Art: A Violent Venetian

One wintry night in 1699, in a rain-lashed Venetian tavern, a young artist named Marco Ricci killed a gondolier who had slighted his paintings. Had it not been for this murder, argue some Italian historians, 18th century Venetian landscape painting might never have thrived as it did. To keep Ricci from the law, his Uncle Sebastiano packed the young hothead off to Dalmatia, where the wild landscape inflamed his imagination. After the heat was off in Venice, which took four years, he returned, and his painting began to give new life to the coloristic Venetian tradition that had seemed over with the death of Tintoretto a century before.

Ricci became a much-commissioned, much-traveled painter and a foremost influence on others, but with his death in 1729 his fame ebbed away. In 1933, a major Marco Ricci oil sold for a paltry $500. Now renewed interest in Ricci has led to a retrospective of 228 of his works at the Palazzo Sturm near Venice, which before closing last week drew a remarkable total of 47,600 visitors. And the $500 painting has been resold for $90,000.

Painter Ricci did not, of course, learn all he knew in Dalmatia. Uncle Sebastiano taught him, and he was much swayed by Genoese oils filled with fantastic orgies of intertwined trees. A talented stage designer, he traveled to London to design sets for the Italian opera there. (He could not resist turning out a few wicked caricatures of English operatic rehearsals, so satirical that they were long thought to be by Hogarth.) He then began painting imaginary ruins, mingling fancy with the realistic landscapes. And this foretaste of rococo and romanticism created a whole new genre of painting, called caprices, that came to edge out the veduta, or popular views bought mainly by Englishmen gallivanting on the European grand tour as forerunners of today's postcards.

His views of ruins swarm with gloomy shadows and tiny human figures scrambling ignorantly through the broken fragments of a past civilization. So much did he yearn for a picturesque rustic appearance that he painted his temperas on taut goatskins. Again and again he pictured tumultuous storm scenes along the seacoast.

When he was 52, he attempted suicide several times, with a sword by his side so that he would die with the appearance of a knight. Finally he succeeded. But without the Venetian visionary's work, such 18th century masterworks as the airy cityscapes of Canaletto and Guardi, the angel-frosted ceilings of Tiepolo and the imaginary prisons of Piranesi might never have come to grace great museums.