Sofonisba Anguissola
- Bryleigh Pierce
- Oct 8
- 2 min read
(Italy, 02/02/1532 - 16/11/1625)
Regarded as one of the first prominent and most prolific female artists in history, Anguissola was highly educated in painting as well as literature and science – traditionally masculine fields – and encouraged to pursue art by her father who determined that his daughters would be independent. In fact, her father was so active in selling her work that he is considered to be one of the first self-portrait art dealers.
Three of her siblings, Elena, Europa and Lucia, also became artists because, like so many women, Sofonisba taught them, and then they in turn taught their youngest sister, Anna Maria.
At the age of 11, Sofonisba and her sister Elena were sent to apprentice at Bernardino Campi’s studio for three years and by 1554 she had already received advice and encouragement from Michaelangelo and the praise of the first Renaissance art critic, Giorgio Vasari, who remarked that her portraits are ‘so lifelike that they lack only speech’. Capturing women engaged in intellectual pursuits, she was the first artist to portray her family as primary subjects and famously painted her sisters in their intellectual pursuits.
After becoming lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth of Valois in 1559, she became the favourite portraitist of the Spanish court of Philip II for over two decades. Anguissola epitomised what a mid-16th century woman with an education could be.
Aside from the portraits she was commissioned for, she mainly undertook self-portraits and portraits for reasons of propriety, although they are nonetheless powerful demonstrations of her aesthetic ambition and indisputable talent. At least twelve of her self-portraits survive and there are records of seven more. In these images, she uses her knowledge of visual imagery to depict herself as an artist and emphasises her intellectual, not her physical, properties.
Recognising her talent, at the bottom of Self-Portrait at the Easel (1556), she inscribed, ‘I, Sofonisba Anguissola, unmarried, am the equal of the Muses and Apelles in playing my songs and handling my paints’.
Image: Sofonisba Anguissola, Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola (1559). Oil on canvas, 108 x 109 cm. Pinacoteca Nazionale, Italy.
