How a Bolognese mother of eleven became the first Renaissance woman to paint the female nude

In 1613 Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul V and the most voracious art collector in Rome, took delivery of a canvas more than two and a half metres tall. It shows Minerva, goddess of wisdom and war, standing naked with her armour set aside, about to put on a richly decorated gown. The artist was 61 years old and had given birth eleven times; only three of those children would outlive her. Her name was Lavinia Fontana, and she is widely credited as the first professional woman artist in Europe to paint the female nude.

Her goddesses are also more openly sensual than most of those painted by her male contemporaries. Her Venuses wear jewellery and carefully dressed hair, which makes them look less like marble statues and more like the Bolognese women she painted in portraits every week. In a Mars and Venus from around 1595, now at the Liria Palace in Madrid and only recently attributed to her, the god of war rests his hand on Venus's bare bottom, a gesture with no clear precedent in Italian painting of the period.

So why did a woman raised in one of the most devout circles of Counter-Reformation Bologna paint them? Three explanations come up again and again: rebellion against a strict father, a sharp commercial instinct and something closer to her own private experience.