ABSTRACT
The Italian painter Marco Ricci came to England in late 1708 with fellow artist Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini in response to an invitation from Charles Montagu, 4th Earl and later 1st Duke of Manchester, then serving Queen Anne as Her Majesty’s Ambassador Extraordinary to the Venetian Republic. Ricci is said to have been a neurotic and to possess a volatile personality. Thus in his early twenties in Venice he was involved in a tavern brawl with a gondolier who died after Ricci broke a jug over his head; he then fled the city and only returned several years later. Marco Ricci painted images which illustrate the cultural dialectic of his time. The Rehearsals of the first group attempt at once to acknowledge and mediate the division between performers and audience; that is, the division between production and consumption which increasingly dominates the history of Western music from late Renaissance to the present.
