Fathers and Daughters – Part 4
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.
Whatever the relationship Lavinia Fontana and Artemisia Gentileschi had with their fathers, or the extent of their artistic dependence on them, there can be no doubt about their determination to define a confident self-image as successful women, as more than a painter’s daughter. Lavinia’s early self-portraits assert her virtue, her musical culture, and her dedication to drawing from the models of antiquity and beyond. Exceptionally, in 1611, towards the end of her life, Lavinia’s image was immortalized in a cast bronze medal (header image; discussed in detail below).
Few Early Modern Italian artists of any gender were honored this way, one notable exception being Leone Leoni’s medal for Michelangelo (fig. 51), gifted to him in 1561 in thanks for handing on a commission, in the form of two silver and two bronze specimens.[83] Most often, women were celebrated in medals for their beauty, virtue, and marital status, rather than for any accomplishments. One significant exception is Gian Antonio Signoretti’s medal of Costanza Bocchi (fig. 52), daughter of Prospero Fontana’s friend and colleague Achille Bocchi, and so presumably a friend of Lavinia’s. Though the medal identifies her only as a daughter and a virgin, she was a poet, accomplished in Greek and Latin.[84]
Among artists, an important exception was Sofonisba Anguissola (1532–1625), whose medal (fig. 53), however, bears an inscription describing her simply as the daughter of her father Amilcare, with no reference to her work as a painter, nor to her status as a virgin, as she often signed her early works.[85] Yet another rare example, closer to Lavinia’s in referring to her profession, is Diana Scultori’s double sided medal (figs. 54a and 54b), paired with that of her husband Francesco da Volterra (figs. 55a and 55b).[86]
Lavinia’s medal is a sophisticated work showing on the obverse Lavinia Fontana Zappia Pictrix in profile (fig. 55a), not as a beauty, but as a modest and mature woman, her head covered, and identifying the medalist as Felice Antonio Casoni, together with the date, 1611. On the reverse (fig. 55b), by contrast, we see a young woman seated at an easel, her long hair flying wild as she looks upward, beginning to draw her idea on the canvas. It is significant that she is not actually painting, for her palette and brushes are on the ground, and her mahlstock is idle in her left hand. Her mouth is bound. In the border a square and compass fill the space between the words of the inscription: Per te stato gioiso mi mantene. It has long been recognized that the image (like Artemisia’s Allegory of Painting in the Royal Collection) generally conforms to the personification of painting described in Cesare Ripa’s Iconografia (newly republished in 1611), and that the inscription comes from Petrarch.[87]
But there is more to say. First, identifying Lavinia’s persona as Painting itself through an original figurative emblem places the medal in an academic setting. Petrarch’s line, a rare vernacular inscription on a medal (perhaps especially suited in honor of a woman painter) appears in a political poem not usually published in the Opere volgari, but which, as Emanuele Lugli has shown, became popular after Vincenzo Carrari published his commentary on it in 1577.[88] The Canzon, “Quel c’ha nostra natura in se piu degno,” is celebrated for its statement that sweet liberty is little understood until it is lost: it is liberty that makes life flowering and verdant, it is through liberty that the poet remains joyful, “for it makes me seem like the other gods” without it Petrarch had no wish for “riches, honor, and whatever man desires.” The line on the medal does not mean, as was once claimed, that through painting the figure is in a constant state of joy, or that “creative fury” sustains her, but rather, as Angela Ghirardi and Emanuele Lugli have also argued, it is about the intellectual freedom that makes life worth living and that Lavinia (fig. 56) claimed for herself.[89]
Lavinia had cultivated this self-image as a liberal artist in Bologna, where the academic world of the university and the Church sustained it. In addition, Libertas, political freedom, was celebrated in the city’s self-imaging, as Lugli has pointed out in his important discussion of Lavinia’s medal.[90] Felice Antonio Casoni (1559–1634), who signed the medal, was in a position to understand Lavinia’s social standing and artistic aspirations both in Bologna and Rome. Born in 1559 in Ancona (where Petrarch’s canzone was first discovered and published in 1503), he was nearly contemporary with the painter, and was educated in Bologna.[91] Casoni would eventually make a career as an architect and made very few medals, including most notably four in honor of the prelate Dionisio Ratta in 1592 celebrating his building of the church of St. Peter Martyr in the papacy of Clement VIII Aldobrandini.[92] Important for us is one of two medals (figs. 57a and 57b) dedicated to the musician-composer, humanist, and architect, Ercole Bottrigari (1531–1612).[93] This is much closer in spirit, style, and message to Lavinia’s medal, for it shows the composer in profile on the obverse, and with musical instruments, an astrolabe, a square and a counting tablet on the reverse, standing for all the mathematical arts of measurement and harmony, which the inscription states can never be pursued enough (Nec has quaesivisse satis). Like Lavinia’s medal, it is signed. Bottrigari had studied music, mathematics, perspective and architecture, in addition to classics, and Casoni places the emphasis on philosophy and theory rather than practice.[94]
