Sofonisba Anguissola
The first internationally famous woman painter of the Renaissance.
Sofonisba Anguissola became a court painter in Spain and lived to over ninety. She painted lively family portraits and several self-portraits.
Sofonisba Anguissola was born around 1532 in Cremona in northern Italy. She was the eldest of seven children in a family of minor nobility. Her father, Amilcare, gave his six daughters a humanist education, which was unusual at the time, and let Sofonisba and one of her sisters study painting with local masters, first Bernardino Campi and then Bernardino Gatti.
Her father sent her drawings to well-known artists to further her career. One went to Michelangelo. According to a surviving letter, he replied that it was harder to draw a crying child than a laughing one. She then made a drawing of a boy being bitten by a crayfish, now in Naples. Her best-known early painting is The Chess Game of 1555, now in Poznań in Poland. Three of her sisters play chess while a maidservant looks on. It is an unusually relaxed and lively family picture.
Her reputation reached Spain, and in 1559 she was summoned to the court of Philip II in Madrid. She served as lady-in-waiting and drawing teacher to Queen Elisabeth of Valois and painted portraits of the royal family. Because she was a noblewoman she was not paid like an ordinary court painter, and several of her works were long attributed to male colleagues. She painted many self-portraits, at the easel, at a spinet or with a book, and she was one of the most frequently portrayed women artists of her time.
The king arranged her marriage to a Sicilian nobleman in 1573. After his death she married a Genoese sea captain. She lived in Genoa and later in Palermo. There, in 1624, she was visited by the young Anthony van Dyck, who drew her and noted that despite her poor eyesight her mind was still sharp. She died in Palermo in 1625, aged over ninety.
Sofonisba Anguissola showed that a woman could become internationally famous as a painter. She paved the way for later women artists such as Lavinia Fontana and Artemisia Gentileschi.