Pier Francesco Mola Coldrerio 1612 - 1666 Rome

Nicholas Turner, having seen the original, and Richard Cocke, from a photograph, have confirmed the attribution of this newly discovered drawing to Pier Francesco Mola.  Nicolas Turner suggests a date of around 1650.  The pose is strongly reminiscent of that of the figure at the far right of Domenichino's fresco The Flagellation of St Andrew, painted circa 1609 in San Gregorio Magno, Rome (see Richard Spear, Domenichino, London 1982, vol. II, pl. 59).  It is interesting to note that Mola acquired a number of drawings by Domenichino from Francesco Raspantino, the pupil to whom Domenichino had bequeathed the contents of his studio. 

Vigorous black chalk drawings such as this are rare in the oeuvre of Mola, compared to the more familiar pen and ink studies, the majority of which are compositional works.  Here Mola's debt to the Bolognese tradition is clearly visible, to the Caracci and to Guercino of course, whose influence can be seen particularly in the velvety definition of the calf of the figure's right leg through the use of outline and chiaroscuro.  Francesco Albani, a pupil of the Carrracci, is traditionally said to have been Mola's master.  Stylistically this handsome sheet can be associated with two other chalk studies by Mola, both in the British Museum.  The first is a very similar figure of an executioner running to the right, drawn in red and black chalk, with a similar use of strong, repetitive lines and strokes around the contours of the figure.  The quick indication of the right foot is drawn in an identical manner and seems to have been corrected with exactly the same stroke as the present study (see Nicholas Turner, Roman Baroque Drawings, London 1999, vol. I, no. 230, vol. II, fig. 230).  The other British Museum study, in black chalk with touches of red and yellow chalks, is the Head of a bearded man wearing a hat, also characterized by a vigorous use of chalk (see Turner, op.cit., vol. I, no. 229, vol. II, fig. 229). 

Both these studies seem, like ours, to be inspired by the work of other painters.  The first is related to the figure of an executioner in the left foreground of van Dyck's painting The Stoning of St. Stephen, now at Tatton Park, Cheshire, but which Mola could have seen in San Giacomo degli Spagnoli, the Roman church for which it was painted in 1623.  The other study resembles closely, in reverse, the figure of Nicodemus in Federico Barocci's altarpiece The Entombment, painted in 1579-82 for the church of Santa Croce, Senigallia.  Mola may have visited Senigallia during one of his two trips to Northern Italy.  These works are indicative of Mola's intellectual curiosity and his capacity to absorb information and integrate it into his own style.

Ann Sutherland Harris, in her review of the Mola exhibition in Lugano (Master Drawings, 1992, vol. 30, no. 2, p. 216), writes that the number of surviving drawings by the artist is quite small and that Mola himself did not conserve them as did, for example, Domenichino.  He preferred compositional ideas and seems to have avoided what was standard for his Roman contemporaries, the meticulous preparation of individual figures or drapery studies.  Even though the evidence of the majority of the surviving drawings by Mola definitely supports this observation, he must have executed studies such as this and the fact that they have not survived makes this magnificent example all the more important a discovery.