One of the most extraordinary things in the National Gallery of Ireland’s engrossing exhibition of works by the early Renaissance painter Lavinia Fontana is not a painting at all. It’s a piece of paper, brown and transparent with age, inked on both sides in an elegant cursive script. Dated 14th February, 1577, Bologna, it is Fontana’s marriage contract. In terms wildly unconventional for the era, it stipulates that Lavinia – already a professional artist, trained in the studio (and style) of her Mannerist painter father, Prospero – and her husband-to-be will live in her family home after their marriage, and that Lavinia will continue to pursue her artistic career. Exceptionally, she will not come with a dowry; her future in-laws must put their faith in her ability to ‘make a great profit from her painting’.
Over the next three and a half decades, Lavinia did just this, receiving commissions from the Bolognese nobility, the church and, eventually, the Vatican Palace. She is understood to have been Europe’s first professional female artist, working outside of the confines of either court or convent and running a successful studio of her own. (Her husband, Gian Paolo Zappi, who had briefly trained with her father, numbered amongst her likely assistants.) As portraitist of choice for the sumptuously adorned ladies of the Quaranta, Bologna’s senatorial families, she became part of their world, relocating to be close to their palazzi and making her sitters godparents to her children. (She gave birth to 11.) Immersed in the social dynamics of the powerful, fashionable circles in which she moved, Fontana was attuned to the significance of her paintings’ every ring and ruffle.
For the uninitiated, here’s a primer.
Canine Cartier
One thing likely to catch the eye of any visitor to ‘Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker’ is a preponderance of lapdogs. Seemingly, no self-respecting cinquecento Bolognese noblewoman would be portrayed without one – and the smaller the dog, the more expensive. In fact, there was a whole breed of lapdogs known as cani bolognesi (Bolognese dogs): these are the white-haired fluffballs that accompany the goddess of love in Venus and Cupid with Organist and dog (1548–49) by Fontana’s contemporary, Titian, and the young Duchess of Alba (The White Duchess, 1795) in Goya’s later rendition. But the dogs in Fontana’s portraits are the brown and white ancestors of King Charles spaniels. In her Portrait of the Gozzadini Family, the tiny dog on the table is the literal centrepiece of the picture’s family drama. It wears earrings and a jewelled collar (decorating the dog was common practice amongst the ruling classes; the inventory of one nobleman in 1687 listed canine collars and earrings) that echo the gold rings worn by the human figures.
One daughter’s bejewelled hand strokes the dog proprietorially; the other’s is held at bay by the father. The symbolic claim to the family fortune is clear.
Slipping into Something More Comfortable
It still startles, nearly 450 years later. Ruddy hand squeezing fleshy bum. The intent stare of the man’s eyes; the woman’s knowing backwards glance. Venus and Mars is undoubtedly Fontana’s most daring painting – especially when you consider that female artists were still fighting for access to nude life models well into the 20th century. Venus is naked apart from a strand of pearls and a single flower, sitting on the sleeve of a robe we can imagine has been discarded in passionate haste. A pair of cast-off slippers in the bottom right of the painting indicate that the scene we are viewing is postcoital; on the bed above the shoes cupid sleeps, his work done. With their raised platforms, these are chopines, a fashion imported from nearby Venice, where their towering platform heels allowed wearers to glide above waterlogged walkways, and which were in turn derived from Turkish bath shoes (nalins). Tantilisingly, chopines were a type of shoe favoured equally by courtesans and patrician brides and thus a lightning rod in contemporary debates about femininity. While it’s almost certain that Venus’s nude body was not painted from life (unless the body of the artist herself), scholars believe the face might have been. Does Fontana’s choice of footwear hint at her model’s profession?
Rock-a-Bye Bye Baby
A miniature four-poster, pelmeted with minutely rendered lace and adorned with floral inlay, looks like an uncomfortable place of repose for the tightly swaddled young child bound within. Their blank stare, directly out towards the viewer, is as unrevealing as that of the Mona Lisa: an expression of neither pleading, peace nor pain. This is a rare extant depiction of nursery furniture of the 16th-century nobility – a child’s bed that has an unsettlingly tombish cast, accentuated by the marmoreal pallor of the subject within. It’s hard not to see echoes of Holbein’s depiction The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521) painted half a century earlier, in the rigid horizontal extension of the body and the terrible untouched whiteness of the sheets. The fact that the eyes stare out at us, however, makes it highly unlikely this was painted to commemorate a lost child, though this was a common occurrence at the time. Of the 11 infants Fontana herself gave birth to, only three survived her, which gives added, awful poignancy to this work.
Pearls of Wisdom
Silk production was the largest industry in 16th century Bologna, at its height employing almost a third of the city’s population. Fontana’s canvases shimmer with richly detailed fabrics and ornate brocades. The centrepiece of the exhibition – a jewel from the National Gallery of Ireland’s own collection – is a tapestry of silks, damasks and velvets, lace cuffs and ruffs, as the Queen of Sheba and her all-female retinue process through the court of King Solomon to hear his wises words. The Queen’s own dress is ornamented with hundreds of pearls, which also adorn the golden gifts that she offers to the king – an allusion both to the ‘easternness’ of the biblical figure (since most pearls were sourced from the Gulf of Persia) and a nod to the possible identity of her real-life counterpart. New scholarship by Dr Aoife Brady, the show’s curator, suggests that this portrait commemorates the marriage of Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara, to his third wife, Margherita Gonzaga, whose name is the Latin for pearl.
A Pain in the Asp
Blame Elizabeth Taylor. Ever since she processed into Rome on her sphinx-shaped float, ablaze with gold and eyeshadow, in the Joseph Mankiewicz-directed 1963 high-camp classic, her image has been indissociable with that of the last Ptolemaic queen of Egypt. Fontana’s more demure rendition, painted three and a half centuries earlier, surprises the Taylor-tinged imagination, but the painter, too, was drawing on oriental tropes of the day. Her simple red tunic and long-sleeved undergarment evokes clothing worn by Ottoman women, whilst an Ottoman soldier’s helmet sits atop her bongrace (a visor made from stiffened velvet or linen), protecting her improbably pale skin from the desert sun. The armoire in the background is decorated with geometric patterns, indicating its eastern origin, while the three small sculptures on top include an ibis. Cleopatra’s eyes meet those of her serpentine assailant, half-hidden in the shadows, with a soft, venomless stare.
‘Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker’, National Gallery of Ireland, until 27 August 2023. Details: nationalgallery.ie
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