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"Lavinia Fontana has the distinction of being considered the first woman artist working within the same sphere as her male counterparts outside of a court or convent. She achieved her independent success and celebrity in one of the most intense of artistic environments, Bologna in the late Cinquecento. The daughter of the artist Prospero Fontana, Lavinia is best known as a portrait painter of elegance and sympathy, and her fame in her own lifetime extended throughout Italy and beyond. In an arrangement that was unusual, if not unique for the age, Lavinia married a fellow painter from a noble family, who then acted as his wife’s assistant and managed their large household (the couple had 11 children, only three of whom outlived their mother). From the 1580s until the turn of the seventeenth century Lavinia was the portraitist of choice among Bolognese nobility. She then moved to Rome, where she became a painter at the papal court and the recipient of numerous honors. Her art and career have recently been the subject of renewed scholarly attention and collector interest.
The present painting is a stunning addition to the known corpus of Lavinia Fontana’s works. It has been recently studied by Dr. Maria Teresa Cantaro, author of the standard monograph on the artist, who has confirmed the attribution to Lavinia Fontana (written communication, 26 May 2013) and to whom we are grateful for her observations on the painting. Cantaro dates the painting to ca. 1585, contemporary with some of the artist’s most distinguished celebrated works: the Portrait of the Gozzadini Family (1585, Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale), the Portrait of a Man of the Tozzoni Family (1584, Imola, Palazzo Tozzoni), and the Portrait of Fra Francesco Panigarola (1585, Florence, Galleria Palatina). The portrait is framed in an elaborate period frame, which is believed to be the original. Lavinia Fontana’s authorship has also been confirmed upon firsthand inspection by Dr. Babette Bohn (verbal communication, January 2014), who also dates the portrait to the mid-1580s.
Our painting is closely related to another portrait by Lavinia of nearly identical size and format (Fig. 1). The sitter in that work, attired in a brilliant green dress, is so close to that of the present portrait that Cantaro considers it likely that the same woman is depicted. They certainly share many similarities in their physiognomy, hairstyle, dress, jewelry, and pose. The differences are notable as well, although the significance of the changes may be difficult to appreciate. While a closed book appears on the table next to the sitter in our portrait, a letter rests on the table next to the lady in green. Cantaro suggests that our painting was executed at the time of her engagement and the other after her marriage. Whereas in the present painting the sitter wears her rings on her index and little fingers (Fig. 2), the lady in green wears her bands on her ring fingers and she holds a glove, a symbol that is typically thought to indicate a married state. If not two portraits of the same sitter, the two paintings may rather depict sisters. A fragmentary inscription formerly on the letter in the related portrait gave the name of “Laura Gonzaga, contessa di Sabbionetta,” however her identification as the sitter has been rejected by Cantaro, both because the inscription was a later addition (and disappeared during the recent cleaning) and the fact that Laura Gonzaga, born in 1547 or 1548, had become a nun and entered a Benedictine convent in 1566.
Cantaro associates both works with a pair of identically sized portraits recorded in eighteenth-century Sanvitale inventories as in the “manner of Girolamo Mazzola.” The Lady in Green was photographed when in the collection of Count Giovanni Sanvitale at the Rocca di Fontanellato in 1931. This portrait is identifiable in the earlier Sanvitale inventories based on the description of the jeweled marten’s head—a luxury item known as a zibellino, which was associated with fertility and childbirth—that is attached to sitter’s belt and held in her hand. The marten’s head is mentioned in the inventories as a “scojatolo” (a squirrel) and later as a “sghiratto” (another word for a zibellino). In addition to the fact that the Sanvitale inventories record the presence of a companion painting to the Lady in Green—another portrait of a woman—our portrait also appears to have been recorded in the collection of Count Giovanni Sanvitale in the 1930s. The Lady in Green was exhibited in the Mostra Iconografica Gonzaghesca in 1937, and the catalogue noted the presence of a similar portrait (almost certainly ours) in the sala d’armi of the Rocca di Fontanellato. These two portraits would have descended from either the Sanvitale family, or from the Sabionetta or the Bozzolo branches of the Gonzaga. They evidently remained with the Sanvitale family until the dispersal of the family collections in the 1940s. Cantaro discusses the Sanvitale provenance in her essay, in which she makes the tentative proposal to identify the sitter of our portrait as Isabella Gonzaga, daughter of Vespasiano Gonzaga, Lord of Sabbioneta, who married Don Luigi Caraffa in 1584. She furthermore notes that the date of Isabella Gonzaga’s matrimony corresponds exactly to dating of these portraits, executed one shortly after the other." [1]
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