The Bolognese painter Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614) has been enjoying a renaissance during the past fifteen to twenty years as scholars have attempted to recover the production of European women artists. Famous in her own day for her portraits, altarpieces, and history paintings, Fontana was capable of drawing greater fees than the Carracci, and for a period she was on a par with Anthony Van Dyck and Justus Sustermans. Of all woman artists, she has the largest body of surviving work before the eighteenth century (150 works known), and her oeuvre will doubtless grow since her paintings circulated through Italy, Germany, and Spain, with some still being identified. Like many skilled and sought-after artists, she eventually moved to Rome. Yet after her death, her reputation remained alive largely within the memories and traditions of the native city where she had first enjoyed artistic success.

A small group of scholars has fostered the current revival. Maria Teresa Cantaro’s catalogue raisonné, Lavinia Fontana bolognese ‘pittore singolare’, 1552–1614 (Milan: Jandi Sapi, 1989), began setting the parameters of the corpus, while Vera Fortunati organized an exhibition in Bologna in 1994 that later traveled to Washington, D.C.’s National Museum of Women in the Arts in 1998. Fortunati’s catalogue for the show in 1994 was translated into English as Lavinia Fontana of Bologna, 1552–1614 (Milan: Electa, 1998). Is there anything more to say?

Absolutely. A third scholar working on Fontana’s career, Caroline P. Murphy, has published a number of articles on the artist in the past decade, and her long-anticipated new volume addresses directly the question that the previous works left hanging: How did Fontana do it? That is, how was it possible for a woman to have an artistic career at all, let alone become one of the most celebrated painters of her day? This question takes us beyond the paintings and into the archives. More than that, it takes us into the history of gender, into the construction of patronage networks, into Counter-Reformation ideologies, and into the politics and social structure of the city that was the second most important in the papal state after Rome. Murphy handles all of these subjects confidently and demonstrates a firm grasp on the recent scholarly literature, a measured appreciation of Fontana’s artistic skills, and a clear narrative style. Moreover, the author has pursued her subject through many public and private archives and uses a wealth of documents to substantiate her analysis. The result is a masterful study that, in linking a very particular artist to a very particular city, clarifies the general conditions that shaped women’s artistic production in the sixteenth century. While she had her share of hardships, Fontana developed a career in the most optimal circumstances imaginable in the cinquecento, and it is doubtful that she would have enjoyed the same success had she started out in Florence, Venice, or Rome.

Murphy opens with a deft sketch of the social and political conditions that shaped artistic patronage in mid-sixteenth century Bologna. Fontana’s career grew in the decades when the city was beginning to emerge as a significant artistic center; certainly its lack of a strongly developed community of artists and patrons helped the career of an artist who did not fit the usual profile. The local artists’ guild was weak and parochial, and noble and patrician wealth had hitherto more often found its way into property and palaces than into canvases and sculptures. Painting gradually joined these markers of conspicuous consumption for the new oligarchy that arose in the decades after Bologna reverted to closer papal control by 1506. Leading Bolognese families seldom married out of the city, and as in Venice this civic endogamy, together with favorable dowry practices, boosted the social status of women. With many husbands out of town on papal business, women translated this status into real power as estate administrators and artistic patrons.

Like many early modern female painters (including Artemesia Gentileschi), Fontana was the daughter of an artist. Her career was planned carefully by her father, Prospero Fontana (1508–1596), a painter who had briefly enjoyed Julius III’s patronage in Rome but whose reputation and prosperity were fading by the 1560s. Prospero’s training refined Lavinia’s artistic skills, intellectual depth, and social graces, but turning these gifts into a steady income would necessitate solving the marriage paradox. Lavinia needed the respectability that marriage to a well-born husband afforded but required the freedom to paint that few well-born husbands could allow; she also lacked the large dowry that most well-born husbands would expect. Sixteenth-century Italy did not turn out many such men, well-born or otherwise. Yet Prospero found one in Gian Paolo Zappi, an impecunious minor nobleman from Imola who, with Prospero, managed Lavinia’s career and who shared her earnings with his father-in-law, an arrangement set out in a very specific and very unusual marriage contract, which Murphy includes in the appendix (doc. 2). She bore eleven children after their marriage in 1577, but more than that, she bore the four who survived infancy—together with her husband, father, and mother—on the tip of a very busy brush.

