Lavinia Fontana was the first of a number of woman artists in Bologna to achieve both national and international renown. She trained in the workshop of her father, Prospero Fontana, a leading exponent of Mannerism in Bologna, a city of vibrant cultural exchange and erudition in the sixteenth century. She became the first woman to be commissioned with a major altarpiece, The Assumption of Ponte Santo, 1584, ordered by the consiglio comunale of Imola (now Imola, Pinacoteca Civica) and would play a key role in shaping the identity of the female artist, with her landmark self-portraits (in the Accademia di San Luca, Rome and the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), following in the footsteps of Properzia de’ Rossi, a leading sculptor in Bologna during the High Renaissance. As she established herself as an independent artist, she gained fame and distinction as a portrait painter in her native city and beyond, and by the 1580s she was receiving important commissions from eminent families such as the Orsini and the Gozzadini.
Th present composition can be compared to her father’s signed altarpiece showing the same subject, now in the Pinacoteca di Brera, which shares some notable similarities, in the manner in which God the Father appears upper left, in the way the Madonna crosses her arms and in the pattern of the marble floor. Lavinia herself staged this subject on a number of occasions, including a copper in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
We are grateful to Daniele Benati for confirming the attribution on the basis of a photograph.