Miseria

At Works, 10.406f, Ruskin makes use of the 33rd capital of the Ducal Palace. Series of Capitals of the Lower Arcade, the later copy, to interpret this face of the 12th capital. There he says that the renaissance copy reads ‘misericordia’, ‘pity’, and that ‘miseria’ here might be a contraction of ‘misericordia’, rather than ‘miseria’ or ‘distress’. If that is the case then presumably the man is listening to the pleas of the child rather than rebuffing them as Ruskin suggests here.

[Version 0.05: May 2008]