'More audacious than her male peers': The Renaissance woman who was the first female painter of erotic nudes

By Cath Pound

(Credit: Fundación Casa de Alba, Palacio de Liria, Madrid)

Late-Renaissance portraitist Lavinia Fontana was the first professional woman artist to paint a nude female figure, many of them more overtly suggestive than those by her male peers. Were these nudes a statement of rebellion against her prudish father, a commercial choice – or a clue to her inner life?

There were two sides to the trailblazing artist Lavinia Fontana. The first can be seen in her self-portrait from 1577, in which she sits at the spinet dressed in a fine gown and jewels, the epitome of a wealthy, cultured and virtuous young Italian woman, the easel in the background a proud indication of her chosen vocation. Considered the first female professional artist, she was much sought after as a portraitist and would go on to win important commissions for more than a dozen altarpieces, challenging the view that women were incapable of winning such illustrious assignments, let alone executing them. 

The second can be seen in the monumental Minerva in the Act of Dressing, in which the nude goddess appears to have been caught unawares as she is about to slip into a finely embroidered robe. Holding the garment carefully in her hands, she turns to meet the viewer with a gaze that is both coy and suggestive at the same time.

In a 1577 self-portrait by Lavinia Fontana, the artist depicts herself as refined and virtuous
(Credit: Accademia di San Luca, Rome)

The image was painted for Cardinal Scipione Borgese in 1613, a year before Fontana's death; the fact that a woman was behind it would no doubt have added a frisson for anyone who saw it. As would the knowledge that Fontana had a reputation for creating such images, something of which we have only recently become fully aware. Over the past few years, more works have been attributed to Fontana that reveal her to be not only the first female artist to paint the female nude, but also the first to paint erotic works whose subject matter was often more audacious than that of her male peers. 

“Her self-portraits are very proper, so you think you have a very prim woman. Maybe not – Patrizia Cavazzini

At first glance it may seem surprising that these two conflicting sides of Fontana existed simultaneously. "Her self-portraits are very proper. There is never a hint of scandal in her life. 

So, you think you have a very prim woman. Maybe not," says Patrizia Cavazzini, one of the curators of (Woman) Painter at The National Museum of Oslo, where both the self-portrait and Minerva are on display. However, the art historian Elizabeth Cropper thinks we shouldn't necessarily believe that "public social respectability denies private sexual eroticism… We need to allow some complexity in our understanding of Early Modern women," she tells the BBC.

Fortuna painted the goddess Minerva nude, about to get dressed and gazing at the viewer
(Credit: Galleria Borghese/ Photo by Mauro Coen)

Whether or not these works are indicative of Fontana's private desires, Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo, author of Lavinia Fontana: Erotic Paintings, believes there were specific commercial and entrepreneurial reasons for her to paint both sacred and profane works. "In my opinion, she did it to show she was different… and to draw attention to her compositional boldness," he tells the BBC.  

A veiled Venus

Her earliest known erotic work was Venus and Cupid, painted around 1585-90. While a nude Venus is hardly an unusual subject in art, Fontana used jewels, veils and pearls to heighten the sensuality. The trope was repeated a few years later when she painted a recognisable noble woman, Isabella Ruini, as Venus. The half-length portrait, no doubt intended for private viewing only, has Isabella/Venus draped in the flimsiest of gauze wraps, which does nothing to conceal her breasts. 

The noblewoman Isabella Ruini was portrayed as Venus by Fontana, draped in a flimsy gauze wrap
(Credit: Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen)

In Florence and Rome at the time there were whole galleries dedicated to portraits of beautiful women, while in her native Bologna there was great competition between the women. "Many poets wrote about them. They ranked them and said who was the most beautiful, so I think it comes out of that culture of an appreciation of female beauty," says Cavazzini. 

Three nude noblewomen

Fontana's most dazzling work in this genre is the recently attributed Three Female Nudes (c1600), which features three noblewomen dressed in nothing but thin veils and exquisitely observed jewels. Dal Pozzolo speculates that it is a contemporary Judgement of Paris, inspired by the story from Greek mythology in which Paris is asked to choose which goddess – Hera, Aphrodite or Athena – is the most beautiful.  

