Portrait of a Lady with a Dog, Lavinia Fontana
Portrait of a Lady demonstrates Fontana’s painterliness, her mastery of the depiction of lace and jewellery, and her intuitive understanding of structure and form, which she derived from observing antique statuary. Yet in her treatment of the hands, there is little sense of the bone structure beneath the skin. In portraits of the period, the lap dog was a popular symbol of marital fidelity, an essential quality in a good wife.
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