Sofonisba Anguissola

• 1. Introduction

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  Sofonisba Anguissola died in Palermo in 1629, almost certainly in her mid-to-late nineties, having outlived two husbands, a queen, and a king. Ten years before her death, a young Flemish painter named Anthony van Dyck traveled to visit her. He found her with weakened eyesight but, as he noted in his Italian sketchbook, with her memory and intellect entirely clear. He later said that their conversation taught him more about the true principles of painting than anything else in his life. She was, at that point, already famous across Europe. Yet for centuries after her death, her name faded. Paintings she had made were attributed to other artists. The portrait of a middle-aged King Philip II that hung in collections across the continent was long credited to Alonso Sanchez Coello, or to Juan Pantoja de la Cruz. It was hers. Who was this woman? How did a girl from a poor noble family in Cremona become one of the most successful painters at the most powerful royal court in Europe? And what did it cost her to get there?

• 2. A Name From Carthage

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  The name Sofonisba was not chosen lightly. Her father, Amilcare Anguissola, had a fascination with ancient Carthaginian history, and he named his children accordingly. His own name derived from the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca. He named his only son Asdrubale after the warlord Hasdrubal Barca. And he named his eldest daughter after Sophonisba, a tragic figure from Carthaginian history. The family lived near the site of the Battle of the Trebia, the second century B.C. clash between the Romans and Carthaginians, and the ancient world was not an abstraction to them but a living presence.

  The Anguissola family traced its origins to a Byzantine warlord named Galvano Sordo, said to have served under the emperor Leo III the Isaurian in 717. According to family tradition, Galvano helped save Constantinople from a Saracen siege using Greek fire, an incendiary weapon developed in the late seventh century. The men of Constantinople supposedly cried out "Anguis sola fecit victoriam" - "The snake alone brought the victory" - and Galvano took the name as his own. The emperor later made it the name of all his descendants. Whether or not the legend is exact in every detail, it tells you something about the family's sense of itself: ancient, martial, shaped by fire.

  By Sofonisba's time, the Anguissolas had spread across northern Italy, intermarrying with families including the Gonzagas, the Viscontis, and the Komnenoi. The branch in Cremona was noble but, by the sixteenth century, not wealthy.

• 3. A Father's Ambition

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  Amilcare Anguissola was inspired by Baldassare Castiglione's book The Book of the Courtier, and he took it seriously enough to educate all six of his daughters in the fine arts. Sofonisba, born in 1532 as the eldest of seven children, was fourteen when her father sent her and her sister Elena to study with Bernardino Campi, a respected portrait and religious painter of the Lombard school. This was an unusual arrangement. Sending daughters to study with a professional painter set a precedent that would later benefit other women who wanted to train as artists.

  When Campi moved to Milan in 1550, Sofonisba continued her studies with Bernardino Gatti, known as Il Sojaro, who had been a pupil of Correggio. From Gatti, she absorbed an influence that would eventually help define an entire trend in late sixteenth-century Cremonese painting. She studied under Gatti for roughly three years, from 1551 to 1553.

  Of the six sisters, four became painters. Elena eventually abandoned painting to become a nun. Anna Maria and Europa gave up art upon marrying. Lucia, who was by some accounts the most technically gifted of the sisters after Sofonisba, died young, sometime between 1565 and 1568. The remaining sister, Minerva, became a writer and Latin scholar. Their brother, Asdrubale, studied music and Latin but not painting. It was Sofonisba who carried the furthest, and who taught her younger siblings what she had learned.

• 4. The Lobster and the Master

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  In 1554, at age twenty-two, Sofonisba traveled to Rome and began sketching scenes and people around the city. A painter who knew her work introduced her to Michelangelo. She showed him a drawing of a laughing girl. He challenged her to produce something harder: a weeping boy. What she sent back was Child Bitten by a Lobster, a drawing of a child's face contorted in pain and surprise. Michelangelo recognized her talent immediately.

  For at least two years, the relationship continued as an informal correspondence. Michelangelo sent her sketches from his notebooks and asked her to render them in her own style, then offered guidance on the results. It was a form of mentorship that would have been difficult to formalize within the guild structures that governed professional painting, which effectively excluded women from membership and from the life-drawing sessions that formed the backbone of academic training.

  One of the most striking works from this early period is Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola, made around 1550. In it, her former teacher appears in the act of painting her portrait. She is both subject and author. The image raises an obvious question: who is really in control of how Sofonisba Anguissola is seen? The answer she gave was herself. That sensibility would carry through all the self-portraits that followed.

• 5. The Constraints of Being Female

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  Without access to anatomy lessons or life-drawing sessions - both considered unsuitable for a woman of her social class - Anguissola could not attempt the large-scale multi-figure compositions that brought the greatest prestige to male painters. History paintings and grand religious works required exactly this kind of training. She could not do them.

