Christ and the Woman from Canaan

Author: Rhoda Eitel-Porter

Despite its poor condition, the ambition and quality of this sheet remain apparent. It is a highly finished composition, detailing even the elaborate architectural and landscape background that includes an impressive palatial building with a balustraded outdoor staircase at left, and an almost genre-like group of an ox, a donkey and a curled-up dog below an arcade. Two half-length figures at right, pointing in opposite directions, and at left, a woman passing a vessel to a man, with other people at the foot of the stairs, animate the middle ground. These areas, shadowed with a light wash, frame a lighter, V-shaped vista towards a town at the foot of a hill beside a river. The foreground is occupied by Christ surrounded by five gesticulating disciples and a kneeling woman.

​​In 2023 Cristiana Romalli discovered that the drawing is closely related to the signed painting Christ and the Woman from Canaan by Lavinia Fontana in a private collection.^[1] It must have been completed by the time of Fontana’s wedding on 13 February 1577 to Gian Paolo Zappi because the wording of its signature, Lavinia Prosperi Fontana Filia, was only used by the painter prior to her marriage. Fontana learnt from her father, the painter Prospero Fontana (1512-1597) in Bologna. Her earliest independent dated work was painted in 1575. Christ and the Woman from Canaan was acquired on 19 August 1579 by Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici (1549-1609) for the Villa Medici in Rome, as noted by Maria Teresa Cantaro, who believes it to have been commissioned directly by the cardinal.^[2]

As recounted in the Gospel of Matthew (15:21-28), Jesus was approached in Canaan by a woman who begged him to cure her possessed daughter. Although initially reluctant to help a Gentile, Jesus was swayed by her great faith and her comment that even ‘the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table’, possibly explaining the prominent highlighting on the dog in the background of the painting. The figure of the kneeling woman was later adapted by Lavinia Fontana for her paintings Noli me tangere of 1581 in the Uffizi, Florence, and St Francis of Paola Blessing a Noble Child of 1590 in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna.^[3]

The drawing is surely preparatory for the painting rather than an autograph or workshop ricordo or even a later copy after it; the facial types of the five apostles crowding around Christ are distinctly different in painting and drawing, the blue drapery hangs down further over Christ’s knee, and the landscape in the distance is a little less detailed in the painting than in the drawing. Judging by extant portraits of Ferdinando de’ Medici, the distinctive dark-haired second apostle from the right in the painting, wearing a blue cloak, might conceivably have been intended as a portrait of the patron. The cardinal would have been no more than 28 years old at this time, but it is unlikely that Lavinia Fontana would have met him in person.

The attribution of the drawing to Lavinia Fontana faces some challenges. For one, there is a lack of other highly finished pen-and-ink drawings attributed to her. Current attributions include more loosely composed sketches, such as a study of The Wedding Feast at Canaa, acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2022.^[4] The Getty drawing, formerly attributed to Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), is for a painting also acquired by the Getty that year.^[5] The attribution to Lavinia of the unsigned and undated Getty painting gained support from Babette Bohn and Aoife Brady, with Bohn dating it after 1578, while Brady similarly placed it in the late 1570s or early 1580s.^[6] Considering that the drawing is a pastiche of compositions by Vasari and Prospero Fontana, who served as an assistant to Vasari for several years, it seems best to leave aside comparisons with the Rotterdam sheet, which in any case represents a more advanced and refined design stage.^[7]

If one were to entertain the idea that Lavinia was working after another artist, the drawings of the Bolognese Orazio Samacchini (1532-1577) appear to be the closest in style.^[8] Similar to the artist of the Rotterdam sheet, Samacchini​ worked with areas of light and shadow created by extensive, light wash, as can be seen, for example, in his Holy Trinity with Angels in the Louvre, which relates to a painting of about 1568-69, commissioned for the church Santissima Trinita in Bologna,^[9] or in the Louvre Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, which relates to the altarpiece of the Magnani Chapel in San Giacomo Maggiore of 1575.^[10] The Rotterdam drawing, however, exhibits a delicacy of line generally not seen in Samacchini’s pen drawings and the extensive background is also somewhat unusual for that artist. ​A comprehensive study of watermarks on drawings firmly attributed to Samacchini might establish how many of them are also on paper with the watermark of a hand surmounted by a six-pointed star, similar to Briquet 10706 which are known to occur in paper used in northern Italy. Samacchini presumably had a personal connection with Lavinia, as he vouched for her talent to her future father-in-law.^[11] Assuming, however, that Lavinia would have possessed drawings by Samacchini or another artist outside her immediate circle, might be stretching the idea too far.

A previous owner of the drawing, the collector Padre Sebastiano Resta (1635‑1714), believed it to be by Ludovico Carracci (1555-1619).^[12] However, there is only a faint resemblance to Carracci's drawing style. Other suggestions, such as Denys Calvaert (1540-1619) and Lorenzo Sabatini (1530-1576), were also considered but later dismissed once the connection to the painting was established.^[13] Considering the inflection in the drawing of Roman Mannerism of the 1560s and 1570s (as in the work of Livio Agresti and Girolamo Muziano, for instance) and of the draughtsmanship of Vasari, apparent in the weightiness of the two central figures of Christ and the woman, and in the facial types of the apostles, Prospero Fontana is also worth investigating. Prospero is known to have made use of drawings by Vasari for some of his compositions, and Lavinia worked in her father’s studio and on occasion incorporated her father’s pictorial inventions. Yet unlike his daughter, Prospero is generally recognized as a draughtsman, and his existing works significantly differ from the Rotterdam sheet.^[14]

On balance, the most plausible scenario is that both the drawing and painting are the work of the same artist who, recognizing the importance of this commission, produced an outstanding preparatory study. The painting, created at the outset of Lavinia’s career as an independent artist and probably commissioned by a prominent patron, aimed to showcase her artistic range beyond her recognized proficiency as a portraitist and establish her as a painter capable of handling complex narrative scenes.