ABSTRACT
Giulio Mancini was not only a prominent physician and personal doctor to Pope Urban VIII, but also a connoisseur fascinated with the art world. His interest in art took written expression in a composite work entitled Considerazioni sulla pittura which, although unpublished until the twentieth century, has a seminal place in art history. Mancini concentrates on the artists who worked in the cities he knew best, Siena and Rome, and his first-hand accounts of artists of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were particularly influential on later biographers such as Giovanni Baglione, Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Carlo Malvasia, and Filippo Baldinucci. Lavinia Fontana was one of the first professional women artists to flourish by establishing her own networks of patronage, and even more significantly she did so in the competitive art markets of Bologna and Rome. More than one hundred works by the artist are extant, revealing her versatility and skill in both portraiture and religious painting.
