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See Works, 11.348 and the illustration there in Plate 15 of the ‘Renaissance Capitals of the Loggia’. There is a drawing of one of the capitals of the Upper Arcade at Bit Book p.44, and there are references at Notebook M2 p.44; Notebook M2 p.45; Notebook M2 pp.46-50; Notebook M2 p.111; Gothic Book pp.26L-28 starting from ‘over Noah’; and in Palace Book pp.22-25L.
The Ducal Palace. Series of Capitals of Lower Arcade provides for Ruskin a case study of decline, with the later copies of earlier forms providing evidence of earlier excellence and later decline. It was harder for Ruskin to fit the capitals of the upper arcade into a similarly straightforward linear account. Similar points are made about the upper arcade, but at Notebook M2 p.111 Ruskin suggests that those he had thought late because they were badly cut were not late but evidence that even in earlier time it was the ‘general practice of the Italian workmen to put careless cutting into the upper stories’. The point is changed slightly at Notebook M p.112: account was taken of the viewpoint so that cutting was more careful when the viewpoint was likely to be more frequented by people as they moved around the outside of the Ducal Palace. In the published text at Works, 10.292 the point is made differently in the context of Ruskin’s much more positive judgments of the capitals of the upper arcade: the worst when seen from above were best when seen from below because they were adapted to the viewpoint from which they were intended to be seen. A similar point is made at Works, 9.297 about the ‘head of the Adam of the Ducal Palace’ and the account the sculptor took of the viewpoint from which it would be seen.
Ruskin did not make explicit the relationship of that insight to the parts of the Vendramin tomb which he considered fraudulent because not properly cut at the back.
At Works, 10.278 the variety and the disposition of the capitals of the upper arcade provide evidence for Ruskin’s conclusions about Gothic style in relation to centralisation and subtle proportion of the Byzantine palaces. At Works, 10.429 he returns to their variety and to the excellence of many of them, citing as particular examples that of the winds noted at Palace Book p.22, and that of the birds described (and said to have been daguerreotyped) at Notebook M2 p.50.
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[Version 0.05: May 2008]