A Bacchanal

This Bacchanal at LACMA, dating to around 1697, depicts a Dionysian revel in the tradition of Titian's great Bacchanals painted for the Este court—a lineage Ricci consciously engaged throughout his career. Bacchic subjects offered painters maximum license for sensuous color, dynamic composition, and figures in states of abandon, all virtues of Venetian painting at its most characteristic. This early work shows Ricci already in command of the vocabulary: the tumbling figures, the vine-wrapped revelers, the warm flush of wine and skin. LACMA's holding documents the dispersal of Italian Baroque painting across American collections during the major European auction cycles of the early and mid-twentieth century.

The reveling figures are rendered with luminous flesh tones and flowing draperies, Ricci's warm palette and fluid brushwork creating an atmosphere of hedonistic pleasure characteristic of the Venetian approach to Dionysian subjects.