Lavinia Fontana was ‘a great woman painter on a par with the great men of her age’
Dr Aoife Brady, Curator, National Gallery of Ireland in front of ‘Consecration to the Virgin’, 1599 at the launch of the landmark exhibition celebrating works of first professional woman artist Lavinia Fontana in The National Gallery of Ireland.
The title of the new exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland — Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker — says much about its subject, a painter from Bologna, Italy who is remembered as the first female commercial artist in the western world.
“A trailblazer and rule breaker? That is certainly my opinion of Lavinia Fontana,” says Dr Aoife Brady, the NGI’s Curator of Italian and Spanish Art.
“I hope that others, after seeing the exhibition, will agree. She really was extraordinary.”
The National Gallery has in its collection one of Fontana’s most spectacular paintings, The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon, which it purchased in 1872, just eight years after opening its doors to the public.
“The painting had quite a dramatic history,” says Brady.
“It was purchased by Prince Napoleon, a cousin of Napoleon Bonaparte’s, in Italy in the 1850s. He brought it to Paris to join the big collection in the Palais Royale. In 1871, during the Paris Commune, the palace was set alight by revolutionaries, and our painting was one of only a handful that were rescued. The Queen of Sheba is three and a half metres wide, I can’t imagine how they got it out.”
Conservation work on the painting had commenced when Brady joined the National Gallery in 2019: “We worked on that up to 2021, conserving the painting and researching its origins. It made sense to pitch an exhibition on Fontana, and I was delighted when our board got behind it, along with some sponsors. And here we are today; we have 66 objects from public and private collections all over the world, brought together in Dublin.”
Fontana was born in 1552, at a time when Bologna was a prosperous city and a major centre of the arts. “Lavinia gained access to the traditionally male-dominated profession of painting through her father, Prospero Fontana,” says Brady.
“As a woman at this time in history, she wouldn’t have been permitted to study in an academy or to join an artists’ guild, or even to work in another studio. But Prospero Fontana was a well-known painter, who worked to commission for Pope Julius III in the 1850s and ’60s. When Prospero fell ill, the family finances took a bit of a downturn, and he had to look for a successor. He had two daughters and no sons, and Lavinia must already have shown some inclination towards drawing and painting. Prospero didn’t really begin to train her intensively until she was in her late teens or early 20s, which would have been quite late in those days, when men would have been training from the age of 12 or 13. So Lavinia was sort of rushed through and thrown into the public eye quite quickly.”
Fontana’s father is thought to have secured some of her earliest commissions. “Bologna’s university was the oldest in Europe,” says Brady, “and we know that Lavinia painted a number of portraits of its professors for quite low prices, just to get her name out there. But later on, we see her becoming a very keen marketing expert as well. She started to paint the women of Bologna. This is a period in history in which the Archbishop of Bologna was encouraging women to get out and be seen, and to engage in charitable activities. If you think of how women of means today have charity lunches and that kind of thing, it was almost exactly the same in Bologna in this period. Lavinia recognised that there were these kind of big elite Girls' Clubs, and she learned to get in with them. She made a number of prominent women godparents to her children, and named some of her children after them.”
As a young woman, Fontana married a minor nobleman named Gian Paolo Zappi, who agreed to manage the household while she got on with painting. Even as she established herself as a hugely successful artist, she gave birth to 11 children, only four of whom survived beyond infancy.
“We don’t know an awful lot about Zappi,” says Brady, “simply because most people in this period were writing about her, and not him. But he seems to have been an incredibly supportive husband.”
By 1600, Fontana’s fame had spread far beyond her native city. “The king of Spain had commissioned a painting from her and she'd become a real celebrity. In Rome, Cardinal Bernardo commissioned a painting for the church of Saint Sabina, a portrait of St Hyacinth that’s still there today. It was the first painting ever to be exhibited publicly in Rome that was painted by a woman. That was a really, really amazing moment in art history. On Barnardo's invitation, she moved with her family to Rome. And then, very shortly thereafter, she was invited to become the portraitist to the Vatican under Pope Paul IV. That was as good as it could get for any artist in those days, really.”
Fontana painted Biblical and mythological subjects as well as formal portraits, but she is also remembered for paintings such as Minerva Dressing, the first female nude by a woman artist in Italy. “This would have been so out of bounds for women before her,” says Brady. “Not only does she paint female nudes, but she makes them incredibly racy and salacious. These are erotic paintings thinly veiled as mythological scenes, really.”
It must have helped that Minerva Dressing was commissioned by Cardinal Borghese, nephew to Pope Paul V, but painting nudes seems to have made Fontana more admired than ever.
“Lavinia went on to be the first woman admitted to the prestigious Academia de San Luca, a major artists academy in Rome. Prior to this, they wouldn't have even looked at a woman artist, never mind admitted one as a member.”
Fontana died in Rome in 1614. Her last years were plagued by grief for her daughter Laudomia, who died in her teens, and also by arthritis, a condition she writes about in her letters from that period.
“We don't know exactly how Lavinia died,” says Brady. “It's not recorded, but she made it to the ripe old age of 62, which, in Renaissance Italy, was pretty good going. She’s buried in Rome, in a church called Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Her tomb has been lost. It's somewhere in the church, but it's not marked anymore. But her epitaph survives, It says: ‘Here lies Lavinia Fontana, a great woman painter on a par with the great men of her age.’ So again, she's always mentioned in the context of men, but at least she was put on an equal pegging as an artist.”
- Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker runs at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin until August 27.
- The NGI will host a symposium on Lavinia Fontana on May 26.
- Further information: nationalgallery.ie
