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

The drawing is taken from the point where the Via Daniele Manin opens into the Piazza delle Erbe in Padua, looking towards the Palazzo della Ragione which fills the centre of the drawing, a series of awnings and pile of goods leaning against the ramshackle loggia at its base. The corner of the Palazzo Municipio can be seen behind it.

Stylistically, the drawing belongs to the early 1840s, when Ruskin was working in graphite and wash with yellow highlights (a technique inspired by David Roberts's Syrian drawings). He visited Padua in 1841, passsing through the city on 6 May and staying overnight on 17 May (see I.xxxviii n. 2). Taylor dates the drawing to the latter visit; certainly May 1841 seems a reasonable date.

The drawing was first catalogued in the Oxford collection in 1906, when Cook and Wedderburn included it as no. 87 in the Reference Series - one of a set of frames (nos 84-100) which Ruskin had never listed in his own catalogues of the collection.

Although Ruskin visited Padua some six times, he seems never to have referred to the Palazzo della Ragione in his writings.