Pier Francesco Mola

Pier Francesco Mola was four years old when his father, a painter, carried him from a village near Lugano, in what is now Italian-speaking Switzerland, down to Rome. Rome kept him for most of his life, and Romans called him Il Ticinese after the region he came from.

He trained in the late-Mannerist studio of the Cavalier d'Arpino and then under Francesco Albani, a classicising master from Bologna, but two long spells away, in Venice and Bologna, mattered more. From Venetian painting he took warm colour and, above all, the great banked clouds and shadowed woods that fill his backgrounds. Contemporaries thought him at his best in small canvases, where a single hermit or saint sits swallowed by landscape.

The Vision of Saint Bruno, painted around 1660, is the picture that keeps returning. Bruno, founder of the silent Carthusian order, kneels alone in the wild at the moment of his vision. Mola painted the subject more than once, and versions hang from the Getty in Los Angeles to churches in Rome.