Lavinia Fontana

Lavinia Fontana (24 August 1552–11 August 1614) was an Italian Mannerist painter. She was active in Bologna and Rome. Today, people remember her mostly for the portraits that she painted. She also had other themes that she painted. She also did mythological and religious painting. Her father, Prospero Fontana trained her. Some people see her as the first career artist in Europe. This is because she relied on commissions for her income.  In the context of art, this means that people asked her to create paintings with certain themes or styles, and paid for this. 

Her family relied on her career as a painter, and her husband served as her agent and raised their eleven children. She was perhaps the first female artist to paint female nudes, but this is a topic of controversy among art historians.

 Her nude paintings 
Fontana also  pained nudes. Today, art historians do not agree on the ways and means she used for this. She had studied her father's collection of sculptures and plaster casts. The problem is that during Fontana's lifetime, it was socially unaceptable for women to be exposed to nudity. If it was discovered that Fontana used live nude models, this would harm her reputation. Liana De Girolami Cheney argues the figures look very natural. According to her, this might indicate that Fontana used live nude models.  Caroline P. Murphy  says that much like with her Fontana's father's paintings, the body parts are well-rendered, but overall, the figure re disproportionate. Murphy suggests that, like Sofonisba Anguissola, Fontana had family members model for her. Linda Nochlin writes that art academies barred women from viewing any nude body, despite this being a crucial part of an artist's training.

 Gallery 

 References 


 Cheney, Liana (Spring-Summer 1984). "Lavinia Fontana, Boston 'Holy Family'". Woman's Art Journal. 5 (1).






 Murphy, Caroline P. (1996). "Lavinia Fontana and 'Le Dame della Citta': understanding female artistic patronage in late sixteenth-century Bologna." Renaissance Studies. 10 (2). pp. 190–208. JSTOR.
 Murphy, Caroline P. (1997). "Lavinia Fontana". Dictionary of Women Artists. Vol 1. Delia Gaze, ed. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn. pp. 534–7. .

 Rocco, Patricia. The Devout Hand: Women, Virtue, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Italy. McGill-Queens University Press, 2017.


 Other websites 


 Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, a fully digitized exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries, which contains material on Lavinia Fontana (see index)
Category:17th-century Italian painters
Category:16th-century Italian painters
Category:1614 deaths
Category:1552 births
Category:Pages with unreviewed translations