Sofonisba Anguissola

Modern surveys credit Anguissola with at least twelve self-portraits, of which as many as seven are untraced or presumed lost; the figure is repeated across current popular and museum scholarship, which describes her surviving self-portrait series as larger than either Durer's or Rembrandt's before Rembrandt himself painted his own long run. No single peer-reviewed catalogue number for the self-portraits alone was located in the sources consulted for this record, and the editor should check the claim directly against Joanna Woods-Marsden's study of Renaissance self-portraiture and against Leticia Ruiz Gomez's catalogue essay for the Prado's 2019 exhibition, the two places the claim is most likely to have been established with a precise count.

The wider painted corpus is also still moving. English-language reference lists put the number of paintings generally accepted as autograph at roughly fifty to seventy, drawing on a 1994 Cremona exhibition catalogue and later scholarship; the Prado's 2019 joint exhibition with Lavinia Fontana catalogued sixty works across both artists. In 2024, the Stanford art historian Emanuele Lugli identified a mid-1550s portrait of a bearded man holding a cup with a snake, sitting unrecognised in the storage of the Art Museum of Ravenna and catalogued there as a minor Roman painter's depiction of Socrates, as the work of Sofonisba or her sister Lucia; the essay, published in The Burlington Magazine, argues for one of three possible sitters and ties the picture to the Anguissola family's connections among the apothecaries of northern Italy. A corpus that can still gain a picture in an Italian museum's attic in 2024 is not a closed file, and this record treats it as an open one.

The pattern has a documented, specific cause rather than a vague one. Anguissola signed her early Cremonese pictures prominently and in Latin; the chessboard in her 1555 Game of Chess carries a full signed inscription naming herself, her father and her subjects. Once she reached the Spanish court in 1559 she stopped signing her work, in keeping with the conventions of court portraiture, and a large share of her Madrid-period output was later catalogued under the name of Alonso Sanchez Coello, the court's official painter, whose workshop she worked alongside. The Prado's Portrait of the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia is a documented example: it appears in an 1865 catalogue as Coello's work, and it was the art historian Maria Kusche who reattributed it to Anguissola in a 1992 article, one of a series of such reattributions she made over the following decade.

Some of the confusion runs in more than one direction at once. The Lady in a Fur Wrap, in the Stirling Maxwell collection at Pollok House, Glasgow, was attributed to El Greco from the time it entered the French royal collections in the nineteenth century. Kusche later argued it was by Anguissola, a portrait of Catalina Micaela of Spain. A joint investigation by the Museo del Prado, Glasgow Museums and the University of Glasgow subsequently moved the painting away from El Greco but settled it on Sanchez Coello rather than on Anguissola, so a single picture has now carried three different attributions inside little more than a century, none of them settled beyond dispute.

The earliest documented case predates the Spanish court entirely. Anguissola's 1551 portrait of her sister Elena, shown as a Dominican novice under the name Sister Minerva and now in the Southampton City Art Gallery, was for a period attributed to Titian; only an inscription on the back of the panel, giving Anguissola's name and the date, corrected the record. Southampton's own account of the picture notes plainly that once she fell out of fashion after her death, several of her paintings were reassigned to more famous men, and names Giovanni Battista Moroni, Alonso Sanchez Coello and Francisco de Zurbaran alongside Titian as men whose names have at different times been put on her work.

Self-Portrait with Bernardino Campi, now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena and dated to the late 1550s, shows Anguissola's own teacher, Bernardino Campi, apparently at work on a portrait of her. It is a picture inside a picture: Campi holds the brush, but the painted image of Anguissola he is supposedly completing is larger and more prominent than his own figure, and it is Anguissola, not Campi, who meets the viewer's eye.

Art historians read the composition as a deliberate argument rather than a decorative conceit. Mary Garrard has described it as the first instance of a woman artist consciously reversing the usual subject-object relationship between painter and sitter, using the picture to assert that she is the one with authorship and artistic authority even though her own teacher is shown holding the brush; Whitney Chadwick makes the same point in similar terms. A separate reading, advanced by Claire Sandberg, treats the picture instead as a piece of self-promotion made shortly before Anguissola's 1559 departure for Spain, in which the costly red velvet and gold embroidery of her painted dress, unlike the plainer clothes she wears in most of her self-portraits, signals the rank and marriageability of a woman about to enter a royal court. The two readings are not mutually exclusive, and this record gives both rather than choosing between them.

Anguissola was the eldest of seven children born to Amilcare Anguissola and Bianca Ponzoni, six of them daughters, and her father had at least five of them trained in painting alongside a humanist education. Her sister Lucia, born around 1536 to 1538 and dead by her late twenties, is generally regarded as the most talented of the group after Sofonisba herself; Vasari wrote that Lucia's death left her no less famous than Sofonisba's own reputation. Lucia's only fully signed work, a portrait of the physician Pietro Manna now in the Prado, carries a Latin inscription naming her explicitly as its maker and as a young woman when she painted it.

