Caroline P. Murphy, Lavinia Fontana: A Painter and her Patrons in
Sixteenth-Century Bologna (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2003), 236 pp. ISBN 0300099134
This is the first monograph in English on Lavinia Fontana and as such must
be welcomed by scholars of late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century
Italian Bolognese painting. Previously, Lavinia Fontana was the subject of an
important exhibition held in Bologna in 1994 at the same time as the
exhibition of the work of Sophonisba Anguissola and her sisters, held as part
of a renewed interest in the work of women painters. The 1994 exhibition
offered a unique opportunity to view together most of the 150 works by
Fontana, the largest oeuvre for a woman painter before the eighteenth
century. Caroline Murphy has clearly benefited from the account of Fontana’s
stylistic development established by the exhibition but has moved beyond this
to produce a monograph which sets the work of this female painter within a
detailed and nuanced account of the historical, social and cultural context of
the period.
The book consists of an introduction, six chapters and a conclusion,
together with an appendix of documents that, disconcertingly, appear only in
English translation so that scholars pursuing research in this area will still need
to return to the original sources. The introduction, ‘Art and Society in
Sixteenth-Century Bologna’, is particularly useful because it places the work of
Fontana in the context of Bolognese history, culture and society; the author
rightly stresses the increased role of women in church and society following
on from the teachings of the Archbishop of Bologna Gabriele Paleotti, whose
treatise on Sacred Painting greatly influenced Fontana and helps to situate her
work within Counter-Reformation art.
Chapter One, ‘The Making of a Woman Artist’, establishes Fontana’s
formation both within the context of women painters but in particular under
her father Prospero’s guidance, as it was he who encouraged her to pick up
the brush (her first dated work is 1575, when she was already twenty three).
Murphy also carefully examines Fontana’s detailed marriage contract (1578),
set out by her father so as to enable her to paint while her husband executed
the contractual side of the work. Her small early paintings for private devotion
are discussed here.
Chapters Two to Six focus on Fontana’s subsequent career mainly as a
portraitist, arranged under different groups of patrons. Chapter Two examines
her ‘Pictures for Scholars, Prelates, Poets and Bankers’, all distinguished men
in Bolognese society such as the historians Carlo Sigonio. Chapter Three turns
to the ‘Gentildame et honeste matrone’. Female patronage of women artists
was not unique but even so the case of Lavinia Fontana was exceptional as
she became the official portrait painter of female nobility in Bologna, which
greatly increased the price of a work by her. Murphy ably reconstructs the
personal histories as well as social identities of these patrons, and
demonstrates how Fontana’s own social position rose through her work,
indicated by the noble status of the godparents of her later children. In
Chapter Four, Murphy provides a micro-historical reading of ‘Laudomia
Gozzadini and her Family Portrait’, analysing the patrons’ personal history
through a close reading of the painting (1584) in tandem with corresponding
documents in the family archive – an exemplary analysis of a painting in its
social context. Chapter Five, ‘‘La Vita vedovile’: The Art of Widowhood’,
shows that Bolognese widows enjoyed great independence and leadership:
unlike her contemporaries, such as Ludovico Carracci, Fontana represented
them as such. Chapter Six, ‘Painting for the Children of Bologna’, examines
Fontana’s depiction of the children of the noble families of Bologna but also
her production of devotional paintings for the educational institutions in
which they were taught the catechism.
Fontana and her husband moved to Rome in 1604 but that is another
story as Murphy’s title makes clear. Although not structured around stylistic
analysis, Murphy’s book nevertheless offers a good account of Fontana’s
development, here set within the broader and more interesting historical
context of late sixteenth-century Bologna. Murphy demonstrates the
importance of Paleotti’s presence in the city for the choice of subject for her
paintings, and offers a sensible well-groomed account of the context within
which Fontana, as a woman, worked. The analysis of gender in this volume is
extremely balanced and nuanced and provides a convincing key to the
interpretation of Lavinia’s paintings.
Roberto Cobianchi
University of Warwick