The woman on the left is thought to be Clelia Farnese, considered one of the most stunning women in Italy, and both she and the unidentified woman on the right gesture to the clear victor in the centre who is thought to be Maria de Medici. The work is painted on slate, giving it a highly reflective surface, so the latter-day Paris who commissioned it would be reflected in the image as he gazed upon his choice in the privacy of his chamber.  

The dazzling 1600 painting of three nude noblewomen in veils and jewels has only recently been attributed to Fortuna
(Credit: Private collection)

Painting such images was undoubtedly bold, especially for a woman living in Bologna at the time of the Counter Reformation, when the city's severe Archbishop, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, was keen to extend the Catholic Church's moralising zeal into the realm of painting.

“Her artist father Prospero acknowledged that a Christian painter should avoid painting scandalous subjects as it was sinful

In his Discorso delle pitture, her artist father Prospero, acknowledged that a Christian painter should avoid painting scandalous subjects as it was sinful. But he then argued that artists needed to accept commissions for such works for financial reasons and that the Church should deal with the commissioners themselves during confession.

His fence-sitting may well be explained by the fact that having trained his daughter and put her on the path to a lucrative career, but then, having fallen out of fashion himself, he had made her sign a contract obliging her to hand over all her earnings until his death. Is it possible that she pushed the boundaries in protest against him?

Venus of the beautiful buttocks

It is perhaps no coincidence that her most daring works were produced in the years leading up to, and after, Prospero's death in 1597, when she may have been feeling the shackles loosening. The most audacious of these paintings focus specifically on the female bottom, a factor which can be explained by a renewed interest in the Venus Callipyge (the Venus of the beautiful buttocks), a recently discovered Roman statue of Venus provocatively lifting her robe to reveal her bottom.

The theme had been adapted by various male artists, including Giorgione, Titian and Veronese. But these artists "had not dared depict the goddess's buttocks being touched", says Dal Pozzolo. Lavinia, in her Mars and Venus, painted around 1594-5, did. "That it was a female painter who crossed this boundary can, in my view, be explained in terms of the self-promotional value," says Dal Pozzolo.  

Fontana's Mars and Venus (c1594-95), unusually for the time, is a depiction of the mythical pair as blatantly lustful
(Credit: Fundación Casa de Alba, Palacio de Liria, Madrid)

The painting is quite extraordinary in its depiction of unbridled lust. Mars gropes Venus's bottom, thrusting his crotch towards her as he does so. The upright spike on his shield, together with the sword pointing between her legs, leave us in doubt about the state of his arousal while Venus, who turns to smile knowingly at the viewer.

Hidden multitudes

Although the female bottom is once again the focus of attention in a nude Minerva that Fortuna painted in 1604 after she had made a move to Rome, the goddess's face is also of interest as it has been suggested that it is Fontana herself. That assumption is based on a 1605 poem that praises her skill as an artist and suggests that in order to depict virtue and beauty she only needed one model – herself. "Whether or not this figure resembles Lavinia, she is identified with it – as so often happens with women artists," says Cropper. 

It was undoubtedly Fontana's dual identification as a refined, educated and skilled female painter, as well as one that dabbled in the erotic, that led to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, a renowned collector and patron of the arts, commissioning the 1613 Minerva which took pride of place on the walls of the Villa Borghese in Rome.

"Such a large painting cannot be hidden away. Especially as it was commissioned from Rome's most famous painter by the city's most demanding patron," says Dal Pozzolo. He would have shown it to "everyone he thought would appreciate it". While those who did so at the time were likely limited to men from the higher echelons of society, today we are all free to admire the work of this phenomenal, boundary-pushing woman whose enigmatic smile in her self-portrait clearly hid multitudes. 

(Woman) Painter is at The National Museum of Oslo, Norway, until February 7 2027.

First published at BBC, October 16, 2026

Taglietti exhibition wins heritage award ahead of Milan opening

By Helen Musa

Enrico Taglietti at the Town House Motel Bunda Street Civic ACT 1961 (Now demolished),
Photographer not identified. Courtesy Taglietti Archive.

An exhibition developed by Canberra Museum + Gallery celebrating the life and legacy of influential Italian-Australian architect Enrico Taglietti has won the Events, Exhibitions and Tours category at the 2026 National Trust ACT Heritage Awards. 

