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The pulpit in the church of S.Ambrogio in Milan is described in the 1847 edition of Murray (Murray (1847b) p.154):
The pulpit is a curious structure standing upon eight arches. It is said to have been rebuilt ‘in 1201; but most of the ornaments are so obviously of the earliest Romanesque period, that it can only have been repaired. A remarkable basso-relievo representing the agape or love feast should be particularly noticed. Beneath it is a very splendid Roman Christian sarcophagus in the highest state of perfection.
The account in Murray agrees with current thinking. The pulpit is made up from an early Christian sarcophagus below a pulpit of about 1130. The whole crushed in 1196 by the collapse of the tower, and restored in the early 1200s (See Verzar (a)).
Ruskin is not interested in any of that. He is concerned at Notebook M p.7L with the getting the measurements right. He is concerned with the stream of Gothic and the ‘classical feeling adhering to the system of Italian Gothic’.
And at Notebook M p.10 he seizes on a particular detail: ‘The Lombards have a particular Proutishness in the way they fret and enrich their surfaces with lines, with little comparatively feeling of grace or completion; but often infinitely better than the finish of the cinquecento...’ This is illustrated at Notebook M p.9L.
The point is similar to that made by Selvatico about early Lombard work which he sees as being typified by the reliefs at Cividale. There is a comparison with a capital at San Michele, Pavia, at Notebook M2 p.128.
Plate 14 at Works, 16.276 [n/a] provides an image by Ruskin of the pulpit, and at Works, 16.277 [n/a] he comments on the image on the pulpit of Eve and the Serpent to argue that the truth and life of Lombard art marked the ‘birth of Italian art’ (Works, 16.276 [n/a]).
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[Version 0.05: May 2008]