110 2 LAV INIA FONTANA (BOLOGNA 1552 –1614 ROME) The Holy Family c. 1575 Oil on beechwood panel 39.5 × 32 cm Inscription: signed bottom right: “[LAV]INIA PROS[P]ERI FONTANÆ” Provenance: Acquired 1749 from Imperial Gallery in Prague Castle; from 1945 to 1955 in USSR (Moscow); Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Gal.-Nr. 270 Literature: Borghini 1584, pp. 558 f.; inv. Prague 1662, fol. 16v, no. 214; inv. Prague 1718, no. 214; inv. Prague 1737, no. 292; inv. Dresden 1747–1750, fol. 36r, no. 310; cat. Dresden 1765, G.I. no. 187; cat. Dresden 2007, vol. 1, p. 216; cat. Dresden 2006/07, vol. 2, p. 538; Bull 2009, pp. 680 f. This panel is considered one of the earliest surviving works by Lavinia Fontana. Trained by her father, the Bolognese painter Prospero Fontana, she initially created small-format devotional pictures that were mainly used for contemplation in the private sphere. In the absence of male heirs, Lavinia Fontana took over her father’s workshop when he fell ill. She ranks as the first female artist of the early modern period in Europe to work independently, in charge of her own studio.1 In 1577, on the occasion of her engagement to Gian Paolo Zappi from Imola, whom she married in the same year, she painted her formal self-portrait at the clavichord (fig. 1, p. 28).2 Her husband supported her in her business endeavours – and from the mid-1580s onwards, she advanced to become a highly sought-after portraitist of the Bolognese nobility. Fontana’s devotional panel features the traditional motif of the Holy Family in an atypical composition that reveals the artist’s creative spirit. Joseph is depicted from behind in lost profile. Standing on a stone platform, he enters the pictorial space comprising the Virgin with the Infant Christ on her lap, John the Baptist as a child, and his mother Elizabeth. Despite the proximity of the figures to each other, a strong sense of depth is created from the left foreground to the background at the right. The artist achieves this depth through accents in perspective provided by the floor pattern and the architectural column, for instance, as well as the interplay between light and dark areas. As the rearmost figure, the clearly older Elizabeth is placed in the darker background, while the group of the young Mother of God with the two children is emphasised by the influx of light at the front. As a repoussoir figure, Joseph leads us from the real world into that of the picture. With him, we simultaneously cross the boundary of our (worldly) experience and enter the religious sphere. Joseph wears a white robe, which symbolises a connection to the divine, thus guiding us to a transcendent experience. The artist adds an intimate and human dimension to the salvific message of this scene. This early painting by Fontana already displays characteristics of her mature work: the graceful painterly expression of emotional, familial motifs that speak directly to the viewer. The two children embrace each other, the Christ Child smiling gently as the Virgin holds him lovingly in her arms. Such gestures, motions, and actions, which resemble typical behaviour of children and mothers, reinforce the credibility of the depiction. This work thus meets the requirements of the Counter-Reformation movement from the mid-16th century onwards, which significantly shaped artistic production. The decisions of the Council of Trent were a theological confrontation and reaction of the Catholic Church to the Protestant movement, which influenced the treatment of religious painting, as religious themes were to be rendered clearly, legibly, and appropriately in order to guide the faithful. Accordingly, pagan motifs were to be separated from Christian motifs – a rejection of antiquity and the classical pictorial language of the Renaissance, which was trained on the themes of antiquity. Such a rejection nevertheless led to new achievements: sensual and emotional painting that appeals to the feelings of the faithful. Fontana does not use a strict triangular composition, which was often deployed in the Renaissance when depicting a constellation of religious figures, but distributes the figures in the pictorial space according to the rule of proportion of the golden ratio. In this way, the artist succeeds in ordering and stabilising the composition, despite the diagonal structure of the work towards the back. The painterly quality of The Holy Family can best be appreciated in the accomplished execution of the figures. | I R I S Y VONNE WAGNER 1 See essay by Aoife Brady in this volume, pp. 25–41. 2 See King, 1995, p. 392.
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