Lavinia Fontana
Lavinia Fontana is considered to be the first woman to become a successful professional artist in Europe. Her oeuvre of over seventy works, to which the present picture is a new and hitherto unpublished addition, is the largest of any female artist before the eighteenth century. Born in Bologna to an artist father, Prospero Fontana, Lavinia Fontana not only enjoyed the benefits of her father’s training, but also took advantage of the emerging belief in renaissance Italy that women could play a leading role in the arts, whether literary, musical or visual.
By the early 1580s Fontana was well established as a portraitist in her native Bologna. She, as a woman who wore such fabrics and jewels had a great eye to render them with an unseen degree of realism. It was a vital asset for portraying the intensely fashion conscious Bolognese. The present portrait is dominated by the elaborately depicted ruff, along with details such as the jewelled flowers in the sitter’s dress.
P.S. Read here about the surprising career of Lavinia Fontana, a painter of popes, nudes, and noblewomen!
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