Marco Ricci

Marco Ricci was born in Belluno on 6 June 1676. He trained under his uncle, the painter Sebastiano Ricci, reportedly beginning in Milan around 1694 to 1696 before moving with him to Venice in 1696, and often assisted him on commissions early in his career. Around 1700 he began working in set design.

According to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and a 2026 forensic-psychiatry article discussing one of his paintings, Ricci was forced to leave Venice after a violent altercation: a gondolier is said to have insulted his work, and Ricci struck him with a jug, killing him. He fled to Split, in Dalmatia, where he remained for about four years before it was safe to return.

In 1708 he traveled to England with the painter Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, at the invitation of Charles Montagu, Duke of Manchester. In England he worked chiefly as a set designer for opera and contributed to fresco decoration in London and at Castle Howard. He returned to Venice in 1716 and lived and worked alongside his uncle Sebastiano until his death.

Sources differ on the exact end of his life. Wikipedia gives 21 January 1730 in Venice, and the Getty uses the same year; the National Gallery of Art in Washington instead records his death year as 1729. Both institutions agree he died in Venice. Given the conflict between major museum records, the precise date should be treated as 1729 to 1730 rather than a single confirmed day.

Museum scholarship consistently frames Ricci as a pivotal transitional figure. The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza describes his landscape paintings as his most original works and credits him as important to the development of eighteenth century Venetian landscape painting, citing his influence on Canaletto, Michele Marieschi, Francesco Guardi, Giuseppe Zais, and Francesco Zuccarelli. General surveys of Venetian painting repeat this framing, crediting his combination of real and imaginary elements and his handling of light as a direct precursor to the vedutisti who followed him. No verbatim, attributable quotation from a named critic in a major contemporary outlet could be confirmed for this profile.

Ricci's market is that of a documented but thinly traded Old Master. The auction database LotSearch records roughly 500 lots by the artist over time, with results confirmed for a bit under half of them, a volume that reflects centuries of dispersal through European auction houses rather than a modern, closely tracked market. The aggregator MutualArt cites realized prices reaching USD 653,911 for a painting and USD 165,286 for a work on paper, but it does not disclose the underlying lot title, auction house, or sale date, so those figures cannot be confirmed or treated as a verified record. The highest specific, fully sourced price found is EUR 13,420 for a painting titled Harbour Scene, sold through Lempertz in Cologne; the exact sale date is not published in that index, and other databases (Invaluable, LiveAuctioneers, Heritage Auctions, Artsy) do not show a clearly higher, fully documented figure but are not fully searchable. This should be read as the highest well documented result available, not as a confirmed all time record.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Marco Ricci, and no gallery or estate represents him; his work moves through Old Master auction houses and secondary market dealers rather than a managed primary market. Because public price data is sparse and inconsistently indexed across databases, any single sale result, including the highest documented figure cited here, should be treated as indicative rather than definitive. Collectors should also be careful of a naming collision: auction and reference databases sometimes list a distinct, much later artist named Marco Ricci (Italian, 1938 to 1995) whose modest price history is unrelated to the Baroque painter described here. Provenance and attribution should be checked against major museum holdings (the National Gallery of Art, the Getty, the Met, the Royal Collection Trust) before relying on any dealer or auction description alone.