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

Standard for execution of shade in drawings admitting its full depth. Held upside down it will be seen that the folds of the drapery might represent two beautiful leaves of a water-plant clasping its ascending stem. This shows at once the strictly ornamental and constructive arrangements, not only of every line, but of every surface in noble sculpture. In archaic Greek and Etruscan sculpture and in the parallel Christian schools of the xiith century these ornamental lines are disposed under the strictest submission to the law of gravity; the substance of the stuff being conceived as entirely fluent and incapable of forming an angle, unless under such violent tension as that of a whiplash when it is cracked. The introduction of draperies capable of sustaining themselves in angles is a sign of later schools, and the prevalence of such drapery of debased ones.