Who was Sofonisba Anguissola?

An Italian Renaissance painter who achieved international renown in her own lifetime, served as a court painter in Spain, and was largely written out of the record afterwards — a pattern common enough to be a category rather than an exception.

Her situation. Born around 1532 into a minor noble family in Cremona, she was educated in painting at her father's insistence — unusual, and possible only because her family's status made an apprenticeship unnecessary. Women were barred from studying anatomy and from drawing from nude models, which effectively excluded them from history painting, the most prestigious genre. Portraiture was one of the few avenues open.

What she achieved. Michelangelo saw her drawings and corresponded with her, setting her exercises and offering critique. Vasari praised her in his Lives of the Artists. She was invited to the Spanish court of Philip II, where she spent around fourteen years as a lady-in-waiting and painter to Queen Elisabeth of Valois, producing court portraits and teaching the queen to paint.

What is distinctive in her work. Her group portraits, particularly The Chess Game, show family members in informal, animated interaction rather than the stiff formality typical of the period — an approach that influenced later portraiture. She produced numerous self-portraits, frequently depicting herself painting or at a keyboard, which functioned as assertions of her status as an artist.

How she was lost. Many of her works were reattributed to male contemporaries — Titian, Moroni, Coello and others — a recurring mechanism by which women artists disappear from the record, since an unsigned high-quality work was assumed to be by a man. Modern scholarship has restored attributions.

She lived to around 93, and was visited in old age by the young Anthony van Dyck, who recorded her advice on painting and sketched her — the drawing survives.

Her contemporaries worth knowing alongside her include Lavinia Fontana, the first woman known to run a professional workshop, and Artemisia Gentileschi.