In an overnight email from Milan, CMAG curator Virginia Rigney, who is there installing the exhibition, said Taglietti: Life in Design would open in the architect’s birthplace on October 20, marking 100 years since his birth in 1926.

Presented at Politecnico di Milano, where Taglietti graduated in architecture in 1953, the exhibition is making its first international appearance following its debut at CMAG in June 2025 and subsequent presentation at the University of Melbourne.

The Milan exhibition brings together original architectural drawings, photographs, models and personal objects tracing Taglietti’s international influences and contribution to Australian architecture. Highlights include a dress created by his wife, Franca Taglietti, using fabric designed by Italian artist Lucio Fontana.

Enrico Taglietti Proposal for a Visitor Centre Red Hill Canberra 1962. Courtesy Taglietti Archive.

The presentation introduces new research into the Tagliettis’ early creative life in Milan and 11 architectural models developed by Politecnico di Milano students, offering fresh perspectives on some of Taglietti’s most significant Australian buildings.

Rigney, who will travel to Barcelona to present a paper on Taglietti at the ICOM Design Conference, said the exhibition’s arrival in Milan provided an opportunity to share a distinctly Canberra story with an international audience.

Taglietti: Life in Design is curated by Virginia Rigney of CMAG, Silvia Micheli of The University of Queensland and Tanja Taglietti of Taglietti Studio + Archive, with Milan co-curators Marco Biraghi and Giampiero Bosoni of Politecnico di Milano.

First published at Canberra City News, October 15, 2026

Monumental Statues of Ramses II Discovered in Egypt

By Anne Doran

The head of the second statue, likely also of Ramesses II.
EGYPTIAN MINISTRY OF TOURISM AND ANTIQUITIES.

Archaeologists in Egypt have uncovered the remains of two colossal statues believed to depict Ramses II after a local landowner reported finding an inscribed stone block in the village of Behbeit El-Hagar.

The discoveries were made by an archaeological mission from Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). According to Dr. Hisham El-Leithy, Secretary-General of the SCA, the first find was a stone head more than five-feet-high from a massive statue. It depicts a man wearing a double crown, a symbol of the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt worn by ancient Egyptian rulers.

Nearby, archaeologists found part of the statue’s back pillar. An inscription on the pillar gives one of Ramses II’s five royal titles, “Hor-Ka-Nakht-Mery-Maat” (The Strong Bull, Beloved of Ma’at), identifying him as the sculpture’s subject.

The second find consists of part of a statue of a royal personage along with its head, which was adorned with the striped cloth associated with ancient Egyptian rulers. Not including the head, the surviving section of the figure, which is missing its legs and base, measures almost eight feet high. Based on the similarity of this statue’s face to that of the first, researchers believe it may also represent Ramses II, though the identification has not been confirmed.

The archaeological mission also found a pink granite block about four feet long not far from the statues. It bears traces of hieroglyphic inscriptions that include two more titles of Ramses II: “Nesu-Bity” (King of Upper and Lower Egypt) and “Sa-Ra” (Son of Ra).

Ramses II, known to historians as Ramses the Great, was the third king of ancient Egypt’s 19th Dynasty (1292–1191 BCE). He presided over the final peak of Egypt’s imperial power and is remembered for his 66-year rule, military campaigns, extensive building programs, and monumental temples and statues. Because of his popularity, longevity, and talent for political propaganda, inscriptions and artworks bearing his name and image can be found throughout Egypt.

Excavations and archaeological work are continuing in the area.

First published at ARTnews, October 14, 2026

Stevie Wonder review – playing ​his greatest album in full, he knocks everyone sideways

Extraordinary … Stevie Wonder at Birmingham’s Utilita Arena. 
Photograph: Katja Ogrin/Getty Images for ABA

Utilita Arena, Birmingham

The opening night of Stevie Wonder’s tour marking the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life leaves jaws on the floor, thanks to sumptuous tracks carrying still-urgent messages.

