Lavinia Fontana (Bologna, 1552 — Rome, 1614), The Visit of the Queen of Sheba, 1599, oil on canvas, 256 x 325 cm, dated upper right on clock “1599,” Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, NGI.76, purchased 1872.
The Visit of the Queen of Sheba is the most ambitious work by Lavinia Fontana (1552—1614), the most successful female painter in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe (fig. 1). While ostensibly depicting the Hebrew bible story of the visit of the exotic queen to the court of King Solomon, the painting shows figures in contemporary court dress. It probably celebrates Alfonso II, the Duke of Ferrara, and his third wife, Margharita Gonzaga.1Aoife Brady, “Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker”, in: Aoife Brady, Maria Canavan, and Letizia Marcattili, The Crowning Glory: Lavinia Fontana’s Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, Dublin 2021, 26-28. ↩ Fontana, the daughter of the painter Prospero Fontana, lived and worked in nearby Bologna until moving to Rome in 1604.2Caroline P. Murphy, Lavinia Fontana, New Haven 2003; Leticia Ruiz Gómez, ed., A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, Madrid 2019; and Aoife Brady, ed., Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker, exh. cat., Dublin 2023. ↩ In this large canvas, Fontana focused upon the elaborate clothing of the queen and her attendants, as well as the lavish gifts they present to the king. The Queen’s attendants are the subject of far more detailed attention than the king and the four men, shown either from behind or in shadow, who wait upon him. Bologna, a university city ruled by a papal governor, typically a Cardinal sworn to celibacy, provided such women, who comprised a notable share of Fontana’s patrons, with relatively few opportunities to mingle with or serve women like Margherita, whose female attendants were celebrated for their skill as dancers, but with more educational opportunities than were usual at the time in Europe. Other members of the queen’s retinue include a little person, a large gray dog, and a Black servant who may have been enslaved. All three were common status symbols in contemporary courts; for more than a century already they had been features of the Gonzaga court in Mantua where Margherita had been raised and to which she returned following her husband’s death.3Maria Teresa Cantaro, *Lavinia Fontana Bolognese ‘pittore singolare’, 1553-*1614, Milan 1989, 188-91; Vera Fortunati Pietrantonio, Lavinia Fontana 1552-1614, exh. cat. Milan 1994, 206-07. ↩ The landscape in the background is reminiscent of the work of Fontana’s contemporary, Annibale Carracci, a native of Bologna whose brother and cousin had, like Fontana herself, studied with her father.
A path-breaking artist
Although recent research has substantially expanded our knowledge of them, female painters were relatively rare in sixteenth and even seventeenth century Italy, or indeed elsewhere on the continent; spurred perhaps by Fontana’s example Bologna, which during her lifetime was one of the most important centers of European painting, would host more than any other Italian city.4Babette Bohn, Women Artists, Their Patrons, and Their Publics in Early Modern Bologna, State College 2021. ↩ Fontana enjoyed unprecedented success; she appears to have been the first European woman to support herself and her family through her painting. Prospero Fontana had traveled to France, where according to Vasari he worked at the palace of Fontainebleau; his wife, Lavinia’s mother, Antonia de’ Bonardis came from a distinguished local family of printers. In 1577 Lavinia married Gian Paolo Zappi, the Count of Imola, with whom she had eleven children. Their marriage contract stipulated that she would continue to work as a painter. Fontana is best known for her portraits, although she also painted large religious as well secular, mythological works, including full-scale nudes. The complexity of the composition, the ornateness of the display of contemporary courtly splendor, and the proto-feminist theme make The Visit of the Queen of Sheba, painted in 1599 when Fontana was nearing fifty, the most convincing demonstration that she was fully mistress of her art.
A feminine subject
The ostensible subject of the work is not in doubt, as the painting is inscribed on a lower left step, “REGINA SABA VINET IN HIERUSALEM UT TENTARET SALOMONEN IN EINIGMATIBUS, ET DEDIT EL MULTA EC MAGNA MUNERA PARAPOMENON, II CAP. IX.” In the biblical story referenced here, the Queen of Sheba travels a great distance, possibly from Ethiopia or Yemen, to King Solomon’s court in Jerusalem, where she confirmed his wisdom by soliciting his response to difficult questions, something Fontana does not attempt to illustrate. Instead, her focus is on the magnificent gifts mentioned at the conclusion to the inscription. The story, used to confirm the importance of the small Jewish kingdom of Israel, retained its popularity with later religions of the book, Christianity and Islam. Although Fontana shows the queen bowing before Solomon, who is seated on a throne, she and her retinue clearly demand much more of the viewer’s attention. If not exactly a story of female empowerment, this is certainly a celebration of the status of the extraordinarily well clothed women it depicts and of the impressive jewels and other riches the queen is able to present to Solomon.
