Lavinia Fontana’s Wedding Feast in Cana Reconsidered (original) (raw)

Lavinia Fontana's Birth of the Virgin

Source, 2023

You might not be acquainted with Lavinia Fontana's altarpiece, "Birth of the Virgin," located in the Santissima Trinità church in Bologna. Nevertheless, this remarkable piece deserves greater recognition and scrutiny. The 17th-century Bolognese art critic, Cesare Malvasia, described it as a "bold gamble that succeeded." This article confirms his judgment by introducing some new references and correcting some misunderstandings that have overshadowed its complexity.

'The Marian Dimension'. Part Five: Wedding Feast at Cana

On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, ‘They have no more wine’. ‘Woman, why do you involve me?’ Jesus replied. ‘My hour has not yet come’. His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you’. John 2:1-5

Lavinia Fontana: Immortalizing Morality

Lavinia Fontana was a late Italian Renaissance painter of exceptional and formidable skill, particularly when it came to her depictions of fabric and ornamentation. The nobility of Bologna flocked to have her paint them bedecked in their silk, jewels, and lace. She solidified her place in Bolognese society through her considerable skill in painting, and became somewhat coveted as both a friend and a creator. In this paper, I focus on Fontana’s depiction of noblewomen and their place in society as conveyed through dress. By the means of her astute renderings of garments completed with painstaking detail, we are able to clearly see many elements of late Renaissance dress as applied to noblewomen in Northern Italy. I base my studies on a close reading of the garments depicted by Fontana in both her self-portraits and commissions. I compare these with the work of contemporary scholars in analyzing her artwork, as well as with publications that ran in 16th Century Bologna. In particular, I analyze the fashions portrayed by Fontana to those pictured in Cesare Vecellio’s De Gli Habiti Antichi, et Moderni Di Diverse Parti Del Mondo. Through these close comparisons, one is able to see particular fashion trends, such as the abundance of pearls and silk, and the meaning behind the overelaborate representation of such materials. It is evident that portraits assisted Fontana’s patrons in solidifying their place in late Renaissance Bologna as being the most fashionable – and morally devout – women in the city. This examination is furthered by a review of social etiquette and governmental oversight during this time period, including an investigation of traditional customs surrounding ceremonial moments in women’s lives, such marriage, birth, and mourning. Sumptuary laws in place in Northern Italy greatly affected what women could and could not wear. Furthermore, without a royal court, the nobility of Bologna clamored to fill the vacuous social space left; the surest way to solidify their place as fashionable members of the first class was through portraiture. Fontana was careful to observe these laws and unofficial codes, thus the women she depicts are immortals with morals. Fontana’s pictures walked a fine line of extravagance within moral boundaries. Renaissance dress was important to the painter; her subjects’ social standing depended on her accurate depiction of their overconsumption within legal confines. This enhances our understanding of the garments worn in Bologna during the late 16th Century, as well as our understanding of the personality of Lavinia Fontana. Fontana painted her noble patrons as they wished to see themselves. She aggrandized them through their dress, but their morality was always of the utmost priority to her. In her portrayals, all of the noblewomen adhere to strict sumptuary laws, seemingly forever being enacted and repealed in late Renaissance Italy. She further glorified particular patrons, such as Eleanor de’ Medici and Isabella Ruini, through allegorical myths that furthered their beauty and their morals simultaneously. Acting in the role of a woman painter was not an ordinary thing to do for someone in this era. Lavinia Fontana balanced her life through her temperate dress and enthusiastic religiosity. She expected nothing less from the proper women who sat for her. Through her innocuously rebellious career her star was catapulted, and Fontana herself became a noblewoman by association.

A Daughter's Pride: Lavinia Fontana's Self-Portrait at the Virginals

Lavinia Fontana’s musical self-portrait has been discussed by both art historians and musicologists in several studies since the 1980s. All of these analyses agree on characterising this tiny painting as a wedding portrait, in which Fontana depicts herself as an affluent lady, educated in Latin and an amateur musician: the perfect lady of the court created by Baldassare Castiglione in Il cortegiano. This paper will look into this Self-Portrait as a less traditional construction as it appears to be at first sight: its musical elements do not only feminise and domesticate her image (as was usual at the time), but also consciously place her within a line of female painters who also chose music as an important part of the representation of the self. Whilst her predecessors represented themselves as mere amateurs (i.e. the portraits by Catharina van Hemessen, Sofonisba Anguissola or Marietta Robusti), Fontana takes her self-portrait a step further, representing herself as a professional painter and heiress to her father’s workshop. She accomplishes this without openly defying the conventions of the patriarchal society of late 16th-century Italy. My discussion will try to elucidate how music plays a significant role in Fontana’s depiction of her ‘daughter’s pride’.

ScholarWorks@Arcadia Lavinia Fontana: A Reattribution

Arcadia University, 2019

At Hopetoun House in Queensferry, Scotland, the paintings Two Women with Infant and Two Women with Child and Dog are attributed to the late-sixteenth-century artist Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) . Through research and visual analysis, this thesis denounces the current attribution and instead attributes these two paintings to Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614). Fontana was a female painter of the late Renaissance whose artwork did not always conform to the Mannerist tendencies of the other Italian artists from this period. It is difficult to place her within a specific style since she began to stray from some of the concepts and style of Mannerism. During her time, Fontana overcame obstacles set upon her by the Counter-Reformation as well as those due to gender inequalities. Scholars may have been motivated to attribute the paintings to a male artist to make the works more valuable and profitable. By reattributing these paintings, this thesis helps to correct gender inequality that still persists in the art world.