Her nude paintings were unprecedented in the s β and, as a new exhibition makes clear, this Renaissance artist could be every bit as outrageous and licentious as the boys. A rguably nothing in art embodies the male gaze more than the Renaissance nude, that genre of licentious painting in which the likes of Titian and Bronzino excelled.
But an exhibition opening at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin next month proves that a Renaissance woman took on the boys in this very genre β and did it just as outrageously.
For a woman to be an artist in the s was rare, for her to work with naked models unheard of. But, as Aoife Brady, curator of the Dublin exhibition, points out, she did have unique access to one subject β herself. Another painting, Mars and Venus, depicts the love affair between the goddess of desire and the god of war in a cheekily intimate way.
She turns to look at us in a challenging way, complicit in the lewd promise of what is to come. Fontana painted this in about No other naked Renaissance paintings by women are known to have existed before her.
She was born in Bologna in and trained with her father, the artist Prospero Fontana: having an artist parent was almost the only way a girl could learn art in Europe where the traditional workshop system was open solely to male apprentices. When she was a teenager the sculptor Giambologna created his Fountain of Neptune that still flows in the centre of the city, featuring four female figures who spurt water like milk from their naked breasts.