Aoife Brady’s proposed identification of the king and queen as Alfonso and Margherita replaces earlier suggestions that they are instead Margherita’s brother Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua and Montferrat, and his spouse, Margherita and Vincenzo’s first cousin Eleanor de’ Medici.5Brady (2023), 128-35; Murphy (2003),106-10. ↩ The two couples were among the highest ranking aristocrats of their day on the Italian peninsula; Margherita, Vincenzo, and Eleanor were the grandchildren of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, while the Alfonso was a grandson of King Louis XII of France. While men of their rank typically traveled on military or diplomatic business, women typically left their natal court to marry, often carrying new ideas about art, design, and dress with them. The entrance of such women into any city outside their realm, especially but not uniquely upon the occasion of their wedding, often engendered lavish festivities.
The painting’s composition divides neatly into two halves. To the left the king welcomes the queen who pays him homage. Brady suggests that Fontana may have relied on a print of the same scene by Marcantonio Raimondi, which she greatly compressed to divert attention away from the king and towards the queen’s retinue and the gifts they carry. Fontana’s placement of the seated king on a throne atop several stairs to the left of a kneeling queen gesturing towards her entourage behind her appears in other sixteenth century northern European as well as Italian depictions of the subject, of which the earliest and most celebrated was executed around 1518 by Raphael or his workshop in the Vatican Loggia.6Brady (2023), 116. ↩ None of these possible sources pay so little attention to Solomon and so much to the queen’s attendants or the gifts they carry. The splendor of her dress, the striking gesture of her arm, and the way that Fontana illuminates her face and the rest of her figure ensure, however, that the queen remains the center of attention. o the right Fontana layers the little person, hunting dog, and Black servant in the foreground, the ladies in waiting in the middle ground, and, behind the figures, a landscape stretching into the far distance.
Illustrating contemporary court culture
The Visit of the Queen of Sheba is above all a description of contemporary Italian court ceremony and culture. At the turn of the sixteenth into the seventeenth century, people, whether enslaved or free, as well as animals, were, like the riches to which the little man points, prized exotic accoutrements. Little people, enslaved Africans, and gray hunting dogs had been present at the Gonzaga court in Mantua since at least the end of the fifteenth century, although only the latter two figure in Mantegna’s frescoes in the Camera degli Sposi in the Ducal Palace.7Paul D. H. Kaplan, “Italy, 1490-1700”, in: David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. III/1, From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition: Artists of the Renaissance and the Baroque, Cambridge 2010, 102. ↩ There was also an established history of Black servants at the court in Ferrara, and of depicting at least some of the Queen of Sheba’s attendants as Black, even when the African-born queen herself was shown as white.8Kaplan (2010), 107-08, 180. ↩ The little man’s bold red doublet and his outstretched arm ensure that the viewer’s eye lingers upon the tray carried by the servant, even though Fontana depicts only half of the Black man’s body. Rather than simply indicating his lower status, this also parallels the similarly truncated courtier at the far left of the work in a bracketing device that ties the two halves of the composition together.
Fontana’s somewhat stiff arrangement of the figures emphasizes the status of the queen and the splendor of her entourage. The exacting depiction of fabrics, faces, and goldsmithing matter more here than the display of bravura painting or the dynamically contorted bodies that feature prominently in the work of her Bolognese contemporaries. The mountainous scene that opens up behind them is, however, entirely modern, and moreover illustrative of her familiarity with the recent work of Annibale Caracci, the city’s most celebrated contemporary artist and with his brother and cousin a pioneer painter of the ideal landscape. Situated behind the balustrade that defines the edge of the space containing the figures, it is an example of illusionistic quadratura painting in which the view extends through a pierced wall far into the distance. Fontana’s landscape is framed in the upper left foreground by the presence of a tree that assists the transition into the depth of the valley of the S-shaped river flowing far beyond it. She very much adheres here to the conventions established in paintings such as Annibale’s River Landscape painted around 1590 before he left Bologna for Rome and now in the collection of Washington’s National Gallery of Art.9Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf, Ideal Landscape: Annibale Carracci, Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorraine, New Haven 1990, 46-47. ↩
The prominence of the ladies, whose heads Fontana raised as she worked on the painting, are crucial to understanding Fontana’s unique approach to her subject.10Maria Canavan, “Shining New Light on a Female Renaissance Artist”, in Brady, Canavan, Marcattili (2021) 49-52 ↩ It is possible that many of the highly individualized faces ladies in waiting were portraits of contemporary Bolognese or Ferrarese noblewoman; a closely related drawing of one of them by Fontana survives in the Uffizi as does one for a male attendant.11Cantaro (1989), 190, 233. ↩ The former appears to depict either the women in pink leading the procession and holding a crown, or the woman shown in a frontal view who points toward the servant in the red jacket. She most resembles the former, although she is positioned like the latter. Although their lavish clothing, like that of the queen, is a testament to the Bologna’s importance as a center of silk production, far more important to the theme of the painting is the degree to which the city’s women, many of whom patronized Fontana for portraits of themselves and their children, were known at the time for their erudition. Eleven heads are visible, with eight being possible portraits.
