Gendered Viewing, Placemaking, and the Early Modern Domestic Interior: Lavinia Fontana's 'Portrait of a Newborn in a Cradle'

Portrait of a Newborn in a Cradle in the Pinacoteca in Bologna (c. 1583), immediately draws us into an intimate encounter. At 113 x 126 cm., the life-sized portrait of an infant swaddled in linen, bedecked with pearls, and gazing at the viewer, commands our attention. Filling the space of the painting, the massive canopied and columned cradle, ornamented with carved floral designs and inlay, is a microcosm of a domestic interior, set within an interior, indicated by the tiled floor and glance to a room beyond where a woman hovers. Although we know the image was painted by Bologna’s pre-eminent artist Lavinia Fontana, the patron and identity of the newborn remain unknown.

Focusing on the linens, pearls, and cradle, the paper examines how portraits such as Fontana’s are enmeshed in the processes of placemaking for women in the home. Placemaking refers to how space is transformed into place through processes that make space both meaningful and useful. Places are filled with people and things, practices and representations, meanings and values. Places, as sites of identity and memory, are felt, perceived, understood, interpreted, narrated, and imagined. The paper argues that Fontana’s compelling portrait image, in conjunction with inventories and extant physical evidence, and in the context of the burgeoning prescriptive writings, devotional writings, and writings on art produced under the influence of Catholic reform both in Bologna and elsewhere, allows us to perceive how space and materiality, including the portrait itself, are productive of women’s experience of the home.