Description
Circle of Marco Ricci (Belluno 1676 – Venice 1730) – River landscape with figures.
Oil on canvas, in a carved and gilded wood frame.
Marco Ricci (Belluno 1676 – Venice 1730) was among the leading figures in the renewal of Venetian landscape painting between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Trained alongside his uncle Sebastiano Ricci, he studied the Roman classicist tradition of Gaspard Dughet and Salvator Rosa, later working in Milan, Dalmatia and London, where he was active as a stage designer and landscape painter for the Italian opera. Back in Venice, he developed an original landscape idiom built on compositions in successive planes, architectural ruins and broad, animated skies, laying the groundwork for the eighteenth-century developments of the genre carried forward by Zuccarelli and Zais.
The present work belongs to Ricci’s circle, from which it draws its characteristic compositional elements: the scenographic construction through receding planes, the ruined tower crowning the hill, and the sky animated by large cloud masses. The wind-blown tree on the left, a recurring device in Ricci’s compositions used to balance the scene, and the staffage figure carrying a barrel on his shoulders, akin to the dockworkers found in his harbour scenes, further confirm this stylistic proximity. The remaining figures of travellers and washerwomen along the bank recall the repertoire of Canaletto-esque staffage widespread in Venetian landscape painting of the period, while the warm, earthy palette and the taste for an Arcadian atmosphere complete the painting’s stylistic profile.
Condition report: Relined canvas. Good state of preservation of the pictorial surface.
