Lavinia Fontana became the first Italian female artist to achieve repute both in Italy and abroad. Despite giving birth to eleven children and living in a closed-minded society, she produced more than one hundred works and earned a living from her art. She became the first woman to run a workshop, competing with men for important commissions in Bologna, Florence and Rome. Lavinia was trained in the workshop of her father, the prominent painter Prospero Fontana (1512-1597), as was usually the case with women who practised as artists up until the 18th century. Although she followed his style in the depiction of historical scenes, she developed an independent manner in her portraits, which became her preferred genre. Her earliest known portrait is a signed and dated canvas (53 x 44.5 cm.) from 1575 depicting a young boy.¹ Many of her early portraits depict children, as this was a subject matter deemed suitable for a female artist. Other genres traditionally considered fitting for female artists included still lifes, flowers, miniatures and small portraits; Lavinia did not limit her repertoire to these however and embraced a much wider range of subjects including large altar pieces, group portraits, landscapes and even mythological scenes featuring nudes.

The present lot is very similar in style and format to other examples on copper executed in the first two decades of the artist’s career. These include a Portrait of a girl which sold at Christie’s, London, 10 July 1998, lot 66 9 (Fig. 1),² and the striking small self-portrait, signed and dated 1579, in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence (Fig. 2).³ This type of cabinet piccolo pittura was practiced widely by the Bolognese school and were often produced as gifts for prominent collects ors or presentation pieces for potential patrons. Copper was the preferred support for private, domestic portraits, as it made them easy to transport and exhibit. These portraits also demonstrate Lavinia’s interest in cost.mes – great attention is given to the rich jewellery and the lace of the sitters’ dresses.

In this portrait there appears to be a desk to the left of the sitter and a curtain to her right, indicating an interior setting and perhaps alluding to her intellectual qualities. The compositional structure of a sitter seated at their desk whilst gazing at the viewer was widely used when depicting savants and scholars. This is also how Lavinia chose to portray herself in the Uffizi self-portrait, placing herself on a par with her male contemporaries. Lavinia was educated and received a significant humanistic and artistic grounding. She grew up during a t.mes in Italy when new ideas about women and their role in society were emerging. Marriage was a core element in social relations and the role of the wife was that of a social companion, a pillar of private life and a support in shared public life. The need to educate women to become this type of ideal companion was discussed in an extensive corpus of literature including popular treatises such as Alessandro Piccolomini’s De la institutione di tutta la vita d’homo nato nobile e in città libera (Venice, 1542) and Lodovico Dolce’s Della institutione delle donne (Venice, 1560).

We are grateful to Dott.ssa Maria Teresa Cantaro for endorsing the attribution to Lavinia Fontana based on digital images, as well as for outlining Lavinia’s artistic personality in a catalogue of her works (Cantaro 1989) and helping to restore the artist’s rightful place in the history of art.

¹ M.T. Cantaro, Lavinia Fontana bolognese, Milan 1989, p. 63, cat. no. 6, reproduced.

² https://www.wga.hu/html_m/f/fontana/lavinia/portgirl.html

³ http://catalogo.uffizi.it/it/29/ricerca/detailiccd/1504611/