(Bologna 1552 -1614 Rome / Roma) Portrait of five women, with a dog and a parrot, oil on canvas, 187 x 240 cm, unframed

Provenance: Principi de‘Medici di Ottajano; European private collection;

The present painting shows a lady and her attendants, who help her to dress. The compositional structure and the subtle, sentimental expression belong to the sublime and refined figural type that prevailed in late-sixteenth-century Italian and European court portraiture which reached well into the first decades of the seventeenth century. These features are characteristic of Lavinia Fontana, who was active in her native town Bologna during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. She was a celebrated portraitist and mastered both the Mannerist vocabulary that had been passed down to her by her father and the analytical and naturalistic Northern approach to portraiture. She received numerous commissions for court portraits, primarily as from the 1590s, when she was already well known and had asserted herself against her numerous male colleagues. The present painting may be compared with works by the painter dating from the same period, such as Portrait of a Noblewoman in the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington corroborates the attribution. The latter picture dates from 1584 and clearly shows a courtly language of form, which also holds true for the Portrait of a Lady and Her Dog in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, likewise done in the late sixteenth century. After a thorough inspection of the present picture, Prof. Teresa Cantaro has fully confirmed the attribution. She assigns it to the artist‘s last period, between 1603, the year Lavinia Fontana moved to Rome, and the first half of 1614, the year she died. The dating is based on the comparison with a portrait of Bianca degli Utili Maselli from Lavinia‘s Roman period.

Provenance: Principi de‘Medici di Ottajano; European private collection; The present painting shows a lady and her attendants, who help her to dress. The compositional structure and the subtle, sentimental expression belong to the sublime and refined f