Fathers and Daughters – Part 2
PUBLISHED IN FOUR PARTS, ELIZABETH CROPPER explores HOW THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING THE DAUGHTER OF AN ESTABLISHED ARTIST SHAPED THE CAREER OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI AND LAVINIA FONTANA.
What did Prospero Fontana and Orazio Gentileschi have to offer their daughters beyond simple paternity? In Bologna, Fontana primarily offered the stability and comfort of a family that, while not noble, was well-connected.[28] Prospero (born ca. 1509), whose appearance is only recorded in a woodcut frontispiece (fig. 15) published by Malvasia and derived from his self-portrait in an altarpiece, was the son of a stonemason, and his own training as a painter is unclear: it seems to have been somewhat haphazard, beginning in the workshop of Innocenzo da Imola, moving on to work with Girolamo da Treviso, and fetching up in Genoa in the workshop of Perino del Vaga. In January 1539, having returned to Bologna, he was recognized as an independent master in the commission to paint an altarpiece of the Resurrection of Christ for the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Morte in Bologna (now lost).[29] Later that year, he married Antonia de’ Bonardis from a wealthy family of publishers and printers. Her dowry helped Prospero secure a house, where he entertained such educated visitors as the naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi and Gabriele Paleotti, soon to become a leader of religious reform in Bologna.[30] His judgment was trusted by his peers and he held office in the council of the Arte dei Bombasari e Pittori many times.[31]
But this is Lavinia’s story not Prospero’s. Lavinia (fig. 16), born in 1552, was the third of Prospero’s three children, following Flaminio (b. 1544) and Emilia (b. 1546). Flaminio is documented as working alongside his father in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, in 1563–65 and was very likely in Città di Castello in 1571–73, but he must have died by the time of Lavinia’s marriage in 1577, when she was declared Prospero’s only heir.[32] Her married sister had died in 1566.[33] Prospero was anxious to keep the family together, even as he often had to travel for work, including commissions in Rome, Florence and Ancona. His one long journey to support Primaticcio in Fontainebleau in 1558 seems to have been cut short by illness, and he returned to his family almost immediately. It is notable that in his 1571 contract to decorate the Palazzo Vitelli in Città di Castello, which required him to live some one hundred and twenty miles away from Bologna for three years, Prospero was specifically guaranteed a house large enough for his family to live in.[34]
The biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia reports that Lavinia resisted many possibilities for marriage above her social class because she believed that only equality could lead to peace and happiness in marriage.[35] In 1577, aged 25, Lavinia married Gian Paolo Zappi from Imola (figs 17–18), thanks to the intervention of Vincenzo Ghini, a professor of mathematics at the University of Bologna, whose family was from Imola, and on the advice of the painter Orazio Samacchini, a family friend, who underlined Lavinia’s virtue and her potential for earning money.[36] We have very few, if any, firmly dated works before this, though the terms of the unusual marriage contract make it clear that she was already a professional painter: her self-portraits of that year were ready for her future father-in-law to carry to the Zappi family in Imola as evidence of her comportment, virtue, and musical and painterly accomplishments.[37] In the contract it is stated that the couple must live in the Fontana household until Prospero’s death, and must always care for her mother. Prospero would pay expenses, but the Zappis must give their earnings to him. Gian Paolo was also a painter, and might expect some income, but, given Samacchini’s testimony, Lavinia was clearly the breadwinner.[38] The family’s move from Via Galliera to a new house in Via della Fondazza in 1588 indicates her continuing success.[39]
Prospero would live until 1597, dying at the age of 85, and with dwindling income, even if his last signed and dated work was completed as late as 1593 (the Crucifixion in the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Saint-Étienne Metropole; fig. 19).[40] He was still receiving payments on Lavinia’s behalf for a work done that year, the important altarpiece of the Assumption of the Virgin (fig. 20) for the Paleotti chapel in San Pietro Metropolitana, now in Pieve di Cento, and to which he may have contributed.[41] Prospero bequeathed everything to Lavinia, with the provision that she continue to support her mother. When Lavinia and Gian Paolo moved to Rome in 1604, they took Antonia de Bonardis with them, together with the four surviving children from the eleven born, often with difficulty, in Bologna.[42] The remarkable fact is that Lavinia never left home, the site of the family business in which she and her father were the principal agents.