  Instead, she found the space that was available to her and stretched it. The Game of Chess, painted in 1555 when she was twenty-three, shows her sisters Lucia, Minerva, and Europa gathered around a chessboard. It is an intimate domestic scene, combining elaborate formal clothing with relaxed, genuinely amused facial expressions. This kind of candid family grouping was not what Italian portraiture typically offered. Critics have since described it as a conversation piece, a genre that places informal social interaction at the center of the image rather than official status.

  Her self-portraits make an argument as much as they make likenesses. In a 1556 self-portrait, she presents herself at work, as the person holding the brush rather than sitting for one. A 1561 self-portrait shows her playing a musical instrument. Her contemporary Giorgio Vasari wrote that she had shown "greater application and better grace than any other woman of our age in her endeavours at drawing" and had "by herself created rare and very beautiful paintings." The praise acknowledged her achievement. It also, without meaning to, underlined the category she was being measured against.

• 6. A Court Painter in Madrid

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  In 1558, already established as a painter, Anguissola went to Milan and painted Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, the third Duke of Alba. He recommended her to King Philip II of Spain. The following year, she received an invitation to join the Spanish court.

  She was approximately twenty-six when she arrived in Madrid in the winter of 1559-1560. Her official position was lady-in-waiting to Elisabeth of Valois, Philip's third wife and an enthusiastic amateur painter. Anguissola was there as the Queen's art tutor, but she quickly became the court's principal portrait painter. The subjects came to her: Philip's sister Joanna, his son Don Carlos, and the King himself. She stayed for fourteen years.

  The work was demanding in ways her earlier portraits had not been. Royal sitters wore clothes whose fabrics and jewellery required painstaking attention. The formal requirements of official portraiture left less room for the informality that had made her reputation in Italy. Yet her portraits of Elisabeth of Valois, and later of Philip's fourth wife Anne of Austria, retained a vitality that distinguished them from the more rigid court style.

  In 1561, she painted a portrait of Philip's sister Margaret of Parma for Pope Pius IV. Elisabeth died in childbirth in 1568. Anguissola had guided the Queen's artistic development throughout their time together, and had also influenced the artistic sensibilities of the Queen's two daughters, Isabella Clara Eugenia and Catherine Michaela. The salary she earned as court painter, combined with gifts and a dowry of 12,000 scudi that Philip eventually provided, amounted to what the source describes as an admirable return from her craft.

• 7. Two Marriages

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  After Elisabeth's death, Philip II arranged a marriage for Anguissola. In 1571, approaching forty, she married Fabrizio Moncada Pignatelli, the son of the Prince of Paterno and Viceroy of Sicily. Philip paid a dowry of 12,000 scudi on her behalf. Fabrizio was said to be supportive of her painting, and the two are believed to have lived near Catania from 1573 to 1579, though some scholarship questions whether they ever left Spain. A royal pension of 100 ducats allowed her to continue working and to take on students. In Paterno, she painted and donated a work called La Madonna dell'Itria.

  Fabrizio died in 1579 under circumstances the sources describe as mysterious. Two years later, traveling to Cremona by sea, she met the ship's captain, a sea merchant named Orazio Lomellino. They fell in love. Her brother Asdrubale objected. She married Lomellino anyway, in Pisa, on the 24th of December 1584. They lived in Genoa until 1620.

  Lomellino's fortune, added to Philip's pension, gave her the financial independence that had been conditional for most of her life. She had no children of her own, but she kept up cordial relationships with her nieces and her stepson Giulio. She was the leading portrait painter in Genoa during these years. When she died in 1629, Lomellino buried her with honor at the Church of San Giorgio dei Genovesi in Palermo. Three years later, on the anniversary of what would have been her hundredth birthday, he placed an inscription on her tomb that read, in part: "To Sofonisba, my wife, who is recorded among the illustrious women of the world, outstanding in portraying the images of man."

• 8. Influence and Afterlife

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  The portrait Anguissola made of Queen Elisabeth of Valois wearing a zibellino - the pelt of a marten set with a jewelled head and feet - was copied by many of the finest painters of the following generation, including Peter Paul Rubens. Caravaggio is said to have drawn on her work for his Boy Bitten by a Lizard, which takes up the same idea she had explored in Child Bitten by a Lobster decades earlier.

  In a letter written in 1579, Lavinia Fontana described how she and another woman, Irene di Spilimbergo, had set their hearts on learning to paint after seeing one of Anguissola's portraits. Fontana went on to a significant career, as did Barbara Longhi, Fede Galizia, and Artemisia Gentileschi. A Cremonese school, the Liceo Statale Sofonisba Anguissola, now bears her name. The American painter Charles Willson Peale named his daughter Sophonisba Angusciola, born in 1786, after her; she became a painter and quilter whose works are held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

  On the 4th of August 2017, a crater on Mercury was officially named after Anguissola. The approximately fifty paintings attributed to her are held across institutions in Madrid, Vienna, Poznan, Naples, Florence, Milan, and elsewhere. The visit that Van Dyck paid her in Palermo on the 12th of July 1629, recorded in his Italian sketchbook, remains one of the most documented encounters between two painters of different generations in the history of European art - and his sketch of her, made when she was in her nineties with failing eyes, is itself one of her most vivid surviving likenesses.