Exceptional career woman, unexceptional painter: Lavinia Fontana, at the National Gallery of Ireland, reviewed

Reviewing the Prado’s joint exhibition of Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana in the Art Newspaper three years ago, Brian Allen pronounced it well worth seeing but predicted that each of these pioneering 16th-century women artists ‘would wither in the spotlight of her own retrospective’. Was he right? In its new monographic exhibition devoted to Fontana, the National Gallery of Ireland puts his waspish prediction to the test.

Ireland’s National Gallery was an early investor in Fontana, acquiring her most ambitious work, ‘The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon’ (1599), eight years after opening in 1864. During conservation for the exhibition, infrared reflectography revealed several pentimenti, one of which explains the rather strange resemblance of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting to a flock of swans: at some point in the picture’s evolution Fontana shifted the whole retinue up a notch by lengthening their necks under their ruffs. Anatomy was never her strong point. As a woman artist she had no opportunities to draw from life, but – like other restrictions on her sex – that didn’t hold her back. Her ‘Galatea and Cherubs’ (c.1590), ‘Venus and Mars’ (c.1595) and ‘Minerva Dressing’ (1613) are believed to be the first nudes painted by a woman – among many firsts in the extraordinary career of this serial shatterer of glass ceilings.

Fontana came to painting relatively late; she was 23 in 1575 when she painted her earliest dated work. Her painter father Prospero Fontana had no sons and after becoming ill in the 1560s trained up his daughter to take over his studio. But as a woman in 16th-century Bologna, Lavinia couldn’t do business in her own name: she needed the studio version of a house husband.