(Belluno 1676–1730)
Landscape with Classical Ruins and Figures,
oil on canvas, 100 x 140 cm, unframed

We are grateful to Annalisa Scarpa for confirming the attribution.

The present painting relates with only a few slight differences, to the same composition of a Landscape with Classical Ruins and Figures in the J. Paul Getty Museum, California (inventory number: 70.PA.33) and, like that version, can be dated to around 1725-1730. The fact that the same image should recur should be no surprise as other examples of Ricci repeating certain subjects are known: a useful parallel may be drawn with the two versions of the Capriccio with ruins and figures in the collection of Lord Barnard, Raby Castle and the painting at the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art, New Orleans (see A. Scarpa Sonino, Marco Ricci, Milan, 1991, p. 226, fig. 94 and 95) The repeated use of the same subject is clearly more frequent in his tempera works, which were faster to produce due to their size and technique than larger oil paintings.

In the present compostion the position of the bodies, the depiction of their movements and the execution of their garments all point to the artist’s well-known characteristics and Ricci´s manner also emerges clearly in the architectural structures, in the statuary and in the overall scenography, as well as in the paint and manner, rich in browns mixed with red, which are typical of his palette and which define the volume of some of the ruins.

The range of ruins present in Ricci’s paintings plays fundamentally on a series of about ten monuments, interpreted with fantasy and assembled to form a natural and harmonious-looking group: the temple of Vesta alongside the pyramid of Cestius, the Fora alongside the statues, sarcophagi, urns and obelisks; vegetation grows and roots over everything, conferring over all the poetic aura of a Romanticism ante littera.

The present painting reveals the most typical features of Ricci’s painting of ruins: the construction unfolds with the creation of side wings revealing a series of planes in which the view becomes increasingly less sharply defined. The inclusion of natural elements softens the otherwise architectural severity of the scene, packed with statues and buildings, between which move a number of figures, some in groups of two or three, some alone.

Marco Ricci is a fundamental figure for any understanding of the development of landscape painting in the Veneto during the eighteenth century and for the precursors of the vedutismo of the same period. It is known that in his manner of painting landscapes, he drew on a late-sixteenth-century legacy which was rooted in the work of Titian and had been neglected for some years; at the same time, he was also influenced by Salvator Rosa and Pieter Mulier, known as Tempesta, as well as other North European artists.