How Lavinia Fontana went from ‘prospect’ to first professional woman artist

Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614) is extensively thought-about the primary lady in Western artwork historical past to be an expert artist. Though others earlier than her have been famous painters throughout the context of a convent or a courtroom, Fontana ran her personal thriving studio in her native Bologna and later in Rome. The Nationwide Gallery of Eire, dwelling to Fontana’s largest and most formidable identified portray, The Go to of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon (1599), is dedicating a significant monographic exhibition to the artist.

With round 50 work and works on paper, Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker will discover the “many firsts” of her profession, says its curator Aoife Brady, and concentrate on her specialism—portraiture—for which she turned the artist of selection for Bolognese noblewomen. However it’s going to additionally deal with her unprecedented work on large-scale public altarpieces and her portrayal of feminine nudes at a time when girls weren’t permitted to check human anatomy.

Fontana’s coaching as a painter appears to have been a matter of economic necessity. Her father Prospero, himself an esteemed portraitist, was in poor health and considered his youngest daughter as “a prospect to maintain the household going”, Brady says. Fontana’s organized marriage to Gian Paolo Zappi was suitably unconventional, enabling her to pursue a creative profession. Their 1577 wedding ceremony contract, which can seem within the first room of the exhibition, stipulated that she had no dowry, and they’d each earn a dwelling in her father’s home.

Although biographers of the time are hazy on the main points, Fontana labored prolifically—and strategically—over the next a long time whereas additionally bearing 11 youngsters. “She knew how you can market herself,” Brady says. “Whereas her father and her husband gave her the circumstances wherein to function, it appears she was accountable for lots of the negotiation and diplomacy that comes with being a profitable artist within the Renaissance.”

Her rise coincided with a interval when girls in Bologna had higher alternatives to take part in public life, together with as patrons for charitable organisations and the humanities. These “elite cliques” turned Fontana’s core clientele. Her finely detailed Mannerist portraits, with their luxurious rendering of garments and jewels, have been seen as “essential for these girls’s properties”, Brady says. Among the many examples within the exhibition is the monumental Gozzadini Household group portrait from 1584, the primary documented fee from a feminine patron to a feminine artist.

Aoife Brady, curator

Fontana’s fashion can seem “very tutorial” to modern eyes as compared with the gritty naturalism pioneered by her near-contemporary Caravaggio, Brady notes. The Dublin present will show her artwork alongside uncommon Renaissance textiles and trend equipment in an try to “break down these partitions”, Brady says, and immerse gallery guests in “the world of late Sixteenth-century Bologna”.

It’s only in current a long time that Fontana’s method, and that of different neglected girls artists by historical past, has begun to be studied in depth—giving rise to new discoveries of her work. “It’s extraordinary how a lot has come out of the woodwork,” Brady says. The tally of securely attributed footage now stands at round 130, although, she provides, “I would have the ability to offer you a special determine after the exhibition ends.”

Brady was concerned within the current attribution of three items coming to the present from US collections. The Getty is lending its newly acquired oil-on-copper portray The Wedding ceremony Feast at Cana and the preparatory ink drawing, dated to Fontana’s early profession within the late 1570s. And the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork in Washington, DC, will ship Portrait of Lucia Bonasoni Garzoni (round 1590), which it not too long ago acquired after it surfaced at public sale in Spain in 2021.

One other “thrilling reveal” shall be Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1600) from Bologna’s Museo Davia Bargellini, which underwent restoration particularly for the exhibition. Its shadowy, “nearly Caravaggesque” background was discovered to be a later overpainting and has now been cleaned away to reveal a brilliant palette that “utterly adjustments our studying of the work”, Brady says.

One of many targets of the present is to foreground Fontana “as an artist and never only a lady”, Brady says, hopefully inspiring additional technical analysis into her still-mysterious studio observe. “It’s going to be actually necessary for future scholarship for us to all have an excellent grasp of precisely how she labored, as a result of in any other case it’s inconceivable for us to untangle her oeuvre.”

• Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker, Nationwide Gallery of Eire, Dublin, 6 Might-27 August