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# Painting by Lavinia Fontana found in storage of a museum in northern France
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/v-khranilishche-nebolshogo-muzeia-na-severe-frantsii-nashli-kartinu-khudozhnitsy-vozrozhdenii-lavinii-fontana/
- Published: 2025-03-26T06:33:21.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T18:42:41.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Art, Museums, Heritage, People

In the storeroom of a small museum in northern France, a painting by the Renaissance artist Lavinia Fontana has been found. The picture had been lying about in storage for the past 150 years.

Fontana is considered one of the first professional women artists in Europe, and the discovery of her work is a veritable windfall for a provincial museum.

The painting first caught the eye of Philippe Costamagna, a specialist in sixteenth-century Italian art and curator of the Fragonard Museum, during a visit to the Musée de la Chartreuse last year, where he was part of a team of experts brought in to study and restore the collection of Italian painting. Costamagna recognised something unexpected in a portrait previously attributed to Pieter Jansz Pourbus, an artist of the Northern Renaissance who worked slightly earlier than Fontana. Costamagna was convinced of the picture's Italian origin, Bolognese in spirit, with its little girl holding a posy of flowers and its finely detailed collar. He examined the handling of the paint closely and reattributed the work to the Renaissance woman artist.

Fontana was born in Bologna in 1552, the daughter of a successful Mannerist painter, Prospero Fontana, who taught her to paint. Besides portraits, she created several grand mythological scenes, as well as altarpieces and religious pictures for private prayer. In 1577 Fontana married the painter Gian Paolo Zappi, who, recognising her outstanding talents, set aside his own ambitions to support her as her agent. The couple had 11 children. Popes Gregory XIII and Clement VIII were among Fontana's many distinguished patrons, and she demanded high fees for her work. In 1603 Fontana settled in Rome, where she became the first woman elected to the prestigious Accademia di San Luca. She died there in 1614.

Nobody has ever lost out by tidying the storeroom.