This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Lavinia Fontana.
Born: 24 August 1552, Italy
Died: 11 August 1614
Country most active: Italy
Also known as: Lavinia Fontana Zappi, Lavinia Fontana de Zappis
Lavinia Fontana belonged to the Bolognese Mannerist school and is thought by many to be the first professional female artist, working on many prestigious private commissions for Bolognese and Roman nobility, and for foreign dignitaries (including the King of Spain). Painting throughout her eleven pregnancies, she produced large-scale portraits that are notable for their luminous coloring and for her attention to the fine decorative detail in clothing and jewelry. She complemented her portraits with numerous religious paintings, including altarpieces and small devotional works, and mythological scenes. In what was an unprecedented honor, Fontana’s reputation was confirmed in her own lifetime when she was admitted into the illustrious guild for painters in Rome, the Accademia di San Luca, the first woman to achieve such an award.
Childhood
Lavinia Fontana was one of three children born to Bolognese painter and teacher Prospero Fontana. He worked on projects, including Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, with painters Perin del Vaga, Taddeo Zuccari, and Giorgio Vasari, while his patrons included Pope Julius III, France’s Henry II, and Caterina de Medici. Lavinia’s mother, Antonia di Bartolomeo de’ Bonardis, came from a successful and well-established family of printers and publishers. The family’s comfortable lifestyle was tinged with tragedy, however, when Lavinia’s older sister, Emilia, died aged sixteen, while records show that her brother, Flaminio, died sometime before 1577.
The historian Adrianna Hook Stephenson describes how “Fontana was baptized in the cathedral of San Pietro in Bologna, on August 24, 1552 [and] in attendance at the baptism were two sponsors, Signor Agostino Hercolani and Signor Andrea Bonfiglioli, both members of the Bolognese patriciate”. She surmises that Prospero’s choice of “two male members of the local nobility to recognize the birth of his daughter was auspicious, given that Lavinia Fontana’s later artistic career was characterized by the frequent support and patronage of Bologna’s aristocracy and by her intimate relationships with Bolognese noblewomen”. Stephenson continues that her father’s friendship with these figures, and also the young Gabriele Paleotti (a future archbishop of Bologna), and the prominent academician Armodio de Santi, “was instrumental to the successful career of his daughter, who enjoyed patronage from the secular, religious, and scholarly circles of Bologna”.
Education and Early Training
Prospero, who ran a successful studio in Bologna and taught at the School of Bologna, tutored all three of his children, but it soon became evident that Lavinia possessed the greatest natural talent and he focused his energies on training her. His other pupils included local painters Lorenzo Sabbatini and Annibale Carracci as well as the Flemish sculptor Giambologna. Besides her artistic education, Fontana undertook academic teachings, becoming a student of letters, mathematics, geometry, and Latin. She also studied music, learning to play the spinet (a type of small clavichord).
As-well-as enjoying the support of her father, Lavinia was fortunate to have grown up in Bologna at a time when women artists in other European cities faced greater barriers. Bologna, the second largest city of the Papal State, and whose patron saint was convent painter, Caterina dec Vigri, was a progressive city that had welcomed women into its university since it opened (in 1158). Fontana was a successful student, receiving her doctorate in 1580.
Prospero had served as head of the Bolognese painters’ guild on no less than five different occasions and his social and artistic aspirations were well known. Nevertheless, he suffered financial hardships, with Giorgio Vasari even commenting on his inability to pay back loans taken out to finance a trip to France in his 1568 edition of Lives of the Artists. Stephenson suggests that it was likely for “increasing old age and infirmity along with financial considerations, that Prospero Fontana trained his daughter Lavinia as a professional artist”. Indeed, Fontana’s earliest works were small devotional pieces on copper plates, and portraits for clients brought to her by her father. Prospero also adopted the strategy of giving away her work for free, or for a nominal fee, as a way of raising her profile amongst potential patrons.
Mature Period
Stephenson writes, “In her father’s workshop, Lavinia learned the basic skills of design, media preparation, and painting execution required of all young artists [and it] is significant that Lavinia learned the importance of drawing as a preparatory skill from her father”. (Indeed, the 40-or-so extant Fontana preparatory portrait drawings in circulation today are testament to her technical skill and her close observance of individual physiognomy.)
But despite her abundant talents, Prospero knew that to have a career as a painter, and without being a member of a court or convent, his daughter would need to take a husband. In 1577 she married one of Prospero’s students, a local painter from a family in Imola, Gian Paolo Zappi, son of a wealthy grain merchant. Prospero negotiated with the Zappi family that, in lieu of a dowry, Fontana would paint to earn an income. They also agreed to the unusual arrangement of having the newlyweds live with the bride’s family (as opposed to the groom’s). Under this arrangement, both Lavinia and her husband could continue learning from Prospero. The Fontana-Zappi marriage contract (dated February 14, 1577) states: “Signor Gian Paolo is obliged to come and live in Bologna, and to stay and live with Signor Prospero […] and the earnings that Gian Paolo and Madonna Lavinia make from art will be converted to the benefit of Signor Prospero”. Sadly, as historian Laura M. Ragg notes, Gian Paolo turned out to be “a talentless ‘simpleton’, and he soon gave up pursuit of his own artistic career in order to support his wife with hers. While he sometimes painted drapery and background details of Lavinia’s works, his primary role was that of being her agent, and of raising their eleven children”.
