Presumably due to the absence of a string of nucleotides in chromosome 8, fewer than one in a billion folks have a hereditary situation often called generalized hypertrichosis terminalis, which ends up in a masking of fur over most of their physique. Traditionally, most of those that’ve had hypertrichosis labored in exhibitions and zoos, carnivals and geek reveals. Flip-of-the-century performers similar to Stephan Bibrowski (“Lionel the Lion-faced Man”), Krao Farini (“The Lacking Hyperlink”), and most famously Fedor Jeftichew (“Jo-Jo the Canine-Confronted Boy”) had been compelled into dehumanizing performances, their stage names indicative of the merciless tradition of spectacle that has so-often maligned those that bodily don’t conform to an arbitrary preferrred of magnificence. Earlier than all of these figures, there was Pedro Gonzalez, the primary to be recognized with the situation, born among the many Indigenous Guanche folks of the Canary Islands within the sixteenth century.
Dropped at the court docket of King Henry II of France to be enslaved because the monarch’s pet, Gonzalez was described as a canine, a simian, and a bestial half-man. When courtiers realized that Gonzalez was not solely fluent in French and Spanish, however Latin as nicely, he was wearing aristocratic finery and mockingly handled as titled, a beast-man made to pantomime the Aristocracy. Regardless of their supposed bodily irreconcilability, Gonzalez and his spouse appeared to have had a contented union leading to seven kids, although 4 of their progeny inherited hypertrichosis and had been handled as inhumanely as he was. A consultant instance could be the inscription on a portrait of Gonzalez’s daughter Antonietta for Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum Historia (1642) — or “The Historical past of Monsters” — that reads “A bushy lady of twenty whose head resembles that of a monkey.”
A unique sentiment is expressed in a 1595 composition exhibited on the Museum of Nice Arts on the Website Château de Blois. Rendered when the Gonzalez household was in Parma, the portrait presents younger Antonietta in a way befitting the noble costume through which she is clothed. Round 10 years previous on the time of the sitting, she wears finely embroidered material adorned with intricate designs in pink, blue, and gold thread; her lips are ruby-red and her russet eyes are clear, vibrant, and curious; a feathered tiara is subtly seen rising concerning the crown of her hanging strawberry blonde hair. That hue was from her mom, however she has the identical tell-tale hirsutism of her father, the identical thick and shaggy hair masking her face.
Right here, Antonietta will not be meant to be a monster, however reasonably a lady, a toddler, a human. Not solely that, however Antonietta Gonzalez is fairly. The letter she clutches in her portrait declares her in a dignified method as a member of the “court docket of the Woman Isabella Pallavicina, the honorable Marchesa of Soragna.” That almost all exceptional portrait of the Italian late Renaissance was produced by one in every of that interval’s most exceptional artists — Lavinia Fontana, the primary lady to make a dwelling based mostly on inventive commissions. It’s a fallacy of naïve sentimentalism at greatest and gender essentialism at worst to imagine that the empathy expressed in “Portrait of Antonietta Gonzalez” is as a result of it was painted by a lady, nevertheless it’s pure to ponder whether or not Fontana noticed one thing of herself in her topic, an individual lowered to a surprise by the arbitrary strictures of an unjust and unequal society.
Fontana was among the many most revered Mannerist painters in Italy. Favored for the gorgeous verisimilitude in her approach, she grew to become an important early lady painter to develop a fame for genius. Daughter of a outstanding Bolognese painter, Fontana married one in every of her father’s pupils, an artist understood to be far much less proficient than she — each every now and then — who acted as her agent. Even the wedding contract stipulated that in lieu of a dowry, Fontana would help herself by her work. Success throughout her life has solely been surpassed by trendy acclaim, as with the Nationwide Gallery of Eire’s landmark 2023 exhibition of her work, or the sale of “Portrait of Antonietta Gonzalez,” which at public sale that very same yr fetched nicely over 1,000,000 {dollars}.
Greater than Fontana’s biography, attention-grabbing although it might be, is the matter of her artwork. In Stephen Greenblatt’s 1980 Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From Extra to Shakespeare, Greenblatt describes the eponymous course of as a way of individuation that emerges from humanist discourses of the interval, whereby his (completely male) examples used literature, philosophy, and artwork to assemble a “distinctive character, a attribute tackle to the world, a constant mode of perceiving and behaving.” As a portraitist, Fontana was involved with that course of; as a portraitist celebrated for her naturalistic renderings of girls, she generated a distinctly female type of Renaissance self-fashioning.
