Summary
Lavinia Fontana grew up in Bologna, Italy, a city that encouraged the academic and artistic talents of women. Women had been educated at the University of Bologna since the Middle Ages, and Bolognese painters claimed a woman painter, Caterina dei Vigri (St. Catherine of Bologna), as their patron saint. Fontana is considered the first woman painter to have had a successful artistic career. She supported her family by her work which included major commissions from both public and private patrons. Encouraged to develop her artistic potential by her father, Prospero Fontana, who was a well-known artist and teacher, it was in her father's studio that she met Giano Paolo Zappi, whom she married in 1577. Zappi appears to have given up his artistic career to assist his wife in her studio, handle the accounts of her numerous commissions, and help care for their many children. [The experience is very similar to that of 19th century mathematician Mary Somerville (1780-1872) who received considerable and dedicated help from her husband William. Ed. Russell McNeil].
Fontana did not just produce portraits or still lifes--categories that ranked low on the academic hierarchy--but small and large scale biblical and mythological works with many figures, including male and female nudes. She painted large public altarpieces, a rare distinction for a woman artist. Women were generally not commissioned to execute altarpieces, in part because these ambitious compositions required studying from nude models. After moving to Rome around 1603, she created the best known of her public commissions, The Stoning of St. Stephen Martyr. This altarpiece, painted for the church of S. Paolo fuori le Mura, one of the seven pilgrimage churches of Rome, was destroyed by fire in 1823. While over a hundred works by Fontana are documented or recorded in early sources, only thirty-two signed and dated or datable works are known, and a smaller number of pictures are attributed to her on stylistic grounds. This nevertheless constitutes the largest surviving body of work by any woman artist active before 1700. [Adapted from National Museum of Women in the Arts]
Books
Please browse our Amazon list of titles about Renaissance Art. For rare and hard to find works we recommend our Alibris list of titles about Lavinia Fontana.
ResearchCOPAC UK: Lavinia Fontana
Library of Canada Search Form
Library of Congress: Lavinia Fontana
Other Library Catalogs: Lavinia Fontana
No comments:
Post a Comment