Lavinia Fontana : erotic paintings

This book is devoted to the erotic art of Lavinia Fontana, the Bolognese artist active between about 1570 and her death in Rome in 1614, known otherwise for her portraits and religious paintings. Recently a substantial body of secular works, showing her remarkable independence of mind, has emerged. These include an exceptional painting on slate, hitherto unpublished, representing three female nudes who, the author argues, can be identified with known figures of the society of the time, and a Mars and Venus in which Mars caresses the goddess's bottom - a theme which turns out to have spread wider in the later sixteenth century than was known and which the author has fun tracing. This theme of 'Venus Callipygia' (Venus of the Beautiful Buttocks) is traced from classical times to the late Renaissance, both in art and in literary sources. In taking up such a theme Lavinia developed and fulfilled for her time a quite different concept of the female artist's role.