Ruins of a Vaulted Building

This was painted around 1730, the year Marco Ricci died in Venice. Ricci had all but invented Venetian landscape painting, and among the things he made fashionable was the painted ruin, a crumbling antique building that never actually stood anywhere, put together out of imagination. Zais took up that taste. What you are looking at is a capriccio, a fiction of antiquity: a great vaulted hall open to the sky, weeds working their way into the stone, arranged for pleasure rather than to record any real place. Small figures settle among the fallen blocks and give the ruin its scale. The canvas has been in the Accademia since 1923.