A successful portraitist particularly sought after by Bolognese noblewomen, Italian painter Lavinia Fontana provides a prime example of how a woman artist strategized her artistic approach and used her gender as an advantage in her career. Fontana couldn’t have exercised her gender advantage without her family backing and innate talent. Born to a family of painters in 16th century Bologna, Fontana was trained to paint fine, delicate Mannerist portraits—a style characterized by its extreme attention to the sophistication, detail, and careful renderings of its subjects and preferred by Italy's aristocracy. Her father, an esteemed court painter, was well positioned to present his daughter’s paintings to the , which established Fontana as an able portrait painter, attracting clients from Bologna's nobility. It was as a portraitist to Bologna’s nobility that she began to exercise her talents both as a painter and as a woman of society.
While Fontana’s gender may have been a disadvantage generally, it was a clear advantage in portrait painting. Conventionally, wealthy, upper-class women would hire skilled artists to paint their portraits. While this experience was tedious for most female subjects, who sat motionless for hours subject to a male gaze, one can imagine that in the presence of Fontana the interaction was different. Fontana’s popularity as a portraitist to noblewomen suggests that the experience was a positive one for many, an impression confirmed by several accounts of “charming conversationalist” and… Charmed by Fontana's pleasant personality, some even developed such a close relationship to her as to become godmothers to her children. Fontana’s last child was named after her godmother Costanza Sforza Boncompagni, the Duchess of Sora, whom Fontana painted in 1594.[i] It was not only her social skills but specifically her femininity that gained her success in Bologna.
Portrait of Costanza Sforza of Santa Fiora, Lavinia Fontana, 1550
Her drawings, characterized by sensitivity to individual facial features, were prized for their astonishing detail and meticulous depictions of the subject's demeanour. Critics, and presumably patrons, marvelled at Fontana's ability to render sumptuous clothing, rich fabrics, and glittering jewels that exhibited the lavish wealth and complemented the women they embellished. One such example is Fontana's 1580 Portrait of a Noblewoman now in the National Museum of Women in the Arts, particularly famed for the rendering of its subject's rounded, intricate features and the elaborate gold embroidery of her attire. But these paintings were about more than accessories. What really set Fontana’s paintings apart and made them the occasion of special relationships was their activation of the sources and resources of female power.
Portrait of a Noblewoman, Lavinia Fontana, 1580
In her portrait of Costanza Alidosi, also in the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Fontana paints a young woman whose gaze is fixed on the viewer; her intelligent and probing eyes suggest agency, even boldness. She is more than an aesthetic and superficial ornament. The woman’s left hand is grasping the chair handle as if she might get up, and her torso tilts slightly forward. This woman looks ready to actively engage with the world. Alidosi’s right hand wraps around a small dog, a conventional symbol for fidelity and faithfulness in many other paintings but here the relationship between dog and owner is more interactive and informative, revealing Alidosi as a protector of the household rather than an object that requires protection. In Fontana’s presentation of her, Alidosi is surely beautiful, but she is more: strong, endowed with will, intelligent with experience. There is more to this woman than conventions of purity and good breeding.
Portrait of Costanza Alidosi, Lavinia Fontana, 1595
Fontana took a limitation–a female artist forced to do portraits–and made it a strength. Given the Renaissance social climate, where women enjoyed few sexual liberties and were bound by the archaic virtue of chastity, studying from the nude was not available to female artists. This meant that a good portion of artistic practice based in that kind of figure study–much of what was called history painting, both religious and mythological–was not easily available to them. Most female artists, therefore, concentrated on the realm of portraiture. (Artemisia Gentileschi, who took on the full range of subjects, is the exception that proves the rule.) Since the grand subjects of religious and mythological art were considered the most dignified concern for artists, and yielded the greatest prices, women were at a disadvantage. As a result, most emerging female artists before the first wave of feminism in the late 1800s resorted to portrait painting which, although considered inferior to religious and history paintings, provided a dignified income nevertheless.
However, Fontana’s keen insight into her subjects may be attributed to her concentration on female portraiture. Fontana’s paintings were especially significant in the early 16th century because their complex portrayals of women stood out against a society which still followed a strict adherence to the feminine ideals of chastity.In his 1432 essay On The Family, Italian humanist author Leon Battista Alberti quotes Roman statesman Gaius Marius that: "Of women we require purity, and men labour."[iv] Alberti argued that "nature and human reason taught mankind the necessity of having a spouse," in whom a man "must seek beauty of mind, that is, good conduct and virtue."
Consequently, various women began their artistic careers by honouring the qualities of purity, modesty, and beauty and painted predominantly feminine subject matter, taking care not to offend the social code while effectively displaying their artistic talents. Fontana, however, was not confined to portraying women through a traditionalist lens and depicted women in a more engaging and provocative manner.
As a result of these societal or cultural restrictions, women artists like Fontana learned to strategize their careers and derive specific advantages over their male competitors to compensate for their loss of other opportunities. Throughout the 14th to 19th centuries, more female artists followed her footsteps and rose to fame as esteemed portraitists.
Fontana was one of Italy's first recognized professional female artists. While many amateur women artists enjoyed noble titles and were considered improper if they charged patrons a fee for their work, Fontana was the daughter of a painter and was, therefore, able to receive payment like professional male artists. Fontana's career success enabled her to demand more individual rights within the constraints of her gender. She married the painter Gian Paolo Zappi without paying a dowry, an unconventional move during her time. In fact, their marriage contract required that Zappi stay at the Fontana family household so that Fontana might continue her artistic career while contributing to the Family's workshop.[v] Such terms were exceedingly uncommon in Italian Renaissance marriages.[vi] Bearing eleven children in her life, Fontana conformed to prescribed female behaviour and did not abandon the traditional “feminine duties” in her personal life. However, she was able to bargain for more power and live with greater freedom as a woman because of her astounding professional achievements.
Instead of catering to masculine ideals of female virtue, Fontana highlighted the strength and beauty of womanhood in her artwork and gained fame and wealth by spreading such a vision among other women. Her paintings invited the viewer to celebrate feminine power rather than to marvel at limited notions of femininity. Not only did Fontana’s triumph confirm that women possess artistic talents comparable to those professional male artists, but it also proved that art was a viable career for women artists.
Works Cited
[i]Caroline P. Murphy, “Lavinia Fontana and Le Dame Della Città: Understanding Female Artistic Patronage in Late Sixteenth-Century Bologna,” Renaissance Studies 10, no. 2 (June 1996): 194, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-4658.1996.tb00356.x. [ii] Laura R. Bass, The Drama of the Portrait: Theater and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain (State College, Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 2008), 36. [iii] Leon Pevsner and Cambridge University Press, Academies of Art: Past and Present (1940; repr., Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, Druk, 2019), 231. [iv] Ibid., 4. [v] Katherine A. McIver, “Lavinia Fontana’s ‘Self-Portrait Making Music,’” Woman’s Art Journal 19, no. 1 (1998): 5, https://doi.org/10.2307/1358647. [vi] Babette Bohn and James M Saslow, A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
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