This Head of a Classical Poet (Socrates ?) is no longer available.

View Similar Items View More

Pier Francesco Mola - Rest on the Flight into Egypt

Ray Donley - Figure with White Collar

Ray Donley - Baroque Portrait

Ray Donley - Baroque Portrait No. 81

Matthew Collins - The Slavic Girl

Matthew Collins - St. John the Evangelist

Natale Schiavoni - Large 19th Century oil painting portrait of Fanny Elssler as the goddess Venus

Ray Donley - Striped Cap

Ray Donley - Cap 24

Unknown - Head of a Youth

(Circle of) Mary Beale - 17thc Oil Portrait Of A Baby Circle Of Mary Beale (1633-1699) English School

(Circle of) Godfrey Kneller - Circle of Godfrey Kneller English School Painting

Home Art Paintings

Head of a Classical Poet (Socrates ?) - Painting by Pier Francesco Mola

See this artwork in context

View In Room

1 of 2 images

Pier Francesco Mola
Head of a Classical Poet (Socrates ?)

Name: Head of a Classical Poet (Socrates ?)
Brand: Pier Francesco Mola
Price: 100000 USD
Availability: InStock

About

Although born in Ticino, in a town now part of Switzerland, Mola was definitively a Roman artist, his family having moved to Rome in 1616 when his father was appointed architect to the Camera Apostolica. Other than two extended trips outside the city, one a two-year stay in Bologna where he worked with Francesco Albani, Mola remained in Rome for his entire life. Mola's oeuvre ranges from ambitious religious compositions to evocative landscapes, often with diminutive figures providing a suggestion of subject matter. Among his most attractive and memorable paintings, however, are half-length and bust-format depictions of ancient literary figures. These vary in identity but have in common the depiction of an elderly bearded figure, often in contemplative or ecstatic attitude, his head crowned with laurel. These figures are characterized by a vigorously executed, richly nuanced physiognomy. Some with vacant eyes and a stringed instrument are traditionally called Homer (Rome, National Gallery; Dresden Gemäldegalerie, Moscow, Pushkin Museum; Ariccia, Palazzo Chigi); others Virgil (Milan, Koelliker Collection), Archimedes (Dresden), or Euclid (Private Collection). Many have only generic titles, such as an "Old Man," a "Mathematician," "Astronomer," "Poet," or a "Philosopher." The subject of the present work has traditionally been considered Socrates, a figure that Mola treated in his multi-figure composition of Socrates Instructing the Young on Self-Knowledge (Lugano, Museo Civico), but there is little internal evidence in the present painting to confirm that. He is very much an ancient literary type, and certainly a Mola type -that of the wise, authoritative, somewhat romantic poet. The attribution of the present work to Pier Francesco Mola was confirmed on first-hand inspection by Dr. Erich Schleier (in July 2011) and by Dr. Francesco Petrucci (in February 2012), who considers the painting a late work dating from the 1660s.