Lavinia Fontana, Newborn Baby in a Crib, c. 1583, oil on canvas, 44 7/8 x 49 5/8 in. Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna
Selected Works
Celebrating
Betrothal, Marriage, and Childbirth
Newborn Baby in a Crib
This luxuriously swaddled baby is shown in an elaborately intarsiated crib further decorated with lace trimmings. The painting likely records in exacting detail how this unidentified infant was displayed during a childbirth reception that heralded a new member of the Bolognese upper class. At the upper left the room opens into another chamber where two women approach a cassone used to store fine linens. Patrician families spent enormous sums for clothing and furnishings to outfit the confinement room for these social visits to the home, attended mostly by women. The preeminent portraitist in Bologna in the later decades of the sixteenth century, Lavinia Fontana cultivated a clientele that included wealthy noblewomen, whom she portrayed as children, brides, matrons, and widows. Throughout Italy male babies were especially desired, but in Bologna women assumed an important social role, and it is possible that this baby, who wears a strand of pearls, is a girl.
