Renaissance
Sofonisba Anguissola (1532–1625)
Italian Late Renaissance Portraiture painter.
Sofonisba Anguissola, born about 1532 into a minor noble family of Cremona, was the first woman artist of the Renaissance to win an international reputation. Her father Amilcare, unusually, had her and several of her sisters trained in painting — first with Bernardino Campi, then Bernardino Gatti — at a time when women were barred from the anatomical study and large public commissions that made conventional careers. She turned that exclusion into a specialty: intimate, animated portraits, above all of her own family, caught in the ordinary business of living.
Her reputation spread quickly. Giorgio Vasari, who saw works in the Anguissola household, praised her in the 1568 edition of his Lives; the young Michelangelo, corresponding with her father, encouraged her and gave her drawings to copy and respond to. In 1559 she was invited to the Spanish court of Philip II as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elisabeth of Valois and de facto court portraitist, remaining in Madrid for roughly a decade.
She married twice, painted into extreme old age, and became a figure of pilgrimage for younger artists. In 1624 the young Anthony van Dyck visited her in Palermo — she was then in her early nineties and nearly blind — and recorded the meeting, with a sketch, in his Italian sketchbook. She died in Palermo in 1625.
The words the record keeps using: intimate, warm, poised, observant, candid, dignified, gentle, quietly witty.
At a glance
- Lived 1532–1625
- Origin Italian (Cremonese)
- Worked in Cremona, Madrid
- Era Renaissance
- Movements Late Renaissance Portraiture
- Mediums Oil on panel, Oil on canvas
Works in the archive
- The Chess Game (Portrait of the Artist's Sisters Playing Chess), 1555 (National Museum, Poznań)
Anguissola's best-known painting shows three of her sisters — Lucia, Minerva, and Europa — around a chessboard in a landscape, attended by a servant. It is a landmark of informal portraiture: a group defined not by rank… - Self-Portrait at the Easel Painting a Devotional Panel, 1556 (Muzeum-Zamek, Łańcut)
Anguissola paints herself at the easel, brush and maulstick in hand, working on a panel of the Virgin and Child. The picture is a deliberate self-assertion: a modestly dressed noblewoman shown not as a sitter but as a… - Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola, 1559 (Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena)
In this ingenious double portrait Anguissola shows her teacher Bernardino Campi in the act of painting a larger portrait of her — so that the 'painted' Sofonisba, brought to life on the depicted canvas, in fact outsizes…
What was said
Vasari, having seen her work in Cremona, wrote that Anguissola had shown greater application and grace than any other woman of the age in drawing from life, and that her figures seemed to lack only speech to be alive.
Her father's correspondence records that Michelangelo, approached on her behalf, encouraged the young painter and supplied drawings for her to copy and respond to — an informal mentorship remarkable for a woman then barred from academic training.
Van Dyck recorded visiting Anguissola in Palermo when she was about ninety-two and nearly blind, sketching her and noting that she remained sharp of mind and gave him advice on the placing of light in portraiture.
What would Sofonisba make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Sofonisba Anguissola", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Sofonisba · Keep a life moment the way Sofonisba would · Pictures made after Sofonisba