Ashmolean The Elements of Drawing, John Ruskin’s teaching collection at Oxford

The drawing shows, in the foreground, the tomb of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194-1250), its porphyry sarcophagus resting on the backs of two pairs of lions beneath a pitched canopy supported on Corinthian columns. Behind it is the tomb of Roger II, King of Sicily (c.1095-1154), the sarcophagus resting on two pairs of carved men and the Corinthian columns decorated with mosaics.

The drawing was made when Ruskin was in Palermo in April 1874: Taylor notes that diary entries of 23, 24 and 30 April describe work on the drawing. (Ruskin also described being distracted by a maimed member of the church's staff and a young priest whilst he was drawing the tomb: Ariadne Florentina, §§ 165-6 = XXII.408-9). Ruskin also included two detail drawings of the lions from Frederick's tomb in the Working Series, case I, no. 49.

The drawing was first catalogued in the Oxford collection in 1906, when Cook and Wedderburn listed it as no. 84 in the Reference Series - occupying a space which had been left blank in Ruskin's catalogues of the Series.

For Ruskin, Frederick's tomb was 'the last example I can show you of pure Greek work in Europe', its 'entablature, pediment, all severe' (Aesthetic and Mathematic Schools, § 8 = XXIII.189-90); lecturing on "The Pleasures of Deed" on 1 November 1884, he described how he was surprised, in coming to Palermo, to discover that the tombs 'are, every atom, done by Greeks, and are as pure Greek as the temple of Ægina' (Pleasures of England, § 86 = XXXIII.476-7).