The meticulous care with which Fontana documented the richly ornamented textiles, including brocades, satins, and lace, the queen and her attendants wear was not simply a matter of a woman artist being attentive to fashion. Before Versailles replaced it during the reign of Louis XIV in the subsequent century, Italy was the European center for the production of luxury goods, with silk and lace, the latter usually made by women, being central to the export economy of the peninsula’s many principalities. Just four years before Fontana painted this work, Isabella Catanea Parasole published the first of her four books of lace patterns, which Femke Speelberg credits as being “the first pattern book to acknowledge a woman as its designer.”12Femke Speelberg, “Fashion and Virtue: Textile Patterns and the Print Revolution 1520-1620”, in: Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 73 (2015), 39. ↩ Moreover, even aristocratic women were charged with ornamenting the garments they and their families wore, often by embellishing them with embroidery. Equally importantly, clothing typically was more expensive and more crucial to communicating social status than movable furnishing, except for the metal plate that also features prominently among the gifts being presented here.
Indeed, as impressive as the clothing and jewels worn by this procession of women are the gifts that they and the servant on the painting’s far right edge carry. Gift-giving was central to court culture of the period, and it is difficult to imagine a more splendid array of presents than is shown here.13Zoltán Biedermann, Anne Gerritsen, and George Riello, eds., Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia, Cambridge 2018. ↩ Although exoticism was particularly prized, the gifts shown here appear to have been largely of Italian manufacture, although in some cases, such as the pearl-encrusted clock, they are more richly ornamented than any surviving examples. The prominent presence among them of a golden sculpture of a marten’s head, a common symbol of fertility at the time, may refer to the fact that all three of Alfonso’s wives remained childless, which led to the annexation of the duchy upon his death to the Papal States, to which Bologna already belonged. The most important of the splendid array of presents is, of course, the crown, which Fontana placed at the center of the composition, and which is carried by the first in the procession of ladies in waiting. It communicates both the queen’s status and — just as much as her willingness to kneel before him — her acknowledgement of the king’s higher rank. Although it is smaller than the one he actually wears, the pendant hanging from it adds to its visual impact.
While the impetus for the creation of what is in many ways Fontana’s most ambitious work remains obscure, it certainly celebrates the visual discernment of the women positioned at the apex of contemporary Bolognese and indeed Italian society, even as this is not shown in a way that challenges patriarchal authority. Thus, although by no means a feminist work, it is nonetheless as assertation of the status that women could attain and an illustration of the socially permissible ways in which they could display it. This message may nonetheless be undercut for many viewers today by the way in which this entailed authority over other human beings, who, like dogs and jewels, are reduced to examples of conspicuous consumption. This highlights the principal means that women of means had in early modern mercantile as well as later capitalist societies had to express their social standing. But at the same time The Visit of the Queen of Sheba also showcases the possibility of talent as a potential avenue to fame for women as well as men. If the Queen of Sheba establishes her political significance through a dazzling display of wealth, Fontana demonstrates her artistic abilities through her skill at depicting it.
