I can’t quite remember when the thought first appeared — to write a children’s book about Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614), the first woman to open her own studio, to seek clients, to make a profession of painting rather than serve a court. What I do remember is the irritation that led to it: the slow realization of how little she was known. Yes, a few museums have mounted grand retrospectives of her work — at the Prado in Madrid, at the National Gallery in Dublin — but unless you’re one of those few who travel internationally for art, which already places you high on the art-world ladder, your chances of encountering Lavinia remain slim. Most people who know her name have a PhD, and sometimes even that isn’t enough. I know because I was one of them. Even though I studied in Bologna, her hometown, no one ever mentioned her until I began a doctorate in New York. And that is a shame, because it means people are missing the intelligence of her altarpieces and the warm precision of her portraits.
So, three winters ago, after Christmas, when the house settled into its food-heavy silence, I sat at my desk and began a small story. It is about an eight-year-old called Camilla, who cannot understand why her older sister has asked Lavinia to paint her portrait before the wedding.
Confined at home, with only a small lap dog for company, Camilla has no sense of the intricate market of portraiture that shapes Lavinia’s world. In that world, portraits are how families display prestige and secure their place in society. A painting is never merely a likeness; it marks a passage: a daughter leaving her parents’ house to marry a knight, a son entering the priesthood. Both a celebration and a parting gift, a keepsake of accomplishment but also a record of the emotions that accompany change.
Camilla understands none of it. I wanted the story to capture her confusion as she overhears adults speak of her sister’s appearance as though it were a problem to be solved, and her discovery that a portrait is not simply a record of reality but a vessel containing what others (the painter, the sitter, her relatives) wish to see. Gradually, she begins to understand how many hands shape a single image, and how beauty is often a collective construction, something arranged, agreed upon, and enforced.
If this seems excessively historical for a children’s story, that’s exactly the point. I wanted the text to be rigorously accurate because history, to me, is most fascinating in its weird details. Too often children’s books about the past are exercises in mnemonic shorthand — names, dates, deeds. What interests me instead is difference: the way the past reveals how everything, once, was other than it is now.
I showed the book first to my cousin’s daughter, then to the children of a few friends. They were merciless. They couldn’t follow the dialogue and tripped over words I had thought plain. My inexperience was obvious. I was an academic, not a children’s book author. And so, I started again, and again, trying to see the world as Camilla might. Would the stranger who came to paint her sister be frightening ? What would she think when confronted with the painted faces of people she did not know? After thirty drafts, the children at last began to smile.
I found an illustrator, Chiara Palillo, a Sicilian artist whose Instagram was full of whimsical portraits of Virginia Woolf and other writers. She agreed to collaborate and began sketching the storyboard. After a few months, she showed me a suite of lovely watercolors: Camilla waiting at the window for Lavinia, Bologna’s towers and tiled roofs rendered in warm, earthy tones. But as she presented the plates, she told me she was discarding them. Lavinia painted in dense oil, not diaphanous washes. So Chiara began anew in acrylic, seeking an effect closer to the thick impasto of Lavinia’s canvases.
Chiara also conceded that she could not replicate Lavinia’s distinctive style. This book was meant to celebrate Lavinia’s artistry, not be burdened by anyone’s imperfect imitation. So, Chiara resolved to collaborate with Lavinia across time. Under the Sicilian sun, she produced cyanotypes of details from Lavinia’s paintings — hands, jewelry, and faces — and layered these blue photographic fragments into her own scenes of Renaissance life. The result was a collage, a visual echo of what I was attempting with the prose: a way of making history feel present rather than merely recited.
With the new illustrations in hand, we found a publisher: Corraini Edizioni, a press revered for its collaborations with Milanese design legends Enzo Mari and Bruno Munari. Chiara and I felt humbled. Munari’s Drawing the Sun had been a touchstone for us. The book itself blends iconographic history, tracing how the sun has been depicted across centuries, with a meditation on the challenge of representing something that, by definition, cannot be seen.
Corraini’s expertise was evident from the beginning. They proposed a cover that felt like canvas, so that readers’ first encounter with Lavinia would be tactile, as though one could touch the paint. They asked for the text to be pared down, inviting the images to speak in their own way. And just as Lavinia’s portraits are constructed from the intentions of many hands, Lavinia’s Wondrous Portraits emerged through the layered care and contributions of everyone involved.
Corraini also suggested adding a gallery of Lavinia’s works at the back, an invitation for readers to seek them out in Bologna, New York, and the many American museums that now house her art. What had begun as a guide to looking at Lavinia’s portraits transformed into an invitation to experience them up close. Chiara and I began to imagine: What if a family or school group brought the book into a museum? How might it change the way they see those paintings? And what if, after studying one of Lavinia’s works, they turned to a canvas across the room and recognized something from our illustrations and went to it because of that inclusion? We began to plant these correspondences like secret seeds throughout the book. Most readers would never notice them. But for those who did, we hoped the discovery would feel like magic: a brief passage into the past, the kind of passage that only art makes possible.
