A Renaissance Painter's Secret Erotic Works Surface in a New Book
A previously unknown erotic painting by Lavinia Fontana, one of Europe's first professional women artists, has surfaced in a private collection — and it forms the centrepiece of a new book published this week by Yale University Press.
Lavinia Fontana: Erotic Paintings by the Italian scholar Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo, with research by Cristina Farnetti, presents an unprecedented study of the 16th-century Bolognese painter's engagement with sensuality, power and patronage. The 200-page hardback, priced at £45 (US$50), is published on 29 September 2026, though The Art Newspaper featured an interview with dal Pozzolo on 12 August 2026 The Art Newspaper.
The painting that triggered the new edition is small but striking. Painted on a slate panel, it depicts three nude women who are clearly portraits — real sitters, not idealised mythological figures. Dal Pozzolo saw the work in a private collection and recognised it immediately as Fontana's hand. The discovery prompted a revised and expanded second edition of his earlier 2019 study, An Erotic Apex of Lavinia Fontana, now broadened to include the slate panel and other unpublished works.
This is not dal Pozzolo's first find. In 2007, he discovered a large canvas by Fontana in the Palacio de Liria in Madrid showing Mars caressing Venus's bottom. That work was, in all likelihood, commissioned by Jacopo Boncompagni — the son of Pope Gregory XIII — a connection that places Fontana's erotic output squarely in the orbit of one of Renaissance Italy's most powerful families.
Fontana herself was a Mannerist painter working in Bologna in the late 1500s. She is widely described as the first Italian woman to achieve financial and critical success as an artist, supported by a network of noble and papal patrons who commissioned both devotional works and, as dal Pozzolo's research makes clear, far more worldly ones. The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, is currently showing an exhibition of 25 works by Fontana NMWA, a reminder that her broader reputation rests on portraits and altarpieces — not the erotic subjects that dal Pozzolo argues were central to her practice.
What makes the book stand out is the gap it fills. Erotic art by women of the Renaissance is vanishingly rare in the documented record, not because it did not exist, but because centuries of attribution, cataloguing and display have worked against its visibility. A painting of three identifiable nude women, made by a woman, for a patron whose family included a pope, sits at the intersection of several histories that rarely meet on a single canvas.
Whether the slate panel enters a public collection remains unknown. For now, it exists in dal Pozzolo's photographs, in the pages of a Yale University Press book, and in the interview he gave to The Art Newspaper. That is more documentation than most rediscoveries receive — and enough to reopen questions about what else by Fontana may still be hanging, unrecognised, on someone's wall.