The Visit of the Queen of Sheba may have doubled as an homage to Margherita, whose support Fontana possibly sought, especially before Margherita was widowed in 1597 and returned to Mantua, although the Duchess was more celebrated as a patron of music and dance, including the ballets in which her ladies in waiting participated alongside her, and as a collector of textiles, than of painting.14Nina Treadwell, “‘Simil combattimento fatoo da Dame’: The Musico-theatrical Entertainments of Margherita Gonzaga’s balletto delle donne and the Female Warrior in Ferrarese Cultural History”, in: Todd M. Borderging, ed., Gender, Sexuality, and Early Music, New York 2002, 47-64. ↩ Once back in her native city, she established the church and convent of Sant’Orsola, residing in the latter. About the time of her death in 1618, Domenico Fetti depicted Margherita receiving its architect Antonio Maria Viani (Fetti’s sister Lucrina, also a painter, was a nun at Sant’Orsola’s). In an almost exact inversion of Fontana’s depiction of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Fetti shows Viani kneeling before Margherita, to whom he presents a model of the church (fig. 2). Raised on a throne atop the steps on which Fetti places Viani, she towers above him in a clear demonstration of female authority.15Molly Bourne, “From court to cloister and back again: Margherita Gonzaga, Caterina de’ Medici and Lucrina Fetti at the convent of Saint Orsola in Mantua”, in: Sandra Cavalla and Silvia Evangesti, eds., Domestic Institutional Interiors in Early Modern Europe, Farnham 2009, 151-80. ↩ Fontana was not nearly as well positioned to invert the usual position of the sexes. Nonetheless The Visit of the Queen of Sheba celebrates the unusual level of female accomplishment that, coupled with her father’s connections and training, made her unusual and impressive career in Bologna and Margharita’s activities in both Ferrara and Mantua possible, as well as the way in which their lives intertwined piety and prominence.
Provenance
Who commissioned this imposing work remains a mystery, but it appears not to have left Bologna until the middle of the nineteenth century. The original location of the painting is unknown but by 1635 it appears to have belonged to the Berò family, where it is more definitely recorded in an inventory of 1696. A century later it resided in the Palazzo Zambeccari, where it appears to have remained until soon before it was sold in 1859 to Prince Napoleon Bonaparte, who displayed it in the Palais Royale in Paris. Following the Franco-Prussian war, it was taken to London where it was sold in 1872 to the National Gallery of Ireland, which had opened just eight years earlier.16Brady (2023), 127-28. ↩ Here it joined what has become a collection particularly noteworthy for its inclusion of work by women; one of the Gallery’s earliest acquisitions was a portrait of Prince Alessandro Farnese now thought to have been painted by Sofonisba Anguissola, although at the time it was attributed to her Spanish contemporary Alonso Sanchez Coello.17Almudena Pérez de Tudela, “Sofonisba Anguissola at the Court of Philip II”, in: Gòmez (2019), 62. ↩
Afterward
For most of her life, Fontana was significantly less mobile than the Queen of Sheba, women such as Margharita Gonzaga, or artists like her father and the Carracci, as she had pledged at the time of her marriage to continue to care for her father. In 1604, however, seven years after his death, she and her family moved to Rome at behest of Pope Clement VIII. There she became the first woman elected to the Accademia di San Luca, the city’s foremost society for artists. She died in 1614 at the age of 61. Fontana continued to inspire subsequent generations of women, and not just in Bologna. Belle da Costa Greene, who as the first director of the Morgan Library in New York was one of the first women and the first African American (although not publicly identified as such at the time) to head a major art museum in the United States, owned Fontana’s marriage portrait of an unknown Bolognese noble woman now in the collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. (fig. 3). A jeweled marten’s head similar to that Fontana showed being presented to King Solomon dangles on a chain from the belt around the waist of the unidentified subject of this work.18Daria Rose Foner, “Marriage Portrait”, in: Erica Ciallela and Philip S. Palmer, eds., Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy, New York 2024, 200-01. ↩
Kathleen James-Chakraborty, University College Dublin
Bibliography
Bohn, Babette. Women Artists, Their Patrons, and Their Publics in Early Modern Bologna. State College 2021.
Aoife Brady, ed. Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker, exh. cat. Dublin 2023.
Brady, Aoife, Maria Canavan, and Letizia Marcattili. The Crowning Glory: Lavinia Fontana’s Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. Dublin 2021.
Murphy, Caroline P. Lavinia Fontana. New Haven 2003.
Pietrantonio, Vera Fortunati. Lavinia Fontana 1552-1614, exh. cat. Milan 1994.
Ruiz Gómez, Leticia, ed. A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana. Madrid 2019.
Captions [Please note that these do not yet credit sources!]
Fig. 1. Lavinia Fontana (Bologna 24 August 1552 — Rome 11 August 1614), The Visit of the Queen of Sheba, 1599, oil on canvas, 256 x 325 cm, Bologna, Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, NGI.76, purchased 1872.
Fig. 2. Domenico Fetti (Rome ca. 1589 — Venice 16 April 1623), Margherita Gonzaga Receiving the Model of the Church of St. Ursula, c 1615, oil on canvas, 245 x 276 cm, Mantua, Mantua, Palazzo Ducale.
Fig. 3. Lavinia Fontana (Bologna 24 August 1552 — Rome 11 August 1614), Marriage Portrait of a Bolognese Noblewoman (Livia de’Medici Bandini?, ca. 1589, oil on canvas, 115 x 90 cm, Bologna, Washington, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay.