Sebastiano Ricci - The Triumph of Venus

Sebastiano Ricci 1659 Belluno - 1734 Venice

Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 48 x 38.5cm

Essay

Like Pellegrini, Sebastiano Ricci can be considered a renovator of the great Venetian decorative style in the tradition of the Cinquecento. He was trained in Venice by Federico Cervelli and Sebastiano Mazzoni. A pupil of Giovanni Gioseffo Dal Sole in Bologna, it was in this city that he obtained his first official commissions and the support of the Duke of Parma, Ranuccio II Farnese, who commissioned The Continence of Scipio, The Abduction of Helen (Parma, National Gallery) and Scenes from the Life of Pope Paul III (Piacenza, Museo Civico). Sent to Rome to study the works of Carracci, Ricci began to develop his own style. Luca Giordano and the great decorators Pierre de Cortone and Baciccio played a central role in its development. In 1695, he travelled to Northern Italy and discovered Florence, Bologna, Modena and Milan, where he met Alessandro Magnasco. He completed several decorative ensembles in Venice, Rome and Padua around 1700. After a brief sojourn in Vienna in 1702, he painted frescoes for the Murucelli and Pitti palaces in Florence around 1706-1707, which betray his debt to Veronese and reveal the Rococo style of his full maturity. Madonna and Child with Saints in the church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice bears witness to this new, clear, ample, dynamic and fluid material. Between 1712 and 1716 he travelled to London with his nephew Marco, and painted, among other things, large mythological compositions for Burlington House. On his way back, Ricci stopped in Paris in 1718 and was received at the Academy of Painting and Sculpture with the Triumph of Wisdom over Ignorance, which established his international reputation. He ended his career in Venice,where he executed a considerable number of decorative canvases with mythological or allegorical subjects, as well as church paintings.

This preparatory sketch for the Triumph of Venus, kept at the J. P. Getty Museum in Los Angeles. In this work, executed around 1713, Ricci creates a pyramidal and tumultuous composition. Naiads, tritons and putti swirl around the goddess in the eddies of the waves. The painter uses a wide range of tones to describe the playful and graceful figures, extending from the tanned complexion of muscular men to the very pale skin of women. The pearl-white body of Venus, accentuated by pink highlights on the cheeks, bosom, stomach and knees, seems to radiate from the inside. In the azure-blue sky, misty clouds and waning sunlight are rendered by quick, gliding touches of pink paint.

This work is a trove of details to savour: the goddess, surrounded by her retinue, is seated on a throne covered with elegant red drapery and pulled by muscular tritons. She turns to one of her companions and orders him to lead the convoy to the shore she points at in the background. To the left, a young boy blows into a shell to warn those in attendance of the change of direction. Seen from the back, a triton in the foreground on the right pulls with all his might on one of the strings attached to the conch. A tiny cupid flying over the scene seizes a handful of corals in a tray presented by a naiad concealed behind the divinity. Perched above Venus and wrapped in a saffron-yellow cloth, another delicately holds in his right hand a pearl necklace which falls on the hair and shoulder of the goddess.

Our study bears witness to the reflections of the artist who to start envisaged a more compact composition, inscribed in a vertical format. Although the figures are arranged in the same way as in the final painting, there are slight variations in our project, which could be a modello previously presented to the commissioner. In this sketch, the putti twirling to the left brandishes a branch of coral as he rises above the group, while his hand still makes contact with the tray in the painting at the Getty. The white drapery which partially conceals the nudity of Venus in our study, reveals her right thigh in the final work. Finally, the strings pulled by the tritons andthe pearl ornament adorning the deity's hair are arranged differently.

Sebastiano Ricci composes this work as his activity begins to spread all over Europe. The work derives from a Triumph of Galatea executed the same year by the painter and intended to adorn the staircase of Burlington House in London (current seat of the Royal Academy). There are many similarities between the painting in the Getty and this setting, including the pyramidal shape of the group of figures, the lustful attitude of the goddess who points her finger in the direction to follow, and that of the muscular triton seen from behind pulling on the strings, and finally the light colours and the moving atmosphere which reveal the influence of Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, an artist also commissioned to decorate the Burlington.

Sebastiano Ricci distinguishes himself from his predecessors who executed purely Baroque art that is more tenebrist and uniform, characterised by dramatic and solidly constructed compositions. Our work bears witness to the painter's evolution towards a Rococo style, developed after his journey to Florence in the first decade of the 18thcentury. He now favours light subjects, graceful figures and a clear and limpid chromatic organisation dominated by pastel colours. As Luigi Lanzi wisely observed, “his stay in Tuscany certainly sharpened Sebastiano Ricci's sense of form with an assured balance between the parts, a great lightness. Light and shadow now divide the painting equally, in a supreme harmony which gains sculptural prominence in a colour that is not at all mortified but, on the contrary, is wonderfully luminous ”. The nervous brush, the sensual and seductive character of the Triumph of Venus, the elegant and manicured shapes and the importance given to the sky welcoming the play of sunlight, are reminiscent of Tiepolo and also Boucher. Moschini admirably described this “new synthesis which opened up new horizons of pure painting, even if the scene is only a ballet, but as felt in the wonders of colour, in its most vibrant, acute, agile accents ”.

Footnotes

1 Luigi Lanzi, Storia pittorica dell'Italia, Bassano, 1789.

2 Vittorio Moschini, La pittura italiana del Settecento, Milan, 1931.

Related bibliography

Jeffery Daniels, Sebastiano Ricci, Hove, Wayland, 1976.

Aldo Rizzi, Sebastiano Ricci, Milan, Electa, 1989.

Settecento. The century of Tiepolo. Italian 18th century paintings exhibited in French public collections, exhibition catalogue, Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 5 October 2000-7, January 2001, Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 26 January-30 April 2001, Paris, RMN, 2000.

Annalisa Scarpa Sonino, Sebastiano Ricci, Milan, B. Alfierie, 2006.