Pier Francesco Mola( 1612-1666) was another prominent Italian artist of the Baroque period. Because his painting The Vision of St. Bruno in the J. Paul Getty Museum shows similarities in subject and composition to the other 17th-century picture mentioned above, his name has been suggested as a possible author for it. Both pictures show a recumbent hermit saint in a wilderness experiencing a heavenly vision. The sentiment expressed in these two pictures, however, is entirely different.
In Mola’ s painting the founder of the Carthusian monastic order reaches forward to welcome the celestial vision. But compare the men’ s body language. The man in the other painting is utterly awestruck and overwhelmed. Here the scene is not set in daylight, in a bucolic landscape, and in an atmosphere of calm. It is night. No happy cherubs look down. An eerie, supernatural light illumines the dark sky and the clouds are dynamically in motion, as if something is about to happen. The mood of Mola’ s St. Bruno strikes me essentially as an artistic confection, lacking in the gravitas one would associate with an event of this importance. By contrast, the serious mood of the nocturnal vision seems to carry the heartfelt spirit of Counter-Reformation mysticism, such as that found in the writings of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, as if the man on the ground could be coming out of his“ dark night of the soul.
Pier Francesco Mola, The Vision of St. Bruno, J. Paul Getty Museum | Photo: Public Domain
One Mola expert I conferred with, who was recommended to me by the Metropolitan Museum, felt sure this was not by Mola but agreed with my assessment of its unique poetic spirituality. His opinion was that the subject probably is St. Bruno, and that it was from the Roman school, in the“ orbit of Pier Francesco Mola.”
Hermit Saint by unidentified 17th century artist Photo: J. Craig Sweat Photography
42 ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE