Schoolmeester bestraft een leerling

511 A schoolmaster-priest chastising a pupil
Verso: Caricature of a standing man

Inv. no. H 115
Pen and brown ink, brown wash, on off-white paper. Remnants of a framing line in pencil. Small losses due to corrosion of the iron gall ink (repaired); old folds.
Verso: Pen and brown ink. Part of the figure’s face has been drawn on a small piece of paper affixed to the verso as a repair.
256 x 197 mm
Inv. 1854: C 10 (“Leonardo da Vinci, eene Schoolmeesterlijke Strafoefening”); inv. 1864: A 47 (Leonardo)
Provenance: Odescalchi; acquired for the Museum in 1790
(L. 2392)
Exhibitions: Lugano-Rome 1989-1990, no. III-94, repr.; Haarlem 2018, no. 68, repr.
Literature: Kahn-Rossi, in exh. cat. Lugano-Rome 1989-1990, p. 128; Petrucci 2012, fig. 157; De Marchi 2013, p. 40, fig. 27.

Van Regteren Altena first proposed the attribution to Mola, replacing earlier ones to Leonardo da Vinci and Guercino (notes on the mat). As Turner (exh. cat. Lugano-Rome 1989-1990, p. 280) observed, this is perhaps the most Guercinesque caricature by Mola now known; he suggests that it should consequently be dated fairly early in his career, when Bolognese influences were paramount.
Many of Mola’s caricatures are autobiographical in character, but the circumstances that led him to draw this unusual image of corporal punishment inflicted on a schoolboy are impossible to reconstruct (cf. Kahn-Rossi, loc. cit.). De Marchi is probably right in believing that the beetle-browed, snub-nosed priest is the same person who recurs many times in Mola’s caricatures; according to De Marchi, he is the artist’s father, the architect Giovanni Battista Mola. Other authors have proposed to identify this instantly recognizable figure as Mola’s friend and confidant Niccolò Simonelli instead (Kahn Rossi, op. cit., pp. 43-49, 108, 284-291, under nos. III.104-115), while yet others see him as a mocking self-portrait of Mola himself.1
The quick caricature on the verso, though damaged and unfinished, nonetheless provides a useful example of Mola’s more loosely drawn portraits-charges.
It cannot be determined whether any of the Mola caricature drawings in the Teyler Museum come from the lot of “Due cento ventotto disegni di Caricature fatte à più persone dal Mola, ed alcuni altri Valent’Uomini” listed in the 1713-1714 inventory of Don Livio Odescalchi (Meijer 1984, p. 252).

1 The identification of the snub-nosed figure as Simonelli was invalidated when Petrucci (2012, p. 139, fig. 93) published a caricature showing Cardinal Chigi on a commode with behind him, in profile, a face that is inscribed Simonelli and that is of a quite different cast. The caricature that Petrucci illustrates is presumably the one to which Manuela Kahn-Rossi had referred earlier (exh. cat. Lugano-Rome 1989-1990, p. 129 and note 45); Prosperi Valenti Rodino (2014b, p. 114) rightly doubts its attribution to Mola. Her proposal (ibid.), also put forward by Volpi (2017, pp. 179-180) to identify the snub-nosed man as Mola himself conflicts, however, with that formulated previously by Turner and others who recognize Mola in another recurring figure in the artist’s caricatures, one that more closely agrees with his self-portrait (see Turner, in exh. cat. Lugano-Rome 1989-1990, under nos. III.99-101, 103, 104, 107, 112, as well as our cat. nos. 512 and 513).