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Sebastiano Ricci (Scheda) |
Born in Belluno but Venetian by adoption, Sebastiano Ricci is the artist credited with Venice’s return to a pivotal role in painting’s Eighteenth century renewal. Though his life (1659-1734) spanned the waning of the XVIIth century and the early years of the XVIIIth, from his earliest works Sebastiano showed himself to be a forward-looking artist, who – absorbing the lessons of the great painters of the past – developed a poetics of his own, in which color and plastic force joined to create a new and cosmopolitan language.
The taste for “plagiary, for imitation that extends nearly to deceit” that Roberto Longhi saw in Sebastiano is almost a game for the artist: a game that enables him to “steal” – from Veronese, from Jacopo Bassano as well as from Luca Giordano – whole images, types and settings, bending them to his will and instilling them with a refined sophistication that presages the airy lightness of the international rococo.
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