Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625) was an Italian Renaissance painter born in Cremona to a relatively poor noble family.

She received a well-rounded education, that included the fine arts, and her apprenticeship with local painters set a precedent for women to be accepted as students of art.

As a young woman, Anguissola traveled to Rome where she was introduced to Michelangelo, who immediately recognized her talent, and to Milan, where she painted the Duke of Alba.

The Spanish queen, Elizabeth of Valois, was a keen amateur painter and in 1559 Anguissola was recruited to go to Madrid as her tutor, with the rank of lady-in-waiting. She later became an official court painter to the king, Philip II, and adapted her style to the more formal requirements of official portraits for the Spanish court. After the queen's death, Philip helped arrange an aristocratic marriage for her. She moved to Sicily, and later Pisa and Genoa, where she continued to practice as a leading portrait painter.

Her most distinctive and attractive paintings are her portraits of herself and her family, which she painted before she moved to the Spanish court. In particular, her depictions of children were fresh and closely observed.

At the Spanish court she painted formal state portraits in the prevailing official style. Later in her life she also painted religious themes, although many of her religious paintings have been lost. In 1625, she died at age ninety-three in Palermo.

Anguissola's example, as much as her oeuvre, had a lasting influence on subsequent generations of artists, and her great success opened the way for larger numbers of women to pursue serious careers as artists.

Her paintings can be seen at galleries in Boston, MA (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum); Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Milwaukee Art Museum); Bergamo; Brescia; Budapest; Madrid (Museo del Prado); Naples; Siena; and at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Her contemporary Giorgio Vasari wrote about Anguissola that she "has shown greater application and better grace than any other woman of our age in her endeavors at drawing; she has thus succeeded not only in drawing, coloring and painting from nature, and copying excellently from others, but by herself has created rare and very beautiful paintings."

The influence of Campi, whose reputation was based on portraiture, is evident in Anguissola's early works, such as the Self-Portrait.

Her work was akin to the worldly tradition of Cremona, influenced greatly by the art of Parma and Mantua, in which even religious works were imbued with extreme delicacy and charm.

From Gatti she seems to have absorbed elements reminiscent of Correggio, beginning a trend in Cremonese painting of the late 16th century. This new direction is reflected in Lucia, Minerva and Europa Anguissola Playing Chess in which portraiture merges into a quasi-genre scene, a characteristic derived from Brescian models.

The main body of Anguissola's earlier work consists of self-portraits (the many "autoritratti" reflect the fact that portraits of her were frequently requested due to her fame) and portraits of her family, which are considered by many to be her finest works.

Sofonisba Anguissola's oeuvre had a lasting influence on subsequent generations of artists. Her portrait of Queen Elisabeth of Valois with a zibellino (the pelt of a marten set with a head and feet of jewelled gold) was widely copied by many of the finest artists of the time, such as Peter Paul Rubens.

Anguissola is significant to feminist art historians. Although there has never been a period in Western history in which women were completely absent in the visual arts, Anguissola's great success opened the way for larger numbers of women to pursue serious careers as artists; Lavinia Fontana expressed in a letter written in 1579 that she and another woman, Irene di Spilimbergo, had “set heart on learning how to paint” after seeing one of Anguissola’s portraits. Some of her more well-known successors include Lavinia Fontana, Barbara Longhi, Fede Galizia and Artemisia Gentileschi.

A Cremonese school bears the name Liceo Statale Sofonisba Anguissola.

[ Ссылка ]

Thank you, please subscribe for future videos
[ Ссылка ]

свернуть