Other medals by Casoni reflect the patronage of the Aldobrandini.[95] Lugli has pointed to the fact that in 1604 both Casoni and Lavinia Fontana worked for the Altemps family: Casoni, whose future lay in architecture, renovated the family palace (fig. 58), and Lavinia’s Altemps Minerva, her first full length female nude, painted for Markus Sittikus von Hohenems Altemps IV, was celebrated by the poet Ottaviano Rabasco in 1605.[96] Baglione, who admired Casoni’s many skills, including modelling in wax, especially “small things in which he was particularly diligent,” without ever needing eye glasses, records that he sent many drawings, models, and “quadretti” in colored wax to Count Altemps in Germany, from whom he received a stipend.[97] Even if Lavinia’s large Stoning of Saint Stephen, installed in San Paolo fuori le Mura in 1604, was not, according to Baglione, entirely successful, her fame in Rome was consolidated.[98]
The notion that painting was a noble and intellectual profession was being fostered in Rome in the Accademia di San Luca, but Rome was not Bologna, where women also enjoyed greater social freedoms, and although her husband donated alms to the institution in 1607, Lavinia was never recorded as a member in her lifetime.[99] Lugli has established the close relationship of the design of Lavinia’s medal with Bologna, and especially with the imagery of Achille Bocchi’s Symbolicarun quaestionum (Bologna, 1574), for which Prospero Fontana provided many drawings. Book I, Symbol III (fig. 59), which is almost a frontispiece for the volume and designed by Prospero Fontana, shows Socrates holding up a square and compass, his daimon over his shoulder as he paints: the inscription reads “Painting shows weighty matters, and the more hidden are revealed by magic.”[100] Even more closely related, as Lugli notes, is Book I, Symbol 24 (fig. 60), which shows a male artist with his foot resting on the cross bar of his easel (as does the figure in Lavinia’s medal), and painting the portrait of King Francis I (d. 1547), seen immortalized in the clouds.[101]
Lugli has also pointed to Lavinia’s documented friendship with Federico Zuccaro (fig. 61), and it is important to consider the continuing context of Casoni and Lavinia’s lives in Rome for a medal made in 1611. For example, among Cardinal Aldobrandini’s closest familiars who decided to stay in Rome upon the death of Clement VIII in 1605 was Giovan Battista Agucchi (born in Bologna in 1570), friend and patron of many Bolognese artists from Annibale Carracci to Domenichino. Agucchi was particularly fond of allegorical imprese and devised several himself. He would have been sympathetic to the venture of the medal. On the one hand, the imagery of Lavinia’s medal is not so complex that someone with a copy of Ripa’s Iconologia to hand could not imagine it: yet it is also visually so original that it had to be prompted by someone, like Agucchi, in sympathy with both the sitter and the allegorical language that defined her.[102] This could, of course, have been Casoni. In my view, however, the brilliance of the design, its pictorial space and naturalistic details, strongly suggest the intervention of Lavinia herself.[103] The significance of the date, 1611, remains to be defined, though it could well be associated with her important commission that year to paint four female virgin saints on slate for the Capella Rivaldi in Santa Maria della Pace. But the significance of Lavinia Fontana’s liberal aspirations, beyond those of personal ties or the simple tools of the trade, is undeniable.[104]
Quite remarkably, one significant detail that argues powerfully for identifying the image of the artist in the medal as a personification of Lavinia herself, whether in Bologna or Rome, and not only as the allegorical figure of Painting, has been overlooked. All critics have commented on the arresting feature of Painting’s wild hair, but without seeing its direct connection to Lavinia.[105] In Virgil’s Aeneid, the most dramatic episode in the story of Lavinia, for whom Fontana was named, occurs in Book VII, when it is prophesied that the beautiful Lavinia will not marry the Latin Turnus, as her mother Amata wishes, but a stranger (the Trojan Aeneas), as had in fact already been foretold in Book VI by Aeneas’ father Anchises.[106] The battle over Lavinia is the cause of the war between Latins and Trojans, and her eventual marriage to Aeneas fulfills the prophecy of the founding of Rome. At the moment the prophet kindles the altars in Book VII, Lavinia’s long hair catches fire and burns with a crackling flame (fig. 62).[107] The wildness of Lavinia’s hair in the medal, which goes beyond the “capelli negri, & grossi, sparsi & ritorti in diverse maniere” described by Ripa, immediately summons up her name, that of a Latin princess, and so represents Lavinia’s very person. Lavinia would have known this story of her name since childhood in Bologna, and in the Roman medal, made by a Bolognese artist on the basis of Bolognese models and ideas, it became an important, uniquely identifying aspect of her persona as the figure of painting.
