symbolic allusion that aids in explicating a particular painting.

Schulz said Turner was beset by publishing misfortune in the 1820s. His bid to extend his public patronage by way of a succession of engraving ventures - Picturesque Views of the Southern Coast of England, Picturesque Views in England and Wales, The Rivers of England and The Ports of England - resulted in a string of commercial failures. The turning point was a deluxe edition of Samuel Rogers' long narrative poem Italy in 1830, with 25 vignettes by Turner. This successful collaboration, along with a deluxe 1834 edition of Rogers' Poems, with 33 Turner engravings, served to enhance the appeal of the poet and the popularity of the artist.

As a result, book publishers - among them Robert Cadell, John Murray, William Finden, John Macrone and Edward Moxon - quickly saw the financial virtue of recruiting Turner to illustrate reissues of other books of poetry. It wasn't until the advent of photography in the later half of the century that Turner's popularity declined, Schulz said.

Mustering of the Warrior Angels (1835) is one of Turner's vignettes for Milton's Poetical Works, in which the artist's poetic appetite is wedded with his curiosity about the physical sciences. He was fascinated with a diagram of Galileo's solar system and, since Milton had visited Galileo in Florence, Turner thought it appropriate to represent the diagram in a corner of this work. In another piece for Poetical Works, Fingal's Cave, Staffa (1833-34), Turner envisions the literary work with a sense of the natural, involuntary and eternal ebb and flow of tides, suggesting the timelessness of nature in which there is no linear beginning or end, but rather a continual, circular flux.

As Turner's paintings evolved into the increasingly spectral abstractions of his later work, critics came to regard his work with growing confusion and often outright hostility. One critic went so far as to describe The Hero of a Hundred Fights (1847) as "not the madness of genius - [but] the folly and imbecility of old age." Clearly Turner's colored insubstantiality was not meant for the moralizing and literary art of the Victorian world.

By comparison, the generation of James Whistler and the French Symbolists embraced Turner's art, particularly the later works, and were inspired by them. In 1969, John Gage published Color in Turner: Poetry and Truth, in which he examined Turner's thematic and literary contexts. Other studies followed, firmly establishing Turner as an artist of a profoundly literary nature, however elusive. "Turner is arguably England's greatest artist, and few of his works are to be found outside of England," Schulz noted.

A richly illustrated catalog accompanying the Fisher Gallery exhibition offers 10 essays on Romanticism, the relationship between text and image, the transformation of watercolor drawings into black-and-white prints, and related topics.