Pier Francesco Mola (1612 - 1666), Portrait of an Elderly Friar

67.5 x 51 cm
Oil on canvas

The painting represents the bust of a mature man (probably a monk), balding and with a very white beard, painted thread by thread. The look down, and the hand to shell the beads of a circolum precatorum (what we now call the Rosary), are details that bring the painting into a proto-baroque world, which is to say, that of a sweetened naturalism. The portraits of mature men became, in the mid-seventeenth century and then for many decades to follow, a real genre in which many artists have tried their hand with often similar results.