View of the park of a villa

Marco Ricci is remembered for wild country, storms breaking over crags and rivers in flood, so this small painting comes as a surprise: a formal garden, the clipped park of a country villa with its straight walks and trimmed hedges. In the early 1700s the Venetian nobility were building and planting exactly such gardens on the mainland, ordered green spaces set apart from the untidy landscape beyond. Ricci lays the paths out in receding lines and dots them with a few strolling figures. It is painted, like many of his late works, on a small piece of kidskin, and it belongs to his last years, the 1720s.