Lavinia Fontana

Italian painter

• Born: August 24, 1552
• Birthplace: Bologna, Papal States (now in Italy)
• Died: August 11, 1614
• Place of death: Rome, Papal States (now in Italy)

Lavinia Fontana was the first professional female artist to have a career outside the realm of the court and the convent. Lavinia is best known for her portraiture, which skillfully depicts the personalities of the sitters and the details and textures of clothing, jewelry, and other objects.

Early Life

Lavinia Fontana was born in Bologna, a major artistic center at the time. She was trained by her father, Prospero Fontana, one of the leading mannerist painters in Bologna, and teacher to the famed Ludovico Carracci.

In her formative years, Lavinia was able to study the earlier masters, whose works hung in Bologna’s private and public spaces. Her godfather owned Raphael’s Vision of Ezekiel (1514-1518) and Correggio’s Noli me tangere (c. 1525). In the nearby convent church of Santa Margherita, Parmigianino’s Holy Family with Saints Jerome, Augustine, and Margaret (c. 1529) was also available for viewing, as was Raphael’s Ecstasy of St. Cecilia (c. 1513), in the church of San Giovanni in Monti.

Lavinia’s paintings show clearly how she was influenced by the works of the masters. Her rich colorism and brushwork evoke Correggio, the elegance of her figures and their costumes comes from Parmigianino, and the delicacy of gestures and facial expressions are from Raphael. Lavinia’s Noli me tangere (1581) shows the influence of Correggio and his painting of the same subject, except that her Christ is dressed while Correggio’s work features a nude torso. For reasons of modesty, women artists of the era were not allowed to draw forms from the nude. The lack of anatomical training because of this restriction shows in some of Lavinia’s works, where proportions are sometimes skewed.

Life’s Work

In 1577, Lavinia married Gian Paolo Zappi, a student of Prospero Fontana and a member of a family that held senatorial and judicial posts in Imola since the thirteenth century. The marriage contract specified that Zappi, like Lavinia, was a painter. Carlo Cesare Malvasia, in the Felsina pittrice (1678), a biography of Bolognese artists, wrote that Zappi painted the draperies in Lavinia’s works.

Lavinia’s father-in-law, Severo Zappi, helped her obtain her first documented commission, Assumption of the Virgin (1584), an altarpiece for the chapel in the palace of the consiglio communale, Imola’s governing body, where Severo held a seat. This painting follows the prescriptions of Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, archbishop of Bologna, on the appropriate depiction of religious subjects outlined in his Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre et profane (1582). Paleotti, who was following Counter-Reformation demands, called for images that related Catholic doctrine unambiguously and inspired piety and devotion in viewers. The kneeling saints in gestures of prayer in Lavinia’s painting invite the viewer to assume the same posture and emotional state. This work won Lavinia Paleotti’s endorsement and established her reputation as an artist worthy of note. Soon commissions began to flow.

In 1580, Lavinia received a doctorate from the University of Bologna. Her circle of friends included some well-known figures, such as the naturalist and physician Ulisse Aldrovandi. Her Stigmatization of St. Francis (1579) shows an accurate rendition of ferns based on Aldrovandi’s exotic plant collection. Some of Lavinia’s scholar friends were among her clients and sitters. In the 1570’s, the philosopher Alessandro Aquilino and the historian Carlo Sigonio had their portraits painted by Lavinia, and in the late 1580’s, the scientist Girolamo Mercuriale also sat for her. In 1579, Lavinia painted herself in the same light as these men. Her Self-Portrait in the Studiolo (1579) shows the artist as her subjects’ equal. She sits at a desk, stylus in hand, preparing to execute a drawing. Ancient statuettes and fragments surround her, presumably to provide intellectual and artistic inspiration.

