Getty Museum
Fishing Boats in a Storm
Creator
Marco RicciItalian Artist · 1676–1730
All works by this person →Born to a family of artists, Marco Ricci first studied with his uncle Sebastiano Ricci. After murdering a gondolier in a brawl, Marco fled to Dalmatia, where he spent four years apprenticed to a landscape painter. By 1705 he was in Milan working with Alessandro Magnasco, absorbing his free handling of paint. After trips to Florence and Rome, he went to the Netherlands and studied Dutch landscape p
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- about 1715
- Medium
- Gouache, on tanned skin
- Culture
- Italian
- Department
- Drawings
- Institution
- Getty Museum
After he returned to Italy from England in 1716 with his uncle and partner Sebastiano Ricci, Marco Ricci adopted the rare technique of applying gouache to dark brown tanned leather as his preferred method of drawing. In this gouache sketch on leather, Ricci took advantage of the skin's dark color to emphasize the ominous storm. The thinner applications of paint in the sky leave some of the leather visible, increasing the visual weight of the angry clouds. He copiously used lead white to make his pigments opaque, and the resulting lack of transparency in light reflecting off the water and sky gives the scene a chilling luminosity. The frightening storm and threat of doom--natural phenomena become fearsome--satisfied the aesthetic notion of the Sublime, the idea that images or words describing danger provided a pleasurable experience for viewers or readers, a vicarious thrill of terror enjoyed in the safety of a drawing room.
The authoritative record is held by Getty Museum. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.
Get printable QR codesHide QR codes
Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.
Related across collections
Semantically similar works from Getty Museum and other institutions.