FONTANA, PROSPERO - St. Alessio distributes his possessions to the poor. Bologna, church of S. Giacomo Maggiore.
of the Madonna del Baraccano, S. Pietro, S. Giuseppe, etc.) and maintained a school attended by Calvaert, Tiarini, and Lodovico and Agostino Caracci, who later supplanted him. He was a superficial and eclectic painter, combining recollections of Raffaello, Correggio, and Parmigianino in works “more of practice than of learning” (Malvasia).
LAVINIA, painter, daughter and pupil of the preceding, b. in Bologna in 1552. Protected by Gregorio XIII, she executed various paintings for churches in her native city (Madonna del Baraccano, S. Giuseppe, S. Giacomo Maggiore, etc.) and numerous portraits, the best known of which is that of the Gozzadini family. She came to Rome, where she had already sent an altarpiece for S. Sabina, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and became the fashionable portrait painter, sought after by the aristocracy. In Rome she also painted in S. Maria della Pace and made an altarpiece for S. Paolo (destroyed in the fire of 1823). D. in 1614.