By Alexis Petridis

Seated amid a bank of keyboards, Stevie Wonder addresses the audience at the first date of his tour celebrating the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life, his most celebrated album. He says playing it in full like this was a longstanding ambition: the issue was that it needed so many people to bring it to fruition. He actually fulfilled that ambition a decade ago in North American arenas in 2014 and 2015, gigs from which the 50th anniversary shows take their cue – complete with Superstition added as an encore – but that said, you have to take his point about the number of people involved.

There really are a lot of musicians up there: three percussionists, a string section, five brass players, six backing vocalists, two guitarists, three keyboard players, including Wonder himself, who variously plays a bank of synthesisers both vintage and modern, a grand piano, an upright tack piano and, on Ngiculela/Es Una Historia/I Am Singing, a bizarre stringed instrument called a harpejji that wasn’t actually invented when Stevie Wonder last released an album, let alone when Songs in the Key of Life was made. Harpejii or not, that very much counts as scaling things down dramatically compared to the album’s actual sessions. Made by a man who could pretty much do everything himself, its recording nevertheless involved 108 musicians: eight people are credited for handclaps.

Its lavishness spoke volumes both about the commercial expectations placed upon it, and the artistic challenge involved in capping what Wonder had recently achieved. Having threatened to retire from music entirely prior to its making, Wonder reconsidered and wound up signing what was, in 1975, the biggest recording contract in history, worth around $230m in today’s money. And in the space of barely two years, he’d released Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale, a bravura display of talent so overwhelming that, when Paul Simon won the 1976 best album Grammy, his acceptance speech thanked Wonder for not releasing anything in the preceding year and thus giving everyone else a chance.

Lavish … Wonder with his sizeable band. Photograph: Katja Ogrin/Getty Images for ABA

The remarkable thing about the Songs in the Key of Life live show is not that it reminds you how extraordinary the ensuing album was, and is – given that everyone from Michael Jackson to Elton John to George Michael has called it the greatest album ever made, it hardly needs highlighting – but that it embellishes it. Not because of the expanded arrangements, lovely though they are: it’s a moot point as to whether Village Ghetto Land is much improved when played by live strings rather than Wonder’s stacked synthesisers, as the studio version was pretty incredible to start off with. It’s because it is resolutely a live performance, rather than a perfect recreation.

Wonder fluffs his harmonica solo on Easy Goin’ Evening (My Mama’s Call) and insists the band restart Isn’t She Lovely, dissatisfied with the initial version (“Stop!” he cries. “Sue me!”). He also stretches songs out at will, the band locking into the tough funk of All Day Sucker and Black Man, and adds to the album’s already teeming tracklisting. Its first half now comes with another instrumental as well as the knotty, jazz-fusion influenced Contusion. You could, at a push, call it a jam, replete with call-and-response audience participation, but that feels like underselling its dramatic, symphonic soul.

For all its peerless reputation, there’s a certain risk involved in performing Songs in the Key of Life live, more or less in order (and including the four songs from the A Something’s Extra EP that was bundled with the original album). Risky because the album opens in relatively understated style: Love’s In Need of Love Today, Have a Talk With God and Village Ghetto Land are incredible songs by any metric, but they’re downbeat, sombre, frequently desperate in tone, reflective of someone so disheartened by mid-70s America he was strongly considering relocating to Ghana and devoting himself to charity work, hardly the big razzle-dazzling opening you might expect from an arena show. On the night, it doesn’t matter, perhaps because the audience know what to expect, perhaps because the lyrics depicting a US desperately lacking empathy, mired in hideous inequality and governed by people whose ostensible devotion to Christianity seemed to have no bearing whatsoever on their actions might as well have been written in 2026.

They’re received ecstatically, although not quite as ecstatically as the reliably joy-bringing Sir Duke and I Wish. Indeed, you spend a lot of the show with your jaw on the floor. Even given its reputation, Songs in the Key of Life still has the ability to knock you sideways with the astonishing level of quality it maintains throughout: it’s an album on which the deep cuts would be anyone else’s showstoppers: Saturn, Knocks Me Off My Feet, Joy Inside My Tears. As the deep soul of the latter finally dies away, an earnest voice pipes up from the rear of the arena. “That,” it cries, audibly gobsmacked, “was really good”.

First published at The Guardian UK, October 14, 2026

Multiskilled Kim Beamish turns to painting

Detail of three Kim Beamish works on show in Phnom Penh.

