PIER FRANCESCO MOLA | Studies for a Mystic marriage of St. Catherine

Armando Neerman, Londres ; 
Collection Jacques Petithory (1929-1992) ; 
Acquis par échange en 1977.

Rennes, 2012, n°19 (notice par Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò)

Window mounted. Overall in good condition and media rather strong. Very slight and occasional surface dirt, paper in good condition. Sold unframed.
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Mola's grace and elegance as a draughtsman is well illustrated in this eloquent sheet, subtly executed in a combination of red chalk, delicately applied red wash, and fluent lines in pen and brown ink. The attribution to Mola was first suggested by Jacques Petithory.¹  Around 1616, the artist’s father, Giovanni Battista Mola (1586-1665), moved his family to Rome from Coldrerio, near Lugano, having been appointed architect to the Camera Apostolica, a position he held until 1634.  Little is known of Pier Francesco Mola's early training in Rome, except that he was apprenticed to Prospero Orsi (1565/70-1635), an artist from Ticino, and also, according to his near-contemporary biographer Passeri, to Cavalier d’Arpino (1568-1640).²    Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò convincingly suggested in her Rennes exhibition catalogue entry for this handsome sheet that it should be dated around the 1650s, on stylistic grounds.  Although the drawing cannot be connected to any known paintings by Mola, it is an accomplished sheet which clearly shows the artist’s ability to synthesize the range of sources upon which he seems to have formed his style, combining Venetian and Bolognese artistic traditions, two powerful idioms for an eager and talented young artist. Mola was in Northern Italy at least twice before the early 1650s. In his first absence from Rome he seems to have stayed for a while in Venice, and at the beginning of his second trip, around 1638-1640, he worked with Francesco Albani (1578-1660) in Bologna.  Albani’s influence, combined with elements of the Carraccesque tradition leading up to Guercino, can be strongly felt both in Mola’s drawings and in his painted works of the following decade.  

 Prosperi Valenti Rodinò rightly stressed the clear debt to Guercino’s graphic oeuvre that is apparent in the present drawing, pointing out several comparable drawings by Mola of the early 1650s, often executed in the same media, and with the same strong pictorial intensity.³  Among these is a study, now in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, an Allegorical figure with an unicorn (Purity), in which the handling of the red chalk, reinforced by pen and brown ink, is very similar to the technique seen here.⁴  The Windsor drawing relates to part of a decoration representing female allegorical figures, executed for the central ceiling of the Galleria of the Palazzo Pamphili, at Nettuno, which was seriously damaged during the Second World War; Mola worked at the Palazzo Pamphili between 1651 and 1652.  In her description of the present sheet, Prosperi Valenti Rodinò also points out ‘les souvenirs évidents de Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione’, and the elegant execution of the Adrien sheet is indeed very reminiscent of the fluency of lines characteristic of Castiglione’s drawing style – a less familiar aspect of Mola’s draughtsmanship.


At the time of the Rennes exhibition the subject of this drawing was identified as ‘Vierge à l’enfant et jeune femme.’  Only more recently has Monsieur Adrien recognised it as a study for The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine, which convincingly explains the presence of the young kneeling woman to the right side of the sheet.

We are grateful to Professor Richard Cocke for confirming, from an image, the attribution to Mola.

For an impressive black chalk and pastel head study by Mola, datable to the same period of the artist’s career, see lot 6

 ^1. The former attribution to Guercino was dismissed by Sir Denis Mahon in a letter to Mr. Adrien, dated 9 January 1990, in which he wrote: ‘In my opinion its former attribution to Guercino, while understandable, is not correct. …On the other hand, a certain generic similarity to Guercino’s drawing style is explicable on the basis that M. Petit Hory’s attribution to Mola is indeed correct.’

^2. G.B. Passeri, Vite de' Pittori, Scultori ed Architetti dall'anno 1641 sino all'anno 1673, ed. J. Hess, Leipzig/Vienna 1934, p. 36

^3. For instance: Agar and Ismael, Stockholm, National Museum, inv. no. 569/1863; Studies for the Dream of St. Joseph (recto and verso), London, British Museum, inv. no. 1946,0713.720; Judith, Düsseldorf, Sammlung der Kunstakademie, inv. no. KA (FP)962; The finding of Moses, Rome, Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, inv. no. FC. 128339

^4. Windsor Castle, The Royal Collection, inv. no. 6798; see N. Turner, Pier Francesco Mola, 1612-1666, exhib. cat., Lugano, Museo cantonale d’Arte, 1989, pp. 222-223, cat. III.6, reproduced