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

The print shows three large illuminated initials, A B C and D, each decorated with interlace and white dogs. It was originally plate XXV in "Longobardo cassinese", the pages and plates of which were issued out of sequence between 1877 and 1878 under the imprint Litografia di Montecassino, as dispense II-IV of "Paleografia artistica di Montecassino", edited by Oderisio Piscicelli Taeggi; this plate was in dispensa IV, issued in 1878. Although the series reproduces manuscripts from the monastery at Monte Cassino, the manuscripts from which they are taken are not always identified, and so it is unclear from which manuscript this illumination was copied.

According to Ruskin's lecture on "Classic Schools of Painting", delivered on 19 May 1883, he had received Piscicelli Taeggi's work just before resuming his Professorship at the beginning of the year. Consequently, the drawing does not appear in any of Ruskin's catalogues, being first listed by Cook and Wedderburn as no. 198 in the Reference Series in their 1906 edition of Ruskin's catalogue. At that time, it accompanied another plate fron Piscicelli Taeggi, and three from Westwood's "Fac-similes of the Miniatures & Ornaments of Anglo-Saxon and Irish Manuscripts"; another three plates from Piscicelli Taeggi were also listed amongst the unframed works by Cook and Wedderburn, and are listed in the present catalogue as Unframed nos 39.a-c.

In his lecture, Ruskin described how 'I have chosen these four magnificent letters to place in your schools - magnificent I call them, as pieces of Gothic writing; but they are still, you will find on close examination, extremely limited in range of imaginative subject. For these, and all the other letters of the alphabet in that central Benedictine school at the period in question, were composed of nothing else but packs of white dogs, jumping, with more contortion of themselves than has been contrived even by modern stage athletes, through any quantity of hoops. But I place these chosen examples in our series of lessons, not as patterns of dog-drawing, but as distinctly progressive Gothic art, leading infallibly forward - though the good monks had no notion how far, - to the Benedictine collie, in Landseer's "Shepherd's Chief Mourner," and the Benedictine bulldog, in Mr. Briton Rivière's "Sympathy." (Art of England, § 63 = XXXIII.309-310.)