Pier Francesco Mola

Pier Francesco Mola ( baptized on 9 February 1612 Coldrerio, Ticino, † May 13, 1666 in Rome) was a Roman Baroque painter, a native of Ticino.

Life

Pier Francesco Mola father Giovanni Battista was an architect who moved from Ticino to Rome in 1616. Pier Francesco Mola was trained by Giuseppe Cesari in painting. From his career in the first few years little has survived. From 1633 he accompanied his father on his work in northern Italy and worked a long time in Venice and Bologna and took the developments in painting. In 1637 he drew in Lucca the painter Pietro Testa. In his birthplace, in 1641 he received an order for three frescoes in the Oratory of the Madonna del Carmelo. For two years he was in Bologna assistant to Francesco Albani.

He returned in 1647 finally returned to Rome, where he entered the household of the Cardinal Camillo Pamphili, nephew of Pope Innocent X family. Maybe he has executed 1651/52 frescoes in the Palace of the Pamphili family in Nettuno. He was one of the artists who should imagine the huge Palazzo Doria Pamphili in Valmontone, but fell in 1659 for the version with a princely patron in lengthy legal disputes that he finally lost in 1664.

Mola was awarded in 1656 by Pope Alexander VII commissioned for the Fresco Joseph gives himself to his brothers recognize in the Sala Gialla Quirinalspalasts of what is now regarded as his main work. His clients also Christina of Sweden, who was staying after her conversion to Catholicism since 1655 in Rome belonged. An invitation to the French court as a companion of Cardinal Flavio Chigi he could not compete due to illness.

Mola was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca Artists Guild in 1655, the Office of the Princeps, he held 1662/63 but only for a year, also prevented him from his illness.

Pictures of Mola are now not only in Rome even in the major art galleries in London, New York and Los Angeles, his drawings, the Louvre collected, but are located primarily in the stock of the Dusseldorf Art Academy, whose founder Lambert Krahe he had acquired in Italy Artworks 1778 had sold to the mountainous land and estates, including a compilation with drawings Molas.