Lavinia Fontana was an Italian Mannerist painter active in Bologna and Rome. She is best known for her successful portraiture, but also worked in the genres of mythology and religious painting. She was trained by her father, Prospero Fontana. She is regarded as the first female career artist in Western Europe, as she relied on commissions for her income. Her family relied on her career as a painter, and her husband served as her agent and raised their 11 children. She was perhaps the first female artist to paint female nudes, but this is a topic of controversy among art historians.
Portrait of Antonietta Gonsalvus, daughter of Petrus Gonsalvus, 1583, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Blois.
Portrait of a lady with a dog, 1590s, Auckland Art Gallery.
Lavinia Fontana, medal designed by Felice Antonio Casone, 1611, British Museum, London.
Assunzione della Vergine, 1593, Pieve di Cento, Collegiata di Santa Maria Maggiore, Bologna.
Mannerism is a style in European art that emerged in the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520, spreading by about 1530 and lasting until about the end of the 16th century in Italy, when the Baroque style largely replaced it. Northern Mannerism continued into the early 17th century.
In Parmigianino's Madonna with the Long Neck (1534–1540), Mannerism makes itself known by elongated proportions, highly stylized poses, and lack of clear perspective.
Mannerism role-model: Laocoön and His Sons, an ancient sculpture, rediscovered in 1506; now in the Vatican Museums. The artists of Mannerism greatly admired this piece of sculpture.
Collected figures, ignudi, from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling
Copy after lost original, Michelangelo's Battaglia di Cascina, by Bastiano da Sangallo, originally intended by Michelangelo to compete with Leonardo's entry for the same commission