Such social stability, as well as her own literacy, which followed from her parents’ connections to the world of printing and humanism, including friendship with Achille Bocchi (for whom Prospero designed emblematic devices), and with the historian Carlo Sigonio (whose portrait she painted), accounts for Lavinia’s extraordinary entrée into the Bolognese world of the university and the palaces of the nobility, and her consequent fame as a portrait painter (fig. 21), equalling her father. She worked as successfully as her father with male scholars and clerics, and was favored by noble women, especially for the portrayal of children and natural wonders.[43] (fig. 22) The network of clerics and nobles established by Prospero also made it possible for her to receive commissions for large altarpieces, such as the Calcina altarpiece for San Giacomo Maggiore (1589)(fig. 23), or the Vizzani altarpiece for the family chapel in Santa Maria della Morte (1590).[44] But just what did Prospero have to offer his daughter as a teacher of painting beyond the fundamentals?
Carlo Cesare Malvasia holds Fontana up as one of those artists who worked from memory rather than from observation, through “fantasy and furor” rather than “imitation and study.”[45] Speed and sureness of execution made Prospero a capable fresco painter, and his ability to imitate and be imitated made him a useful member of decorative teams, whether in Genoa, Rome, or Bologna. The repetitiveness of his work, correspondingly, and the association with the styles of other artists, especially Perino del Vaga and Parmigianino, as well his frequent borrowing of compositions by Giorgio Vasari through drawings, are all typical of a Mannerist moment.[46] Prospero’s Brera Assumption of the Virgin of 1570, for example, was based on a composition by Vasari (fig. 24), and would be repeated.[47] (fig. 25) The compositions of his prestigious frescoes in Palazzo d’Accursio, Bologna (fig. 26) also rely on the example of Vasari.[48](fig. 27) Carlo Cesare Malvasia laments that Prospero and such contemporaries as Vasari and the Bolognese Samacchini and Sabatini stopped imitating both ancient statues and nature, and worked swiftly entirely out of their imagination in a style that was far from verismilar or true, but totally chimerical and ideal.[49] On the other hand, he praises Prospero’s mastery of perspective, and the arrangement of figures in planes, and his knowledge of mythology and history.[50] We learn from him, however, that Ludovico Carracci, born just a few years after Lavinia, left Prospero’s studio in frustration, as did others.[51] Prospero’s last student Alessandro Tiarini (1577–1668) was a quite different case, for according to Malvasia, it was Lavinia herself who recommended him to her father, and intervened when he was about to be expelled for fooling around in the workshop: Prospero put Tiarini in his own private studiolo, where he kept his drawings, books, and reliefs, and where he slept. Fontana grew fond of him but could not discourage his obsessive study of perspective.[52] Tiarini’s education would be terminated upon Prospero’s death, and his work took a very different direction as a result, reflecting the reform of the Carracci.
Lavinia could not join her father on the scaffolding as a fresco painter, for that involved working in a team outside the house, and often travelling outside Bologna. There is nothing, however, in Prospero’s teaching as outlined by Malvasia—drawing after other drawings and relief sculpture, studying perspective, and reading history and mythology—that would not have been as available to Lavinia as to other pupils. In other words, Prospero could teach her everything she needed to become an easel painter very like himself. He could not, however go beyond that: if we look for compositional innovation, a change from crowded scenes full of ornament, or naturalism based on the direct study of the human figure rather than other works of art, we won’t find it. But it was not so much her gender that prevented her from studying the nude model (another often unexamined assumption about women artists’ training), so much as her father’s own practice and, we dare say, prejudice. Malvasia regretted that Prospero had not been born in the next century when he could have followed the Carracci in modernizing his manner.[53] Prospero appears to have made little use of models, far less nude ones, and in this he is quite typical of his generation (and here we think of the well-known engraving by Agostino Veneziano of Baccio Bandinelli’s studio; fig. 28) and Lavinia inherited this: the statuettes of the Crouching Venus and Belvedere Antinous on her desk epitomized nude male and female beauty for both male and female artists.[54] Exceptional in Lavinia is the richness of her coloring in a work such as the Assumption of the Virgin, of 1584 for Imola, and the inventiveness and insight of her sympathetic portraits of the Bolognese who so enthusiastically sought her out.[55]
It might seem inevitable that Lavinia’s career would advance as her father’s declined. Yet It is also important to understand how truly independent she became, not allowing herself to be a mere follower or a collaborator, by establishing her own reputation and market. She was not merely the daughter of a painter, but herself a painter who had the force and talent to exploit the extraordinarily stable social circumstances and education her family provided, and contributing to this in return. This independence was further manifested in her paintings of nude female figures in her later years, such as the Minerva Dressing for Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1613 (fig. 29; itself a reworking of the earlier version from ca. 1604, for Marco Sittico Altemps), or the recently discovered Three Graces, even if these were primarily based on ancient example like those statuettes in her early studio rather than the posed model. It further led her to exploit and embrace her gender by portraying herself as Venus or a brave Judith, dressed in a fine and bejewelled costume.[56] This she did not learn from Prospero.