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

The print shows seven illuminated letters, taken from a twelfth-century manuscript. Arranged in three rows of two, three and two letters respectively they are, reading from top to bottom and left to right, H, M, N, L, M, O, and O. They are decorated with interlace work, pale brown dogs, and, in the 'M', two imaginary monsters.

The print was originally plate XXII 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. According to p. 17 of "Longobardo cassinese", this plate reproduces letters in codex 47 in the library of the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino, dating from the late twelfth century.

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 amongst the unframed objects in the Drawing School (XXI.308). As the unframed examples had not been given an order by Ruskin, they have been given arbitrary accession numbers based upon their position in Cook and Wedderburn's list for the purposes of the current catalogue. At that time, it accompanied two more plates fron Piscicelli Taeggi. Another two plates from Piscicelli Taeggi were placed in the Reference Series, as nos 198 and 199.

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.)