Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Satire on the side


Pier Francesco Mola (Italian, 1612-1666) drew these pen and ink caricatures of priests and clerics to amuse himself and his friends.


His unguarded satirical humor has a special edge, since Mola owed much of his success to important portrait commissions from members of the Church, including the pope.

From the exhibition: The McCrindle Gift: A Distinguished Collection of Drawings and Watercolors, at the National Gallery of Art, through November 25.

Mola on Wikipedia

3 comments:

  1. Those are some kick-ass caricatures. They somehow seem so modern that they could have been featured on Urban sketchers or some similar site. Even the old time guys weren't above a bit of satirical fun with a pen... Thanks for sharing!

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  2. As an aside, if you click on that link to the exhibit, the page has an interesting Sargent watercolor sketch. It's interesting (to me, anyway) in the loose depiction of the figure, in contrast to the slightly tighter rendering of the achitectural elaments - the reverse of what one might expect.

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  3. Tom, you're right, that's a nice Sargent sketch. He was moving fast on the figure, and did the head as an amorphous blob. He gave it to his model and wrote "with apologies."

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