Allegory of the Phlegmatic Temperament

mythological

The foreground is dominated by the massive figure of a turbaned Turk who has fallen asleep on the steps of a classical marble fountain. The darkened trees in the distance and the deep shadows on all sides suggest that the scene takes place under the light of a brightly shining moon. Dimly glimpsed on the ledge next to the Turk's shoulder is a tortoise, whose presence provides the key to the painting's subject.

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About the Artist

Pier Francesco Mola

1612 – 1666

Italian Baroque painter, active mainly in Rome. Although he trained there with Cesari and in Bologna with Albani, his style, characterized by warm colouring and soft modelling, was formed mainly on the example of Guercino and Venetian art (his early career is not well documented, but he probably spent most of the period 1633-47 in north Italy). He painted frescoes in Roman churches and palaces, and his best-known painting is the striking Barbary Pirate (Louvre, Paris, 1650), but his most characteristic works are fairly small canvases with religious or mythological figures set in landscapes. They are somewhat reminiscent of Albani, but much freer, and closer in spirit to Salvator Rosa, with whom Mola was one of the chief representatives of a distinctively romantic strain in Roman painting in the mid 17th century.

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