Artemisia also asserted her self-image in many ways through both likeness and allegory. The original of the self-portrait etched by Jerome David in the 1620s is lost, but this informal, naturalistic image resembles the profile portrait of Artemisia on her remarkable single-sided medal from the same decade (fig. 14). Here she is identified in Latin as Arthemisia Gentilesca pictrix celebris, without reference to father or family. Artemisia wears the strand of pearls and drop earings typical of images of such female beauties as Lucia dell’Oro, but her image is cut modestly above the breasts. Much has been made of her loosened hair, connecting it again to Ripa’s Painting, but I believe this is rather (or perhaps also) an example of art imitating life, for by the 1620s in Simone Vouet’s circle such loosened hair was popular (see, for example Claude Mellan’s engraving of Delilah Cutting Samson’s Hair, fig. 63). Whether in life or in art, such free flying hair connoted freedom, as Lugli has argued at length.[108]
Quite unlike this alert and vital face is the thoughtful gravity of the woman portrayed by Artemisia’s friend Simone Vouet (fig. 64), in which she poses with palette and brush, dressed in expensive silk, and wearing a gold chain with a medal of the mausoleum of Halicarnassus that, like the burning hair in Lavinia’s medal, identifies her as Artemisia.[109] (figs. 65a and 65b) This is how the respected principe of the Accademia di San Luca chose to represent the woman who had succeeded in establishing her status in Rome. Her own self image was closer to the liberated figure devised by Lavinia. Given the probable date of the medal to the mid-1620s, its high quality (such a vital portrait under three inches in diameter), and extraordinary rarity, it is tempting to me to propose that it was designed by Artemisia herself and produced at the wishes of Cassiano dal Pozzo, collector of medals and all things ancient, who had Vouet paint for him the living Artemisia wearing a modern medal of an ancient wonder.
Emanuele Lugli, following the expert opinion of John Graham Pollard, reports that such cast medals were no longer signs of privilege by the turn of the seventeenth century, and were neither expensive nor unusual.[110] He cites Pollard’s view, expressed in connection with Pastorino da Siena’s prolific production of single-sided lead medals between 1540 and 1596, that “the medal had become part of the fabric of ordinary family life like the photograph of today.” Yet the context in Pollard’s example is that of the court, especially Pastorini’s work in Ferrara, and the comparison with the easily replicated family photograph is misleading, even more so today with endlessly circulating digital imagery. Medals of “ordinary people”, especially women, in seventeenth century Rome are hard to find, and very rarely, if ever, made. Few women were celebrated for their accomplishments rather than their beauty or family associations. Nor do these two medals of women artists represent a “currency of fame”: in his careful study Lugli identifies just three prime examples of Lavinia’s medal, and three aftercasts. In the case of Artemisia, the medal is even rarer, surviving in only in two known examples, both in bronze, and one with traces of gilding.[111] These medals, small pieces of sculpture, were not made for monetary value or for wide distribution. They provided prized records of existence, signs of prestige closely held, but they did not and could not make these women famous in the larger world. They could not compensate for exclusion from academies, or the absence, with few exceptions, of publications that put the fame of men into circulation over the centuries, nor could they influence the formation of collections in modern museums, shaped by those literary accounts and the academic disciples that relied upon them. They stand, nonetheless for moments of emancipation, whether late in life, as in Lavinia’s case, or relatively early, as in Artemisia’s.[112]
These women were no longer their father’s creations or creatures, but artists of stature and repute who would both ultimately support their fathers in need. Whether their freedom and independence came about through domestic stability and careful collaboration, as in the case of Lavinia Fontana, or through family failure and chaotic conflict as in the case of Artemisia Gentileschi, they both succeeded in quite unpredictable ways. For an artist’s daughter to become an artist in Early Modern Italy was certainly a possibility, but by no means a foregone conclusion. We are only beginning to explore the success and subsequent oblivion of these and other Early Modern Women. Their life stories, family relations, and institutional situations are essential to an understanding of what Linda Nochlin called “the reality of their history,” and to changing the rules of the art historical game.[113]