Joseph Mallord William Turner

Lecture Diagram 38: Method for a Tuscan Capital (after Lorenzo Sirigatti) and a Circle (attributed to Jacques Androuet du Cerceau and Joseph Moxon)

c.1810

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In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

View by appointment
Artist
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Part of
I. Numbered Perspective Diagrams
Medium
Watercolour on paper
Dimensions
Support: 667 × 985 mm
Collection
Tate
Acquisition
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Reference
D17055
Turner Bequest CXCV 85

Display caption

Like many of Turner's lecture diagrams, this is much simpler than its source - a treatise by Lorenzo Sirigatti (misspelt by Turner), which it fails to represent adequately. Turner misunderstood Sirigatti's work, which he criticised as unnecessarily complex: 'My position [is] that the complicated appearances which simple forms are often made to assume tend more to ingeniously perplex than to clear the way to a study.'

Gallery label, September 1992

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