Marco Ricci

1676 Belluno – 1729 Venice

Marco Ricci, the founder of 18th-century Venetian landscape painting, dedicated himself relatively late to the art of etching. His first attempts in this technique were made about 1723, and he soon attained complete mastery of the medium. Nevertheless, no editions of his printed work were published during Ricci’s lifetime, and it was not until 1730 that the Venetian publisher Carlo Orsolino posthumously brought out a set of twenty landscapes entitled Varia Marci Ricci Pictoris prestantissimi Experimenta ... (Bartsch XXI, 313, 1–20). Thanks to the researches of Giuseppe Maria Pilo, who discovered previously unknown trial proofs by Ricci in the possession of the Remondini Collection in Bassano’s Museo Civico in the early 1960s, the printed œuvre has been considerably extended, so that the catalogue of Ricci’s extant works now comprises a total of thirty-three sheets.