'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