Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker

Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614) is widely considered to be a woman of many firsts in western Europe. She was the first woman to achieve professional success as an artist beyond the confines of a court or a convent. She was the first woman to run her own workshop at a time when women were not allowed to conduct business of their own. She was the first woman to paint large-scale public altarpieces and nudes. All this while giving birth to eleven children, only three of whom survived her.

Yet her name, and within that, her artistic legacy and outsize influence, has largely been forgotten save for a select few champions, seemingly fighting an uphill battle.

The problem, it appears, is that Fontana’s biography overshadows her art. In his review of A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana at the Museo Nacional del Prado for The Art Newspaper in 2020, Brian Allen writes that each artist would “wither in the spotlight of her own retrospective,” because “it’s as much about biography as art.”

Three years later, Dr. Aoife Brady’s excellently curated survey Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker on view at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, sees Allen’s prediction crumble before our eyes. Here, the emphasis is placed on the scope of Fontana’s painterly skill, reinforced by new ground broken through scholarship in the accompanying catalogue.

The exhibition is separated into five distinct, themed sections, with the lion’s share of Fontana’s surviving oeuvre consisting of portraiture. In doing this, Brady keenly illustrates Fontana’s non-linear evolution as a painter. In Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (ca. 1580), Fontana displays a fluency in her father’s mannerist style, of which he, Prospero, was a leading proponent of the Bolognese School. At the same time, in Portrait of Carlo Sigonio (ca. 1578), we see her skill at rendering the nuances of textiles and jewelry in painstaking detail dominate the composition, a trait that would come to define her practice, as seen in the magnificently beguiling Judith and Holofernes (ca. 1595) and Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1600), both acmes of her career.

At the start of her practice, Fontana’s subjects were scholars and intellectuals from the University of Bologna where she took classes, and as her reputation grew, Bolognese noblewomen. It has been hypothesized that Fontana was on occasion commissioned to memorialize a dead child as seen in the haunting Child in a Cradle (ca. 1583). But what draws our eye is the elaborate ornate detailing of the canopy and cradle and the lace and pearls of the child’s clothing, a laborious act of respect and empathy that makes it easy to see why people were flocking to commission her, as her local biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia writes, and why Fontana could charge a higher rate than Justus Sustermans or Sir Anthony Van Dyke for her portraits.

During the 1590s, and possibly as a result of the death of her father in 1597, Brady opines, Fontana shifted, reckoning with the onset of the Baroque and naturalism, producing some of her finest and most experimental works.

Most notable here is the exquisite Portrait of an Portrait of a Boy (late 1590s) that signals the growing influence of the Carracci family also operating from Bologna. Set against a dark background, the expressive eyes highlighted with two sharp stabs of white are a masterclass in the poetic power of painting. Similarly, the broken brushwork with which she constructs his face, particularly a sweeping gesture under his bottom lip, is equal to Annibale Carracci’s at his best. Yet, the exquisite brush control used on the intricate details of the boy’s lace collar and the subtleties of the textures of his clothing, resolutely affirm that this is a Fontana.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Saint Francis of Paola Blessing a Noble child (1590), a left-of-center masterpiece, seems strange, even chaotic, in the wide range of detailing employed. Figures in the background are executed with minimal flicks of the wrist with thread-like highlights over thinly painted areas calling to mind Rubens, while Saint Francis, seen in the foreground, is rendered through broken brushwork with limited detailing. However, the dresses and jewelry of the women in the foreground are immaculately rendered with a high degree of detailing. The result is a sumptuous feast for the eyes as we witness Fontana wrestle to pull the composition together.

While the two-year restoration of monumentally scaled and ambitious The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon (1599), was the catalyst for the exhibition, its role is not a starring one, it is as a foil for Consecration of the Virgin (1599), painted the same year. Commissioned for the Gnetti family chapel, artistically, it is Fontana’s most spectacular showcase of her talent, and, like her other altarpieces, holds incredible symbolic importance to women artists in Bologna. Fontana effortlessly slips between Mannerist and Baroque modes of painting, while also incorporating areas of naturalism, creating a complex and rapturous visual tension that echoes the one seen in Saint Francis of Paola Blessing a Noble child. It is also remarkable in the extraordinary range of Fontana’s colour palette, and her refined inflection and use of highlights, particularly on Saint Peter Chrysologus’s vestments. But its public placement made it more than just a resplendent call for devotion, it was a declaration to the women and girls of Bologna. As Babette Bohn writes in her catalogue essay: “her triumph paved the way for later Bolognese women to succeed more than any other Italian city of the period. By the end of the eighteenth century, Bologna had produced at least sixty-eight female artists whose names are still known: far more than any other Italian city.”

First published by The Brooklyn Rail
https://brooklynrail.org/2023/07/artseen/Lavinia-Fontana-Trailblazer-Rule-Breaker