Curator and author Margaret A. Samu writes, that for her devotional piece, Holy Family with Saints Margaret and Francis (1578), Fontana “painted the Holy Family [of the title] just as her career was beginning to flourish”, and as an “assertion of her arrival as an artist, the painting prominently bears her signature and the date: LAVINIA FONTANA DE ZAPPIS FACIEBAT MDLXXVIII”. Samu concludes that the “signature not only allows us to date the painting with ease but also reveals something of the confidence of this artist, who signs her work like a master so early in her career”. Indeed, by the early 1580s Fontana was highly sought after by the Bolognese nobility and she earned impressive figures for her portrait work. She was known to have especially close and warm relationships with female sitters (indeed, the Duchess of Sora Constanza Sforza Boncompagni, served as namesakes and/or godmothers for Lavinia’s own children) who perhaps felt more at ease sitting for a female artist.
Late Period
In 1586, Lavinia visited Rome for the first time. While there her work caught the attention of Spanish Cardinal Francisco Pacheco and, through him, she received commissions for the King of Spain. She returned to Rome in the Jubilee year of 1600 and received a commission to paint the altarpiece for a Dominican chapel built in honor of St. Hyacinth of Poland. As historian Elizabeth Lev explains, “This was a moment of triumph: Lavinia had broken through the bastions of Rome’s artistic boys’ club to leave her mark in one of its oldest and venerated churches”.
Following her father’s death in 1603, Fontana and her family relocated permanently to Rome at the invitation of Pope Clement VIII. After he died two years later, the incumbent Pope, Pope Paul V, continued as her patron, appointing her as Portraitist in Ordinary (the title given to the principle painter to the Pope) at the Vatican. According to Lev, Fontana was also “inducted into the all-male Academy of St Luke [Accademia di San Luca] for painters, an honor that eluded Caravaggio”. She was commissioned to paint another altarpiece, this time a twenty-foot work titled The Stoning of St. Stephen Martyr, for the Basilica of San Paolo Fuori le Mura (an important pilgrimage site that was unfortunately destroyed, along with the painting, in a fire in 1823).
In 1611 the Roman sculptor Felice Casoni produced a bronze portrait medallion in Fontana’s honor. On the medal, she is depicted with wild hair, symbolizing the “frenzy” of divine inspiration and artistic genius. Fontana passed away in Rome on August 11, 1614, at the age of sixty-two, and was buried at Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Lev writes, “How fitting that this church, built upon a temple and dedicated to the wisdom of women, became the resting place of the woman artist who had it all: fame, family and faith”. Of her eleven children, she was survived only by her sons Flaminio, Orazio, and Prospero. Co-writing the text (now destroyed) for her tombstone, they referred to their mother simply as a painter whose “fame reached outside the feminine sphere”.
The Legacy of Lavinia Fontana
Given that she worked directly for private clients (rather than as a member of a convent or court), Fontana is recognized as the first female career artist in history. Her decorative Mannerist works are renowned for their fine attention to detail, particularly in her rendering of clothing and jewelry. Her nuanced, and vividly colored works influenced later artists such as the Bolognese Baroque painter, Alessandro Tiarini. Today these pieces serve as a vital source of primary research for fashion historians. Her more austere religious paintings, meanwhile, represented Christian parables at a time when the Counter-Reformation act, laid down by the Roman-Catholic church, decreed that artists must “instruct the faithful” and excite them “to adore and love God, and to cultivate piety”. Fontana is also significant for being the first female artist to paint female nudes, and perhaps even the first to use live nude models.
Historian Adrianna Hook Stephenson writes: “Compared to other Bolognese women artists like the sculptor Properzia de’Rossi and the painter Elisabetta Sirani, Lavinia’s life and career was relatively free from personal drama, as she was not portrayed in contemporary accounts as a scorned lover, nor did she die prematurely. She was in fact a product of both her time and culture, and although she did conform to prescribed female behavior by becoming both a wife and a mother, she also transgressed the confines of her sex by becoming a successful, professional artist”. Indeed, with over 100 documented works in existence, Fontana’s is the largest known oeuvre for any female artist prior to 1700. In 1979, Fontana was selected by feminist artist Judy Chicago to have her name appear in her famous installation The Dinner Party, a large-scale work that celebrates the achievements of 1,038 (actual and mythical) female figures.