Assumption of the Virgin Mary

Ricci was a versatile artist - he painted frescoes, large altarpieces and easel paintings. His spontaneous brushwork influenced a number of artists of the subsequent generations - in Bohemia, he was admired by Peter Brandl, among others. Gradually he abandoned the chiaroscuro painting and aimed at a different use of light in his colour scheme, finding his models in 16th-century Venetian painters, especially Paolo Veronese. In its composition, this painting corresponds to Ricci’s altarpiece in St Charles of Borromeo Church in Vienna, for which a surviving sketch is held by the Szépmüvészeti Museum in Budapest, and another has recently been discovered in Nysa, Poland. The size, the style of the work and its arch-like upper part suggest this might be an oil design for the large Viennese composition. A more probable guess is that this is the so-called ricordo - which means that the Prague painting was created only after, or simultaneously with the Viennese altarpiece.