* Lavinia Fontana Bologna 1552 - 1614 Rome

Lavinia Fontana was trained as a painter by her father Prospero Fontana, himself one of the leading mannerist painters in their native city of Bologna.  Like her father, she produced religious compositions, both large altarpieces as well as small, highly finished paintings for private devotion (such as, for example, the small and sumptuous signed copper of the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine with Saints Francis, Joseph and the Infant Baptist, sold here on January 24, 2002, lot 180 for $132,250).  It was her portraiture, however, that gained her broader appeal and for which she is most famous today.  By the late 1570's she had begun to receive distinguished portrait commissions, and her output in this genre was highly varied and original.

The present charming Portrait of a Girl is a wonderful example of the paintings of children at which the artist excelled.  Herself the mother of eleven, Fontana depicts children with great charm and ease; her portraits of them in fact are often much more naturalistic than her portraits of adults, posed and painted with the great gravitas that her fully grown sitters no doubt required and admired.  Fontana's attention to minute detail, however, was unwavering throughout her oeuvre, as in the case of the present painting.  The sitter here is shown in a beautiful rose colored dress which is embroidered, and she wears a coral necklace, an ancient talisman to protect children from evil influences.

Stylistically, the painting would appear to date to the early to mid-1580's, by which time Fontana was well established as a painter.  It is similar to a number of portraits of this date, including a Portrait of a Girl with a Dog (Hopetoun House, South Queensferry, Scotland; see M.T. Cantaro, Lavinia Fontana bolognese "pittora singolare" Milan 1989, p. 113, cat. no 4a.38, dateable to 1583-84) and a Portrait of a Young Woman in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (inv. 1890, see op.cit., p. 143, cat. no. 4a 56b, dateable to 1580-85).  The latter of these in fact provides a very interesting comparison despite the damaged condition of the Uffizi painting.  Both portraits are small tondi, and the figures are similarly disposed in the circular space; the artist has used a similar soft modulation of the fleshtones, and neutral backgrounds with heavy shadowing to give an overall sense of depth to both portraits.