A man wearing a turban

Born in Coldrerio, near Lugano, Pier Francesco Mola moved to Rome with his family at a young age. Aside from two extended periods from 1633-40 and 1641-47, which he spent traveling in northern Italy, including extended sojourns in Venice and Bologna, he remained in Rome for the rest of his life. Mola’s mature style combined with sophistication elements of the seventeenth-century Roman gran maniera, the beautiful colore of Venetian art, and the attentive draftsmanship of the Bolognese masters, especially Guercino.
The present painting portrays a young man, set against an overcast sky, in a manner consonant with Venetian painting. The intensity of his expression and his turning posture echo the Roman portraiture of Simon Vouet and Gianlorenzo Bernini. The painting was first published in 2007 by Francesco Petrucci, who attributed the work to Mola and also suggested that the figure represents the Arab philosopher Averroës (Ibn Rushd, Córdoba 1126–1198 Marrakesh), court physician of the Berber kings in Marrakech, famous in Western Europe for his commentaries on Aristotle. Petrucci argued that the book signals the erudition of the man depicted, while the tagelmust – the wrapping cloth intended to cover the entire face save the eyes, but here pulled down to reveal the sitter’s whole visage – and the abernus – the hooded cloak made of coarse wool – were typical elements of Berber costume, noting that such attire would not have been worn, for example, by Persian philosophers such as Avicenna and Al-Ghazali. Philosophers were common motifs in mid-seventeenth-century art, often commissioned in sets or series, and painters like Jusepe de Ribera, Salvator Rosa, Nicolas Poussin, Pietro Testa, Domenico Fetti, Castiglione and Mola himself created many idealized portraits of the ancient thinkers and epic history paintings with events from their lives. At this time, Neo-Stoic thinking was highly fashionable among the educated classes of Roman society, and Averroës, as a devotee of Aristotle, would have been a natural member of the pantheon of philosophers who excited the imaginations of intellectually inclined Romans.
Although this intriguing hypothesis cannot be proved with certainty, the painting can be securely situated within a group of works showing single figures wearing exotic dress that Mola produced in the early 1650s. The splendid Barbary Pirate (Musée du Louvre, Paris), signed and dated 1650, is a point of reference, and related works include An Oriental Figure (Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeology, Oxford) and the Portrait of an Elderly Turk (Private collection). A ‘testa del Mola, col turbante,’ then in the collection of Lelio Falconieri, was presented at the annual exhibition at San Salvatore in Lauro in Rome in 1696 (G. Ghezzi and G. De Marchi, Mostre di quadri a S. Salvatore in Lauro: (1682–1725), Rome, 1987, p. 80), and this may be the present painting or yet another work in this vein by the artist.
In creating these paintings, Mola must have looked to the two series of etchings of exoticized heads in oriental costumes that Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione made in the 1640s. The principal source for these was of course Rembrandt, who had etched many similar heads during the 1630s, and Castiglione was likely inspired by the foreign traders who frequented the port of his native Genoa, just as exotically dressed foreigners had been a familiar sight in the streets and marketplaces of Amsterdam for Rembrandt before him. Perhaps Mola thought too of his time in Venice. Owing to their trading connections, the Islamic Near East occupied a significant place in the collective imagination of the Venetians, and from the late fifteenth century onwards, painters often incorporated figures in exotic attire in their large-scale narrative cycles and altarpieces. Mola was clearly influenced by these examples, featuring turbaned figures into works like Saint John the Baptist preaching in the Wilderness (c. 1640, National Gallery, London).