‘More audacious than her male peers’: The Renaissance woman who was the first female painter of erotic nudes

The theme had been adapted by various male artists, including Giorgione, Titian and Veronese. But these artists “had not dared depict the goddess’s buttocks being touched”, says Dal Pozzolo. Lavinia, in her Mars and Venus, painted around 1594-5, did. “That it was a female painter who crossed this boundary can, in my view, be explained in terms of the self-promotional value,” says Dal Pozzolo.