“Life is full of surprises, I try to capture these precious moments with wide eyes.”

Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532 – November 16, 1625) was an Italian painter of the Renaissance.

Over four generations, the Anguissola family had a strong connection to ancient Carthaginian history and they named their offspring after the great general Hannibal, thus the first daughter was named after the tragic Carthaginian figure Sophonisba.

[Sophonisba (fl. 203 BC) was a Carthaginian noblewoman who lived during the Second Punic War. She was betrothed to Massinissa, the leader of Numidia. Following an alliance between Massinissa and Rome, Scipio Africanus didn’t agree to their union and the couple was obliged to separate. Massinissa didn’t have the courage to oppose himself to the Romans so he induced his lover to suicide handing her a cup of poison. Her story became the subject of tragedies (and later operas) from the 16th to the 18th centuries.]

Her aristocratic father made sure that Sofonisba and her sisters received a well-rounded education that included the fine arts. Anguissola was fourteen years old when her father sent her with her sister Elena to study with Bernardino Campi, a respected portrait and religious painter of the Lombard school, also from Cremona, Sofonisba’s home town. When Campi moved to another city, Sofonisba continued her studies with the painter Bernardino Gatyi (known as Il Sojaro). Sofonisba’s apprenticeship with local painters set a precedent for women to be accepted as students of art.

Sophonisba’s most important early work is Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola (c 1550 Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena). The double portrait depicts her art teacher in the act of painting a portrait of her.

In 1554, at age twenty-two, Sofonisba traveled to Rome, where she spent her time sketching various scenes and people. While in Rome, she met Michelangelo through the help of another painter who knew her work well. Meeting Michelangelo was a great honor for Sofonisba and she had the benefit of being informally trained by the great master.

Although Sofonisba enjoyed much more encouragement and support than the average woman of her day, her social class did not allow her to transcend the constraints of her sex. Without the possibility of studying anatomy or drawing from life (it was considered unacceptable for a lady to view nudes), she could not undertake the complex multi-figure compositions required for large-scale religious or history paintings.

Sofonisba Anguissola was around twenty seven years old when she left Italy to join the Spanish court. In the winter of 1559-1560 she arrived at Madrid to serve as a court painter and lady-in-waiting to the new Queen, Elisabeth of Valois, Philip II’s third wife, who was an amateur portraitist herself. Sofonisba was essentially engaged to tutor the Queen.

In 1570, Anguissola was thirty-eight and still unmarried. After the death of Elisabeth of Valois, Philip II took additional interest in Sofonisba’s future. He had wished to marry her to one of the nobles in the Spanish Court, yet soon discovered she was already engaged. Nevertheless, he paid a dowry of twelve thousand pounds for her impending marriage to Don Francisco de Moncada, son of the prince of Paterno, viceroy of Sicily, whom she eventually married in 1571. Happily, Don Francisco was said to be supportive of her painting. After the wedding the couple traveled to visit her family, as well as her husband’s estates in Italy, but eventually returned to Spain. After eight years with the Spanish court, Sofonisba and her husband finally left Spain with the permission of the King sometime during 1578. They went to Palermo where Sofonisba’s husband died in 1579.

At the age of forty-seven, while traveling home to Cremona, Sofonisba met the considerably younger Orazio Lomellino, the captain of the ship she was traveling on. They were married shortly afterwards, with Sofonisba purportedly proposing, in January of 1580, in Pisa.

Orazio recognized and supported her in her artwork and they had a long and happy marriage. They settled in Genoa, where her husband’s family lived in their large home. Anguissola was given her own quarters, studio and time to paint and draw.

“To Sofonisba, my wife … who is recorded among the illustrious women of the world, outstanding in portraying the images of man …” Orazio Lomellino, in sorrow for the loss of his great love, in 1632, dedicated this little tribute to such a great woman.

Sofonisba Anguissola’s oeuvre had a lasting influence upon 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 the most widely copied portrait in Spain. Copiers of this work include many of the finest artists of the time, such as Peter Paul Rubens.

Sofonisba is also important 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. Some famous successors to her example include Lavinia Fontana, Barbara Longhi, Fede Galizia and Artemisia Gentileschi.