Bologna, finishes the restoration of Lavinia Fontana's Judith

Next Wednesday, April 5, at 11 a.m., the Civic Museums of Ancient Art of Bologna are organizing an event open to all to present the restoration of Lavinia Fontana ’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes (Bologna, 1552 - Rome, 1614), preserved at the Museo Civico d’Arte Industriale and Galleria Davia Bargellini, at Strada Maggiore 44 in Bologna.

The conservation work, carried out by the Ottorino Nonfarmale Restoration Laboratory, was motivated by the loan of the work granted for the major monographic exhibition Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker, curated by Aoife Brady, which the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin will dedicate to the celebrated artist from May 6 to August 27, 2023. Among the greatest representatives of late Mannerist painting in Europe, the Bolognese Lavinia Fontana is considered by many to be the first woman artist to achieve professional success outside the confines of a court or convent. The painter was the first woman to run her own workshop and the first to paint public altarpieces and female nudes. She maintained an active career, painting for many distinguished patrons while assuming the role of wife and mother. By exploring Fontana’s extraordinary life through her paintings and drawings, the exhibition will offer insight into the cultural climate that allowed her to thrive as a female artist of the time. This will be the first monographic exhibition to examine Fontana’s work over more than two decades and the first to focus on her portraits. A selection of her most highly regarded works from international public and private collections will be brought together, along with the celebrated The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon, from the permanent collection of the National Museum of Ireland.

For theguiding image to communicate the exhibition, the choice fell precisely on the Museo Civico d’Arte Industriale e Galleria Davia Bargellini’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes.

The oil on canvas, signed and dated “LAVINIA FONTANA DE ZAPPIS FECE 1600,” belongs to the maturity of the painter, who tackles the biblical subject of a nocturnal setting with great mastery of luministic effects and with a sensitive attention to the analytical rendering of details, in Flemish taste. The heroine’s face, like that of the fantesca, seem to restore peculiar physiognomic features, so much so as to suggest that they may be identified in two portraits, as, moreover, happens in other paintings of similar subject produced in the Bolognese area in the same years (for example, by Agostino Carracci). Judith, a daring and pious widow who dares to seduce the tyrant in order to kill him and thus free her people, lends herself in fact to provide the likenesses for a disguise in biblical guise, being a model of female virtue appreciated in the age of Counter-Reformation, so much so that she became one of the most recurrent themes in room paintings intended for the interiors of noble palaces.

The initiative is being promoted to recount the results of the restoration, which made it possible to recover those highly refined figurative details, that colorism and those bright and vivid lights and tones that distinguish Lavinia Fontana’s production, and to publicly greet the work, which will leave Bologna for Dublin on April 13. From April 5 to 12, 2023, the work can be admired by the public at the Museo Civico d’Arte Industriale e Galleria Davia Bargellini, with free admission.

At the presentation on Wednesday, April 5 at 11.00 will be attended by Eva Degl’Innocenti (director Settore Musei Civici Bologna), Massimo Medica (director Musei Civici d’Arte Antica | Settore Musei Civici Bologna), Vera Fortunati (former full professor of History of Modern Art Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna and director Centro di Documentazione sulla storia delle Donne Artiste in Europa dal Medioevo al Novecento), Giovanni Giannelli (technical director Laboratorio di Restauro Ottorino Nonfarmale S.r.l.). A musical contribution by MoRosita Ippolito is also planned.

Bologna, finishes the restoration of Lavinia Fontana's Judith

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