Lavinia Fontana

It is history's good fortune that Lavinia Fontana grew up in Bologna, Italy, a city that encouraged the academic and artistic talents of women. Women had been educated at the University of Bologna since the Middle Ages, and Bolognese painters claimed a woman painter, Caterina dei Vigri (St. Catherine of Bologna), astheir patron saint.

Fontana is considered the first woman painter to have had a successful artistic career. She supported her family by her work which included major commissions from both public and private patrons. Encouraged to develop her artistic potential by her father, Prospero Fontana, who was a well-known artist and teacher, it was in her father's studio that she met Giano Paolo Zappi, whom she married in 1577. Zappi appears to have given up his artistic career to assist his wife in her studio, handle the accounts of her numerous commissions, and help care for their many children.

Fontana did not just produce portraits or still lifes--categories that ranked low on the academic hierarchy--but small and large scale biblical and mythological works with many figures, including male and female nudes. She painted large public altarpieces, a rare distinction for a woman artist. Women were generally not commissioned to execute altarpieces, in part because these ambitious compositions required studying from nude models. After moving to Rome around 1603, she created the best known of her public commissions, The Stoning of St. Stephen Martyr. This altarpiece, painted for the church of S. Paolo fuori le Mura, one of the seven pilgrimage churches of Rome, was destroyed by fire in 1823.

Portrait of a Noblewoman, painted around 1580, depicts a young woman standing three-quarter length with her body turned slightly. One hand caresses a small lap dog and the other holds a marten skin which is adorned with an exquisitely jeweled head. Marten skins were a decorative accessory often seen in portraits of Renaissance aristocrats. Fontana has skillfully depicted the contrasting textures of the gauzy silk underdress and heavily embroidered velvet overdress and carefully rendered each detail of the gold, pearl, and ruby jewelry. As in many of her portraits of women, the background is uniformly dark and flat.

While over a hundred works by Fontana are documented or recorded in early sources, only thirty-two signed and dated or datable works are known, and a smaller number of pictures are attributed to her on stylistic grounds. This nevertheless constitutes the largest surviving body of work by any woman artist active before 1700.