Sebastiano Ricci

Sebastiano Ricci was one of those Venetian painters who spent his life on the road, carrying the grand decorative manner of Italy to whoever would pay for a ceiling. Born in Belluno in 1659, in the mountains north of Venice, he worked in Bologna, Florence, Rome and Vienna before the pull of foreign courts took him further still.

Between 1712 and 1716 he was in England, at the height of a fashion for Italian decorators. There he painted a Resurrection across the ceiling of the chapel at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, the old soldiers' home in London, filling it with the tumbling, light-filled figures that were his signature.

He often traveled with his nephew Marco, a gifted landscape painter, the two of them collaborating on the same canvases. Ricci's airy colour and easy movement mark the moment when the heavy Baroque was loosening into the lighter Rococo, and the young Giambattista Tiepolo, who would carry that Venetian style to its peak, grew up studying exactly this. Ricci died back in Venice in 1734.