Lavinia Fontana – A Painter & Her Patrons in Sixteenth–Century Bologna: A Painter and Her Patrons in Sixteenth-century Bologna - Hardcover

Murphy, Caroline P

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300099134 ISBN 13: 9780300099133

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2003

Synopsis

Bolognese painter Lavinia Fontana was a significant and prolific woman artist of Renaissance Europe. Her large and renowned body of work encompasses several genres, including altarpieces, history paintings, and portraits. This is an illustrated, comprehensive study of Fontana. Art historian Caroline Murphy assesses the relation of Fontana's native city Bologna to the artist's work and career, proposing that the unique attributes of the city, its religious and social climate and the citizens who became Fontana's patrons contributed importantly to her success as an artist. The text discusses 16th-century Bologna's economics and emergent artistic culture, how and why Fontana became an artist, her crucial relationship with the noblewomen who became her most loyal patrons, both as married women and as widows, and the portraits and religious works she created for Bolognese children. Employing an especially varied set of source materials, from personal letters and property inventories to scientific treatises, the volume focuses light on the Italian Renaissance world in which Lavinia Fontana lived and worked.

About this title

Review:

'...this book provides a nuanced and richly textured discussion....' -- The Art Book, September 2004

About the Author:

Caroline P. Murphy is assistant professor of art history at the University of California, Riverside.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0300099134
• ISBN 13: 9780300099133
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320