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Artist

Lavinia Fontana

Year
Bologna 1552 - 1614 Rome
Price range
250,000 – 3,000,000 USD
Lavinia Fontana was Italy’s first professional woman artist.

Working beyond the confines of a convent or a court, Lavinia astounded patrons with her adaptability as a painter, never confining herself in terms of genre or scale. As a woman, she was the first to be accepted into the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, first to paint female nudes and monumental altarpieces for the public, and much of her studio practise remains elusive, she is the first documented woman artist to run her own workshop.

Lavinia was trained by her father, the Bolognese painter Prospero Fontana. She grew up in a home abound with books and artistic treatises, copies of masterpieces and antique objects. She was encouraged to read and write, as well as learn mathematics, Latin, and music, specifically playing the spinet (a type of small clavichord). Two of Lavinia’s earliest self-portraits attest to her erudite upbringing: the Self-Portrait at the Spinet (1577, Accademia di San Luca, Rome) and the Self-Portrait in a Studio (1579, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), in which she is poised with a pen and paper, surrounded by antiquities. As Prospero engaged in the rich intellectual life of Bologna’s aristocracy and academicians, he ensured patronage from the city’s aristocratic, religious, and scholarly quarters for his daughter. In 1577, Lavinia married Paolo Zappi, the son of prosperous merchant from Imola. Very unusually, Zappi agreed to forgo a dowry with the stipulation that Lavinia earn a living as a painter. The marriage proved successful—Lavinia’s career thrived, even as she birthed eleven children; Paolo, meanwhile, acted both as her studio assistant and agent.

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Selected artworks
Market

Top 3 auction prices

481,695 $
2009
602,500 $
2012
1,339,333 $
2023

Details

The sales are: Stockholms Auktionsverk – 26 November 2009 lot 2275 (288,391 GBP), Sotheby’s New York – 26 January 2012 lot 48 (383,491 GBP), and Rouillac – 4 June 2023 lot 57 (1,075,753 GBP; catalogued as ‘attributed to Lavinia Fontana’).
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Books on Lavinia Fontana

Aoife Brady, ed., Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker, exh. cat. Dublin, 2023.

Liana De Girolami Cheney, Lavinia Fontana’s mythological paintings: art, beauty, and wisdom, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2020.

Caroline P. Murphy, Lavinia Fontana: a painter and her patrons in sixteenth-century Bologna, New Haven, 2003.

Maria Teresa Cantaro, Lavinia Fontana, bolognese: “pittora singolare” 1552–1614, Milan, 1989.

Notable Exhibitions

Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker, 6 May–27 August 2023. Curated by Aoife Brady.

Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana, 22 October 2019–2 February 2020. Curated by Leticia Ruiz Gómez.

Washington, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Lavinia Fontana, 1552–1614, 5 February –7 June 1998. Curated by Vera Fortunati.

Bologna, Museo Civico Archeologico, Lavinia Fontana, 1552–1614, 1 October–4 December 1994. Curated by Vera Fortunati.

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