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

One of Gruner’s engravings very admirably representing, as far as stamped colour and engraving can, one of the compartments of the church at Milan containing Luini’s frescoes , of which the St. Catherine in the alcove was chosen as a leading example. The decorations in the rest of the church are all of the finest time and perfectly represent to the student what painters like Luini, Carpaccio, and Perugino thought beautiful in building, condescending also themselves, like their great ancestors Cimabue and Giotto, frequently to execute the most subordinate details with their own hands. There is no saying what such architecture might have become had Italy persevered in the Christian faith. Its actual beauty was greatly interfered with by the impossibility of finding pupils good enough to work with the great masters, and such pupils could only have been supplied by a permanently disciplined & monastic school. Actually uneducated and infidel workmen were more and more admitted in the completion of the subordinate parts and the redundance of ornament became instantly vulgar when produced by sensual mechanism instead of religious R. enthusiasm. The main point which students have now to observe is that they need not pretend to imitate the Italian Renaissance until the best painters in the Academy are content to work on house-walls.