Fontana’s expertise in that regard isn’t simply apparent as a matter of prodigious approach, however within the extra refined commitments of her work as nicely. A part of what’s so arresting about “Portrait of Antonietta Gonzalez” is that her topic — already primed to be exploited — is conveyed with no trace of scopophilia. On the contrary, Antonietta seems inquisitive, blissful, and confident. That is no image for a surprise cupboard or freak present: It’s a portrait that gazes again. Although her different topics could have lacked the innate eccentricity of Antonietta, that means of female self-fashioning is obvious throughout the small variety of Fontana’s portraits that survive. Evaluating the artist to previous generations of Bolognese painters, critic Caroline P. Murphy notes in Lavinia Fontana: A Painter and her Patrons in Sixteenth-century Bologna (2003) that she was “in a position to convey an intimacy and a psychological connection between her topic and the viewer that which are missing within the older artists’ work.” That she was among the many most in-demand portraitists of the Bolognese aristocracy — maybe partially in order that they wouldn’t should undergo predatory male artists — demonstrates Murphy’s level.
In her c. 1595 portrait of Ritratto di Costanza Alidosi, held by Washington DC’s Nationwide Museum of Girls within the Arts, Alidosi wears an elaborate black-and-gold brocaded costume, staring out on the viewer with a eager gaze. The countess’s proper hand grips the pink velvet of her chair with tensed muscle, her stern, unsmiling face suggesting an individual charged with energy and duty. The one sop to softness is the tiny canine she holds on her lap.
Tiny spaniels are almost omnipresent in Fontana’s portraits of noblewomen, maybe to melt the austere authority in any other case conveyed. A brown-and-white canine is simply to the far left of the Walters Artwork Museum in Baltimore’s “Portrait of Ginevra Aldrovandi Hercolani” (c. 1595), suggesting a depth of character that transcends the imperious environment of a composition textured by the looks of darkish, heavy velvet and deep abiding shadow and punctured by the withering gaze of its topic. An much more hanging group portrait is “Bianca degli Utili Maselli and Six of Her Youngsters” (c. 1604–5) held by the Nice Arts Museum of San Francisco. The composition is centered by one other matron with an authoritative gaze, framed by kids whose bodily resemblance is apparent. She drapes an arm over her daughter, who in flip clutches her finger. However, bedecked in resplendent black and orange finery, Maselli emanates a familial energy that’s extra monarchical than maternal.
Fontana didn’t constrain her apply to noblewomen and their households; reasonably, she was a preferred painter of Counter-Reformation altars. Certainly, she could have been one of many very first ladies to symbolize that the majority iconic lady in Western tradition, the Virgin Mary. Her 1593 altar for the Collegiata di Santa Maria Maggiore reveals a mystic Virgin ascending upward surrounded by a veritable refrain of cherubim, pudgy infants all. “Assumption of the Virgin,” painted ten years earlier than, is imbued with an empathy of a fellow mom: Two male clergymen in golden stoles on bent knee pray in direction of a glowing heaven through which Mary is surrounded once more by cherubim, a paradise just for ladies and kids. Then there may be Fontana’s harrowing model of “Judith and Holofernes” (1600), a preferred narrative for Italian painters of the time. Much less well-known than Artemesia Gentileschi’s model — although the youthful lady was closely indebted to Fontana — this model chooses to solid its glow on Judith, the decapitated head of Holofernes consigned to a sack on the facet. Not a censorship of gore, however reasonably a centering of the heroine, a radical female self-fashioning in one in every of Fontana’s most autobiographical of compositions.
A 1579 self-portrait tells of the method behind such works: Within the portray now held on the Uffizi, Fontana sketches in a research that evokes the libraries of males like Montaigne or Erasmus, a room the place she is surrounded by small grey fashions of classical statues saved on brown cabinets. In royal purple with a heavy crucifix about her neck, the artist appears to search for for a minute — solely a minute — to match the gaze of the viewer, earlier than returning to the work she has at hand.
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