Perspective of ruins with figures

Among the numerous paintings of landscapes with ruined architecture and human figures in Palazzo Chiericati, this work by Marco and Sebastiano Ricci, dating back to the middle of the third decade of the eighteenth century, is outstanding for its high quality: it is a real “masterpiece of Veneto painting of ruins in the first half of the eighteenth century” (Ettore Arslan).

Remains of grandiose monuments of the classic period, shafts of columns lying on the ground, fragments of antique sculptures, mutilated statues, ruins abandoned through centuries of neglect, disrespectfully disfigured by bushes and weeds and deteriorated by the relentless passing of time, return to life thanks to the presence of human figures: a mother with her noisy children in the foreground, a soldier climbing over the stone remains, attracted by the beauty of a fragment of a female statue, a group of curious onlookers on the right and some stone masons in the background.

The plan of the general composition of the work is probably by Marco Ricci, accomplished by means of a series of perspective planes that decrease in depth, and he would also have worked on the ruined monuments, brightening them with touches of light. His uncle Sebastiano, on the other hand, painted the fragments of sculpture, the bas relief on the left of the picture, the human figures and the hills that we can see in the distance behind the remains of a temple. The hands of the two artists work in perfect harmony, creating an extraordinary work, the expression of that taste for the antique which, shortly afterwards, would lay the basis for the birth of archaeology.