Lavinia Fontana, a Bolognese painter of the Cinquecento, broke barriers for women artists all while demonstrating extraordinary talent by Ashley Busby An
Reviewing the Prado’s joint exhibition of Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana in the Art Newspaper three years ago, Brian Allen pronounced it well worth seeing but predicted that each of these pioneering 16th-century women artists ‘would wither in the spotlight of her own retrospective’. Was he right? In its new monographic exhibition devoted to Fontana,
Her nude paintings were unprecedented in the 1500s – and, as a new exhibition makes clear, this Renaissance artist could be every bit as outrageous and licentious as the boys