Murphy devotes separate chapters to the distinct steps in Fontana’s expanding career. Her first commissions were the devotional pictures and children’s portraits that contemporaries considered appropriate subjects for women painters. Murphy sees Fontana’s naturalistic style as shaped in part by Bologna’s reforming Tridentine bishop, Gabrielle Paleotti, whose 1582 Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane promoted works of art that were subdued, moral, and didactic. Paleotti’s personal support of the artist opened some critical doors, and from the late 1570s through the mid-1580s she began painting portraits of scholars and clerics, tapping into a growing demand on the part of collectors who wanted images of cultural and intellectual leaders. Bologna had Italy’s largest university, and some of its leading scholars, such as Carlo Sigonio and Girolamo Mercuriale, commissioned portraits that they could send to their admirers across the continent. Fontana caught the gravitas they aimed to project, and for some she had the added cachet of representing a return to the classics—both Pliny the Elder and Boccaccio lauded the female artists of Greece and Rome. At this early stage, Bolognese scholars could still afford Fontana. Furthermore, many had connections with wealthy local families, whose endorsement opened doors to the next stage.

From the mid-1580s, Fontana became the favorite painter for Bolognese noblewomen, who paid more handsomely and more reliably than most academics and clerics (who sometimes neglected to pay at all). The absence of a local court was a critical social factor, for these women cooperated in entertaining visiting dignitaries and upholding the city’s honor while simultaneously competing for primacy through marriage, literary production, and conspicuous consumption. Fontana’s skill at rendering jewels, costumes, and lap dogs made her paintings virtual inventories of their possessions, which was frequently precisely what these patrons wanted. The high quality of the book’s illustrations brings out this aspect of Fontana’s work, particularly in portraits like that of Costanza Isolani (New York, Sotheby’s, fig. 83), an anonymous Young Noblewoman (Washington, D.C., National Museum of Women in the Arts, fig. 95), and the Gozzadini Family portrait (Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale, fig. 100; details figs. 101–5 and 109–111). In these works, as with her portraits of scholars, Fontana offered naturalism with gravity. Some of her subjects were young women, others older widows. While many of her peers depicted these women with a retiring demeanor and downcast eyes, Fontana’s female subjects engage the viewer directly and confidently, a trait that Murphy sees as consistent with women’s active social role in Bologna, and certainly one that reinforced her appeal as a portraitist for Bolognese patrician women.

The world of noblewomen opened up to Fontana in part because of the Gozzadini family group portrait of 1584, mentioned above, that depicts the two legitimated daughters of Ulisse Gozzadini, together with their husbands. Murphy devotes chapter 4 to the complex dynamics behind this work, commissioned by one of the daughters in order to assert her place in the family and its inheritance. The author bases her reading on a careful review of correspondence, financial records, and wills produced many decades after the portrait itself was completed, offering by far the most informed and thoroughly documented account of the context for this well-studied piece.

Murphy offers an unparalleled analysis of how an early modern artist’s career could emerge out of unusual family arrangements in a particular social setting, and how her circle of patrons steadily expands from one distinct group to another as her artistry matures. As this richly illustrated volume demonstrates, Fontana’s is an artistry whose respect for the human form and the subject’s individuality seems based in a genuine personal relationship—Murphy is persuasive in her assertion that Fontana’s success was due as much to her ability to cultivate relationships as it was to her skill with a brush. But the same social setting that fostered her career left her without disciples; Fontana could not operate a workshop or train apprentices, and thus had no successors. While a series of women artists practiced in Bologna, from the sculptor Properzia de’Rossi in the early sixteenth century, to Lavinia Fontana, to Elisabetta Sirani in the seventeenth, there was apparently little or no connection among them. It is difficult to tell what relations if any Fontana had with other artists working in Bologna; this is one of few areas where Murphy’s analysis leaves more questions than answers. Murphy explores in great depth and with great skill Fontana’s relations with her patrons but writes little about her relation to other artists like Ludovico and Annibale Carracci, both of whom were beginning to change Bolognese and indeed all Italian painting. As a result, what we see in Fontana is more a maturing technique than a developing style, and it is not clear whether this impression is due more to the artist or the author. Regardless, Lavinia Fontana: A Painter and Her Patrons in Sixteenth-Century Bologna is a major study and necessary reading for those interested in women artists, the politics of patronage and gender, and the cultural setting of Bologna at the time when it was an incubator of the Baroque.