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The evidence from Works, 9.343 makes it certain that the reference is Inferno XXII 129.
The line reads ‘e quei drizzò volando suso il petto’. Alichino, a fiend, swoops down towards the sinner in a lake of boiling pitch. The sinner in fear dives beneath the surface, and Alichino flies back up. Alichino is compared with a bird of prey which misses a duck. Having swooped down, the bird of prey has to climb (drizzo volando - flying upwards) with its breast (il petto) up (suso) to avoid hitting the water when the duck for which it is aiming dives beneath the surface.
Alichino is a fiend rather than a friend, and the reading ‘fiend’ is clear enough in the manuscript. It is odd that Ruskin should compare a ‘cherub who sweeps downwards on the wing’ with a devil, and that might explain the error in the Ruskin Library Transcript T7A, which gives ‘friend’ for ‘fiend’.
The reading in the transcript of ‘fetto’ for ‘petto’ appears to be a transcription error. The two letters ‘p’ and ‘f’ are easily confused in Ruskin’s handwriting, and it seems difficult to give any meaning to‘il fetto’ here.
The fact that the word order is wrong ‘il petto in suso’ for ‘suso il petto’ suggests that Ruskin is quoting the Italian from memory, and that is in itself impressive. However his memory is not altogether accurate. In taking the words out of context and changing their order he ignores the rhyme scheme of ‘difetto’, ‘sospetto’, ‘petto’.
Moreover his memory of the substance of the passage is inexact, and unlike the word order this is not corrected in the published edition. It is clear from the text that Dante is concerned with the moment when the bird of prey turns upwards to avoid hitting the water. In M, and in the published text, Ruskin appears to think that the image is of a downwards movement, even though that contradicts the straightforward meaning of the line, and, more oddly for Ruskin, it ignores the visual point of the image.
There are references to Dante at Notebook M p.5, Notebook M p.173, Notebook M p.181, and Notebook M p.199.
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[Version 0.05: May 2008]