Among Lavinia’s many sitters included prominent women from the Bolognese nobility. Laudomia Gozzadini, daughter of Senator Ulisse Gozzadini, commissioned a family portrait. Lavinia developed a close relationship with her client, naming one of her daughters Laudomia. The portrait of Ginevra Aldrovandi Hercolani, daughter of Senator Ercole Aldrovandi, with a lap dog (1590’s) is one of Lavinia’s most admired works. Noble children were also part of her repertoire, which included Ippolita Savignani at Twelve Months (1583) and Antonia Ghini (1583).

Lavinia’s output was not limited to portraiture. She also painted several mythologies and a large number of religious works. Among her mythologies is Venus and Cupid (1585), which shows figures set against a twilight sky, a light treatment she borrowed from Correggio. Of her religious paintings, many were meant for public spaces, and one commission in particular enhanced her reputation an altarpiece for the Bernerio chapel in the church of San Sabina in Rome, the Vision of St. Hyacinth (1599). She received this commission from Girolamo Bernerio. The work was a great success, and it encouraged Lavinia and her husband to move to Rome. They arrived in 1604, and Bernerio arranged for their accommodations at the Palazzo Monte Giordano.

Bernerio also arranged for Lavinia’s next commission, the Martyrdom of St. Stephen for the church of San Paolo Fuori le Mura, one of the principal pilgrimage churches of Rome. This work was destroyed by fire in 1823 and is known only through a 1611 engraving. Biographer Giovanni Baglione reported in his Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti dal pontificato di Gregorio XIII (1642) that this painting was not as well received as the Vision of St. Hyacinth, so Lavinia returned to portraiture.

Lavinia’s reputation grew in Rome. Camillo Borghese, former papal legate in Bologna and godfather to her son Severo, was elected Pope Paul V . Paul appointed Lavinia official portraitist at the Vatican Palace. In 1609, the rules of the Academy of St. Luke were amended to admit female artists, and Lavinia was allowed to become a member. This meant that she was now free to take on pupils. As a result, prices for her works soared.

In 1611, Lavinia was honored with a bronze portrait medallion cast by the Bolognese sculptor and architect Felice Antonio Casoni. On its face, the medallion shows a portrait of Lavinia, and its inscription identifies her as an artist. The medallion’s reverse shows her at her easel, surrounded by compasses and a square, the instruments of her profession. Her hair is disheveled to indicate that she is caught in the frenzy of creation.

Lavinia died in Rome in 1614, leaving the largest body of extant works by any woman artist active before the eighteenth century. Approximately 150 paintings by her are known and many others are recorded but lost.

Significance

Lavinia Fontana lived in an era when female artists were limited to painting only portraits and still lifes, categories ranked low on the academic scale. Women had no access to membership in academies nor to instruction in anatomy.

Lavinia broke all the rules: Though portraiture was her main subject, she still executed a number of mythological and biblical scenes in both small and large scale. While women rarely received commissions to paint altarpieces, Lavinia did obtain a number of these types of commissions.

By becoming the first female member of the Academy of St. Luke in Rome, she widened the range of possibilities for future women artists, like Artemisia Gentileschi, who, rather than settling for lesser-valued subjects, painted biblical and mythic stories showcasing female heroes.

Bibliography

Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994. Places the life and career of Lavinia Fontana within the context of the artistic patronage of female artists in Bologna and the civic and ecclesiastic support they received.

Cheney, Liana de Girolami. “Lavinia Fontana: A Woman Collector of Antiquity.” Aurora: The Journal of the History of Art 2 (2001): 22-42. Focuses on Lavinia’s “Self-Portrait in Her Studiolo,” providing an iconographic interpretation of the work. Also presents useful biographical information on the artist.

Fortunati, Vera, ed. Lavinia Fontana of Bologna, 1552-1614. Milan, Italy: Electa, 1998. An abridged version of Fortunati’s 1994 exhibition catalog published in Italian. The present publication was produced to accompany an exhibition of Fontana’s works at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

Murphy, Caroline P. Lavinia Fontana: A Painter and Her Patrons in Sixteenth-Century Bologna. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. The most comprehensive text on Fontana’s life and career in Bologna. Includes discussion on the milieu in which Fontana developed her artistic career.