By Helen Musa

Multiskilled documentary filmmaker and 2018 Canberra CityNews Artist of the Year, Kim Beamish, has been turning his hand to painting.

Acknowledged for his films Just Punishment, The Tentmakers of Cairo and Oyster, Beamish spent years living in Hanoi working on a film called What Remains, about a former Vietnamese soldier searching for the missing bodies of National Liberation Front fighters.

He also took time out in 2024 to make his directorial debut at The Mill Theatre in the courtroom drama Terror, by German lawyer and writer Ferdinand von Schirach.

Multiskilled Kim Beamish. Photo: Daniel Abroguena

Now Beamish has emailed us from Phnom Penh, where he lives, to say he is about to open his first solo exhibition in Cambodia, a series of pictures initially inspired by a piece of political graffiti hidden in a laneway near his home.

Described by a Cambodian artist friend, when he first saw the work, as “quick, rough and direct”, the exhibition comments on a world that Beamish often feels is upside down and very much not perfect, hence the title, NoT PerfEct [sic].

“When we spoke I mentioned that I was looking to put an exhibition of my painting and pictures together,” Beamish has written, “Well that time has come and while it is not in Canberra, not even close, I thought I’d reach out and let you know about it.”

First published at Canberra City News, October 14, 2026

Australian opera sensation Nellie Melba lived a life filled with fame, fortune and ultimately tragedy

By Hannah Reich

Dame Nellie Melba, fan of opera, French princes and interesting headwear. 
(Supplied: Wikimedia Commons, PDM 1.0 / ABC Archive)

Dame Nellie Melba was the Kylie Minogue of her time, an opera singer from Richmond, Melbourne, who became a global superstar in the early 20th century.

The prima donna is immortalised on our $100 note (if you've seen one of those around lately), yet she seems to have a lost a bit of currency and is now seen by some as a bit musty, fusty and boring.

But when we made an episode about her (or two, as it turns out) on ABC history podcast The Dead Can't Sue, we discovered that her life was filled with drama and tragedy worthy of the best operas.

It's no wonder a dessert, snack and an exit strategy all bear her name.

'Colonial gem'

Melba, whose real name was Helen Porter Mitchell, was born in 1861, the eldest of 10 surviving children. She played instruments and sang from an early age, under her mother's influence.

Her father was a building contractor whose fortunes were on the rise, but as a conservative presbyterian, he was opposed to music as a career for his daughter.

However, singing at church events or for charity was acceptable, so in 1869, eight-year-old Melba had her first public performance. The 700-strong audience demanded three encores from the kid.

Nellie Melba, her father, David Mitchell, and Nellie's niece,
 in Melbourne, 1903. (Supplied: Bain News Service)

Historian Leigh Boucher, co-host of The Dead Can't Sue, says: "She already had a reputation as this growing colonial gem."

At the same time, Melba was also a tomboy, which led her father to pack her off to a boarding school for young women.

"[This] was more of a finishing school rather than a robust, rounded education. She ended up getting booted out for misbehaviour," Boucher says.

Melba did end up with a well-rounded education, including in music, at Presbyterian Ladies College. Her cheekiness continued; in one instance she dressed up as a nun and solicited donations for a fake charity.

But Melba's joyful adolescence well and truly ended after her mother and a beloved sister died in 1880.

After that, her father moved the family to Mackay in Queensland to run a sugar mill, and Melba, being the eldest daughter, had to run the household.

Melba gets hitched and finally makes her debut

Happily, Mackay was not, as she might've assumed, an uncultured colonial outpost and Melba slotted right into the town's thriving amateur music scene.

The 21-year-old also met Charles Nesbitt Frederick Armstrong, a son of an Irish baronet who had been sent to the colonies for being a troublemaker.

After a whirlwind romance, they married in 1882 and had a son shortly after. Conflict quickly arose between them.

"This is a young woman who has a controlling, dour, respectable father, and she's been swept up by this man with aristocratic heritage who's a bit wild," Boucher says.

"But it turned out that she probably made the mistake I think many people have made … of trying to escape the rule of a patriarch and then ending up choosing another one instead."

