Sofonisba Anguissola was a Renaissance “painter lady”, one of the few artists of the time to have achieved international fame and recognition. Her fame has come down to us thanks to the quotes of the great art historian Giorgio Vasari in his “Lives”, but also to the letters of Amilcare Anguissola, the painter’s father, who wrote to Michelangelo Buonarroti to launch his daughter into the world of art; it is also said that Caravaggio drew inspiration from a charcoal and pencil sketch by Anguissola (“The Boy Bitten by a Prawn”) for one of his most famous paintings, “Boy Bitten by a Lizard”.
Today his works are present in the most important collections and museums in the world, from the Uffizi in Florence to the Prado Museum in Madrid, from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Life and works of Sofonisba Anguissola
He was born in Cremona to the nobles Amilcare Anguissola and Bianca Ponzone, between the second half of the 1520s and the first half of the 1530s. Pushed by her father to cultivate her artistic talent, together with her sisters Elena, Lucia, Europa and Anna Maria, she frequented the Cremonese workshops of Bernardino Campi and Bernardo Gatti (known as Sojaro) who introduced her to the school of Raphael and Parmigianino and the other to Correggio. The sisters also tried their hand at painting, but took different paths. She is the only Sofonisba to make painting her profession, in an unusual path compared to her noble peers of the time, also contributing to the family finances before and after her father’s death.
Already from the 1550s Sofonisba became famous and sought after for her portraits, characterized both by attention to detail and by a careful search for expressiveness: examples are the famous “Portrait of the Anguissola family” or her many self-portraits.
Achieving fame
Sofonisba was then invited to the best Italian courts of the time, where she was called to create portraits of the Gonzaga nobles, the Farnese and the Este families. And his fortune did not stop in Italy: his works bear witness to this, such as the self-portrait preserved today in the Pinacoteca di Brera, in Milan, and painted during a long stay in Madrid, at the court of King Philip II of Spain.
Having married Don Fabrizio Moncada and moving to Palermo, Sofonisba then married Orazio Lomellino in Genoa for the second time, and it is said that towards the end of her life she became blind. Returning to Palermo, she was portrayed by the famous Flemish painter Antoon Van Dyck, and shortly afterwards she died (in her nineties) and was buried in the city.