The closeness of the sisters' training has left a genuine, still-argued attribution problem rather than a settled one. A Portrait of a Woman in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, inscribed on the reverse as a work by Sofonisba, was rejected as hers as early as 1897 by the connoisseur Giovanni Morelli, who proposed instead that it shows Sofonisba, painted by one of her sisters, probably Lucia. The dispute over who painted it and who sits in it has continued in the literature since. The 1994 Cremona exhibition that first assembled a fuller list of Anguissola's works was itself titled Sofonisba Anguissola e le sue sorelle - Sofonisba Anguissola and her sisters - an acknowledgement built into the title that this is a family workshop history and not a single-hand one, and Lugli's 2024 Ravenna reattribution again names Sofonisba or Lucia as the two candidates rather than settling on one.

Amilcare Anguissola sent Sofonisba and her sister Elena, aged fourteen, to study with Bernardino Campi, a respected portrait and religious painter of the Lombard school working in Cremona. When Campi relocated to Milan around 1550, she continued her training with Bernardino Gatti, called Il Sojaro, a pupil of Correggio, until about 1551 to 1553. Her father then put her work in front of the courts at Ferrara and Mantua and before patrons in Parma and Rome.

In Rome, at about the age of twenty-two, Anguissola was introduced to Michelangelo, who set her the challenge of drawing a weeping boy. She responded instead with a drawing of her young brother Asdrubale being bitten by a crayfish, a subject chosen, by the traditional account, to demonstrate that a convincing expression of pain did not require an invented subject. Michelangelo is said to have sent her further drawings from his own sketchbooks for informal study over roughly the next two years. No formal apprenticeship or workshop record survives for this period; the relationship is documented mainly through later biographical accounts rather than a contract or a dated letter, and this record treats it accordingly.

The Game of Chess, also known as Portrait of the Artist's Sisters Playing Chess, is signed and dated 1555 in a Latin inscription on the edge of the chessboard itself, naming Anguissola as Amilcare's virgin daughter and identifying her three sitters, her sisters Lucia, Europa and Minerva, plus an unnamed household maid, as painted from life. It shows the sisters engaged in a game that mid-sixteenth-century convention treated as a demanding, largely male intellectual pursuit, rather than in needlework, music or any of the more conventionally feminine pastimes usually given to young women in portraiture of the period.

Giorgio Vasari saw the picture or heard a strong account of it and praised it after visiting the Anguissola household; his account is the earliest documented reference to the work. The painting passed from the family home in Cremona into the collection of the humanist Fulvio Orsini in Rome, then to Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, into the House of Bourbon and later to Lucien Bonaparte, before reaching the National Museum in Poznan, where it now hangs; it has undergone visible repainting over its history, and at least three period engravings after it are known, which is itself early evidence of the picture's independent circulation and reputation separate from its owner at any given time.

Anguissola left Cremona for Madrid in the winter of 1559 to 1560, appointed to the court of Philip II of Spain as lady-in-waiting to his new queen, Elisabeth of Valois, and as her drawing and painting tutor. She held no formal salaried post as a painter as such; her position was structured as a lady-in-waiting who happened to paint, which is also why so much of her Spanish-period work went unsigned and, later, unrecognised as hers. She remained at the Spanish court for fourteen years, from 1559 to 1573.

Among the small number of Spanish-period works securely identified as hers are portraits of Philip II and of Elisabeth of Valois, both usually dated to around 1565. She worked in this period in close proximity to Alonso Sanchez Coello, the court's official portraitist, adapting her Italian training to the codified formulas of Habsburg court portraiture; it is precisely that closeness in style, combined with the absence of a signature, that has made so much of her Madrid output difficult to separate from his.

In 1571 Philip II arranged Anguissola's marriage to the Sicilian nobleman Fabrizio Moncada Pignatelli, son of the Prince of Paterno and Viceroy of Sicily, and provided a dowry from the crown as part of the arrangement. Secondary biographical sources give conflicting figures for the dowry, some putting it at around 12,000 scudi and others at closer to 20,000, alongside reports of an annual royal pension that is variously given as 100 or 1,000 ducats; no primary court document setting out the exact terms was located in the sources consulted, and the figures should be treated as approximate until checked against a documentary source such as the Spanish royal accounts. The couple is generally placed in Paterno, near Catania, until Fabrizio's death; secondary sources report that he was killed in a pirate attack near Capri, commonly dated to 1578 or 1579, though again no primary record was located.

