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
Arguably 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 – and did it just as outrageously.
Lavinia Fontana’s nudes were so unprecedented that experts argue about how she even got access to models. For a woman to be an artist in the 1500s 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 – herself. The naked goddess Minerva looks out from Fontana’s 1613 work Minerva Dressing as if she were regarding herself in the mirror: it is the same look the artist gives the mirror in her clothed self-portraits.