Nellie Melba started to dream of a life outside the colonies, Leigh Boucher says. (ABC Archives)

Melba found herself raising a child, mostly on her own, and rarely getting to perform. She decided to return to Melbourne, ostensibly to raise her son alongside her family.

Once in Melbourne, she worked with a new vocal coach to train her in the bel canto style, which was popular in Europe's concert halls.

In 1884, Melba made her professional debut at Melbourne Town Hall and it was a raging success.

"In Australian history, it was one of the most momentous debuts you could possibly imagine," Boucher says.

Melba leaves Melbourne

Melba's father finally appeared to support her ambitions. He had financed her singing classes and brought her to Europe where he was working, giving her a chance to pursue her operatic career.

But Melba's husband also went along.

"On the trip to London, Charles began to try and exert a lot of control over her. There are stories about her turning up at breakfast [on the boat over] with bruises on her face," Boucher says.

It's no wonder that on her arrival in London in 1886, abused by her husband, hampered by nerves and without the right clothes or accent, Melba flopped her pivotal audition at Covent Garden.

Undeterred, Melba travelled to Paris and became the student of German opera singer and teacher Mathilde Marchesi. She looked after her son and was barely scraping by.

"But Mathilde Marchesi identified Nellie as having a singular talent," Boucher says.

Marchesi was a maternal figure to the young singer; she improved her vocal technique but also taught her European etiquette and encouraged her to take on her stage name.

Mathilde Marchesi helped Nellie Melba work out how
to make her way into the world of European opera,
Leigh Boucher says. (ABC Archives)

"Together they came up with this identity that both harked back to her roots — Melba being Melbourne — but nonetheless, had an air of sophistication … it was not really a rebranding, I think, but a rebirth."

Melba debuted as an opera singer in Brussels in 1887 and picked up roles across Europe, making a name for herself playing mad women.

"She quickly became renowned as having a possibly once-in-a-generation voice … by 1890 she had broken through at London's Covent Garden, wiping the memory of that failed audition away."

She also began an affair with Philippe, the Duke of Orleans, a dashing heir to the French throne.

Eventually, after Charles used the adultery as grounds for divorce and essentially abducted their son to Texas where he had relocated, the marriage was over. She didn't see her son for 12 years.

"She was not destroyed by the divorce, and she was not destroyed by the loss of her son. In fact, she sunk herself into work," Boucher says.

Farewell to Melba

Melba returned to Australia for a hugely successful tour in 1902.

"There were these amazing scenes of her returning to Melbourne and the streets being filled with thronging masses of people," Boucher says.

"Nellie was an Australian celebrity who not only was making it in Europe but was making it in European elite culture. She was proving that this was not a crass colony, but in fact a place of modernity."

One source said travelling with Nellie Melba during this tour
was like "travelling through France with Marie-Antoinette". 
(Supplied: State Library of Queensland)

But after returning to London and, whipped up by the press who claimed she had been replaced, Melba stood in the wings and rudely outsang a rival at the Royal Opera House.

"In this moment, an emerging celebrity culture just got the better of her," Boucher says.

Melba regained her perch at the top of the opera hierarchy; beloved by the royal family, she had her own dressing room at Covent Garden.

Then in World War I, she raised money for the war effort by going on a US tour. There she was reunited with her son, but the tour was also plagued by strange accidents.

"Nellie became convinced that the Germans are out to get her because she was such a useful tool for the morale of the war efforts," Boucher says.

By the 1920s Melba was in her 60s and decided to retire. This is how the phrase "doing a Melba" was invented, as she spent many years giving farewell concerts.

It was on one of those many extended farewell tours that she contracted a fever. In 1931 she died quite suddenly in Sydney of septicaemia, a complication from what the press described as "facial surgery".

Boucher says, in a time without antibiotics, it was probably an early face lift.

"Her story is not reducible to this moment, but there is something in the ways in which she had to negotiate these gendered norms, negotiate the gendered restrictions of celebrity culture, and ended up dying from a face lift … that is tragic. It was a brutal end to an incredible life."

Fans and the press across the globe mourned the death of Melba.

The New York Herald Tribune declared that she "was the last of those soprano empresses of song … Doubtless the gold age of song will return, but no Melba will sing for us again".

First published at ABC News, October 11, 2026