Widowed, Anguissola travelled toward Genoa by sea not long afterward and, according to the traditional account, fell in love during the voyage with the ship's captain, the Genoese merchant Orazio Lomellino. The couple married in Pisa on 24 December 1584. They settled first in Genoa and later, from around 1615, in Palermo, where Anguissola spent her final years received by visiting painters and other admirers who came to discuss art with her directly.

On 12 July 1624 the twenty-five-year-old Anthony van Dyck, in Sicily to paint the Spanish viceroy and delayed there for months by an outbreak of plague, visited the elderly Anguissola in Palermo and sketched her. The encounter is recorded in his own hand in his Italian sketchbook, now in the British Museum, in one of the few entries in that notebook that Van Dyck wrote about at any length. He believed her to be ninety-six; she was in fact about ninety-two, and died a little over a year later. Despite her age, he recorded that her hands did not tremble and her memory remained sharp, though her eyesight had failed to the point that she could no longer paint; she nonetheless gave him practical advice on lighting an elderly sitter's face: not to raise the light too high, so that shadows would not accentuate the wrinkles of old age. The Knole portrait, discussed below, shows a notable absence of such shadows on her face, consistent with Van Dyck having taken the advice. Van Dyck is widely quoted as saying afterward that he received more useful advice from the words of a blind woman than from the finished works of well-known painters. This is one of the only surviving first-hand accounts, in an artist's own working notebook, of a Renaissance woman painter describing her own method in her own voice, rather than being described by someone else.

Van Dyck appears to have developed a painted portrait from the same sitting, close in likeness to the sketchbook drawing; a version in oil on panel is now at Knole in Kent, held by the National Trust, which acquired it in 2012 through the Acceptance in Lieu scheme, offsetting inheritance tax against the picture's value. Before that identification, the same panel had at one point been catalogued under an entirely different sitter's name, as a portrait of Catherine Fitzgerald, Countess of Desmond, which is itself a small further instance of the same pattern that runs through Anguissola's own output: a woman's portrait, misdescribed and only later put right. A separate and later picture, Sofonisba Anguissola morente - Sofonisba Anguissola dying - now in the Musei Reali in Turin and generally dated to around 1625, shows her on her deathbed; it is a distinct, posthumous or near-posthumous image and should not be confused with the life sketch made the previous year.

The 1624 date for this visit, taken from the sketchbook and followed throughout this record as the mainstream, institutionally supported reading, has been challenged in a 2025-2026 paleographic reassessment by Carla Rossi, which argues the date is a misreading of 1629 and, with it, that Anguissola died in 1629 or 1630 rather than November 1625. The challenge rests on a notarial deed showing her husband had remarried by 26 November 1630, and remains contested rather than accepted; the National Trust and this record both keep the 1624/1625 dating, but a future editor should watch whether the institutional consensus shifts.

Anguissola's reputation faded substantially after her death, along with that of most women painters of her period, and she was not treated as a major figure in general art-historical writing for roughly three centuries. Modern scholarship generally places her serious rediscovery in the wave of feminist-informed art history of the 1970s, the same period in which Linda Nochlin's essay questioning why art history recognised no great women artists reframed the field's attention to painters like her. The 2019 to 2020 Prado exhibition pairing her with Lavinia Fontana, curated by Leticia Ruiz Gomez, marked a further, more institutional stage of that recovery: the first exhibition a major national museum had devoted specifically to historic women painters in that context. The 2024 to 2025 Ravenna reattribution shows the process is still active rather than complete.

The figure most often repeated as Anguissola's auction record, a Christie's London sale of 7 December 2006 at GBP 478,400 (then roughly USD 940,000), was for a picture catalogued at the time only as Circle of Sofonisba Anguissola, meaning it was never offered as her own autograph work even at the point of sale. That picture, a portrait of Margherita of Savoy, has since been independently identified by Diana Scarisbrick and Daniele Sanguineti as the work of Federico Zuccaro, on the strength of comparison with other portraits and documentary evidence including Zuccaro's own diary and his recorded travels to Savoy in July 1605. It should not be counted as an Anguissola price at all, and this record does not treat it as her market record.

The best-supported price for a work catalogued to Anguissola herself is a Dorotheum sale in Vienna on 12 October 2011, where a Portrait of Archduchess Johanna of Austria was awarded to a proxy bidder for EUR 283,300, described by the house as a new world record for the artist. The sources consulted for this record did not separate the hammer price from any buyer's premium in either the 2011 or the 2006 case, and that distinction should be confirmed against the auction houses' own lot records before this section is relied on for a precise hammer figure. By way of an earlier and very different kind of valuation, the small, securely inscribed miniature self-portrait now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, passed through several nineteenth and twentieth century owners and two intervening sales before F. Kleinberger Galleries sold it to the museum in 1960 for USD 3,000, a figure that says more about how modestly a documented, autograph Anguissola was valued before the recent market interest in women Old Masters than any single modern auction result does.