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Crockets are, in Gothic architecture, ornaments, usually in the form of leaves or buds, on Gothic pinnacles and canopies. The word retains the sense of a hooked form found in its French origins. For examples see Figures 3 and 4 of Plate 1 (Temperance and Intemperance in Curvature) facing Works, 11.8.
At Works, 9.404 Ruskin asserts that the best Venetian architecture is without either crockets or finials, and the ecclesiastical architecture of Venice is ‘better or worse in proportion to the diminution or expansion of the crocket’. The perfect use of the crocket is to be found, he argues, in Giotto's Campanile in Florence. The point is reinforced at Works, 11.12 f, where the crocket is said to belong to gabled architecture of a kind Ruskin considers to be not typically Venetian.
Crockets to which Ruskin draws particular attention in the notebooks are those on the door of the church at Santo Stefano, those on the Porta della Carta, and those he associates with the niches of St Mark’s. They are an element Ruskin’s narrative of the decline of Venetian Gothic.
See Quill (2000) pp.49 and 109-110 for photographs and for the context of Ruskin’s thinking.
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[Version 0.05: May 2008]