Landscape with Streams, Monks, and Washerwomen

This is one of Marco Ricci's largest surviving landscapes, and the country in it is real. Scholars recognise the valley of the Piave, the river that runs down from the mountains near Belluno where Ricci grew up. He fills it with ordinary life: two monks at their prayers off to one side, women crouched at the stream washing linen, the water sliding over the rocks between them. For the shape of the trees and the broken ground he leaned on something old, drawings by Titian and prints by Domenico Campagnola made almost 200 years earlier, and turned that inherited language toward things he had actually seen. Painted around 1715, it hung for a long time in the Corniani Algarotti collection in Treviso, next to its companion piece, a quieter scene of horses at a drinking trough.