Portrait of the Artist as a Woman : A new book crowns Sofonisba Anguissola as the first great female painter of the Renaissance

If ever a painter transformed a daunting range of liabilities into a rich panoply of assets, Sofonisba Anguissola is most certainly that artist.

Anguissola had the simple, not uncommon misfortune of being an artistically gifted woman living in a society pleased to suppose such aptitudes could in fact be lavished only on a man. She proceeded to show the culture otherwise.

Anguissola was born into an aristocratic family in the prosperous and provincial Italian textile city of Cremona, about 75 miles southeast of Milan, early in the 16th Century (the exact date of her birth is a matter of some dispute, but it was around 1532). The natural configuration of young Sofonisba’s chromosomes meant that she was not eligible to receive the rigorous formal training available to other aspiring painters of her day. For enlightened thinkers of the Renaissance, the mere thought of a woman learning to draw from close examination of the fleshly contours of a naked male body seemed to spell the certain corruption of the fragile damsel’s abiding virtue.

If gender appeared to be Anguissola’s artistic curse, social station turned out to be her similarly accidental ally. As a woman of minor but nonetheless noble birth, she enjoyed certain freedoms typically afforded by exalted economic standing. She didn’t need to till the fields or pluck the chickens, and a basic education was her due. An apparently indulgent mother and a doting father also helped, not to mention the string of five younger sisters and, especially, a little brother. As the youngest sibling, he didn’t come along until Sofonisba was about 19. By then, her parents had already afforded their eldest certain privileges that normally would have been reserved for a male offspring--which is to say, for a prospective heir.

So, Sofonisba Anguissola got to paint. She got to be quite good at it, too. In fact, she got to be so good that one can hardly disagree with Ilya Sandra Perlingieri, who has titled her new and much-needed monograph on the artist “Sofonisba Anguissola: The First Great Woman Artist of the Renaissance.”

The book, which will be published by Rizzoli in June, has its flaws. It suffers from a woefully limited index and from numbered illustrations that, bizarrely, are keyed to the text but are not always in sequence. Still, it’s a remarkable feat of determined burrowing through difficult, often unmarked terrain. An art historian who teaches in the Department of Women’s Studies at San Diego State University, Perlingieri has spent the last 16 years excavating the once famous, now lamentably little-known artist from the burial ground of history.

As she explains in a brief introduction, she came to Anguissola’s work wholly unaware in 1976, when she was smitten with a single self-portrait of the painter included in “Women Artists: 1550-1950,” the landmark exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. One of the earliest and most widely hailed products of the new feminist revolution in art historical studies, the show trained a bright and welcome spotlight on scores of hitherto neglected Western painters.

If Perlingieri’s book is any guide, the LACMA show also helped catalyze a new generation of scholars. A comparison between Perlingieri’s scholarship and an entry in the exhibition catalogue demonstrates how. The catalogue laments that, of Anguissola’s years painting royal portraits as a lady-in-waiting in the Spanish court, “not one certain work survives from this period of her life,” save for the self-portrait in the show. By contrast, Perlingieri’s book identifies no fewer than a dozen--including many she believes have been falsely attributed to other artists, especially to the male Spanish court painter, Alonso Sanchez Coello.

The author’s research brought her to Cremona, and to an intimate acquaintance with the 16th-Century textile industry that allowed her to identify, through examination of the often luxurious clothing worn by Anguissola’s portrait sitters, dates and even authorship of previously unknown paintings. It led her to Rome, where it appears the young noblewoman met and was encouraged in her fledgling work by Michelangelo. And, it sent her to Spain, where Perlingieri uncovered hitherto unknown documents and gave fresh readings to others.

Among these latter are correspondence with Pope Pius IV, who had requested Anguissola to send him a portrait of Spain’s Queen Isabel de Valois, to whose court the Italian painter had come at the request of Europe’s most powerful monarch, King Philip II. Also unearthed were four documents relating to the artist’s dowry, written by the king for her first marriage, to Don Fabrizio de Moncada, viceroy of Sicily.

Anguissola was first and foremost a portrait painter. For self-portraiture, it’s becoming increasingly common to regard her as a kind of pivot between Albrecht Durer, who pretty much invented the genre in the 15th Century, and Rembrandt, who brought it to its apogee in the 17th Century. Anguissola fits neatly in between.

Her interest in the subject seems to have been born as much of necessity as of choice. Anguissola managed to study in Cremona with painters Bernardino Campi and Bernardino Gatti; yet, as an aspiring artist who could not follow the normal route of apprenticeship in a studio outside the home, both her family and her own visage were the subjects most available to her.

Although sometimes she painted religious pictures, especially late in her long and productive life (she died in Palermo at the age of 93), it is portraiture that ranks as Anguissola’s most significant achievement. Take the unfinished “Portrait of Amilcare, Minerva and Asdrubale Anguissola,” painted when she was about 25. Even in reproduction (the picture hangs in a museum in Denmark) it’s remarkable for the casual intimacy with which it portrays a subject more commonly given a formal interpretation.

Sofonisba’s sister, Minerva, named for the Roman goddess of wisdom, stands at the left, clutching a bunch of fecund flowers to her bosom. She looks lovingly across the canvas to her little brother, 6-year-old Asdrubale, at whose feet stands a faithful dog. Shown in profile, Asdrubale smiles expectantly at his seated father, whose contented gaze and gentle embrace of his young son dominate the picture.

The painting doesn’t merely describe with accuracy and care the physical features of Sofonisba’s family. Instead, it is a gentle portrait of a complex familial dynamic, in which stability of the social order is admiringly portrayed. A man of 63, Amilcare Anguissola is shown at peace in the knowledge that all is right with his world. A daughter is at his side, sheltered within a comfortable interior; his son--who came very late in his father’s life--stands beneath an open window, which frames the boy with a vision of the wider world. With one arm around the boy’s shoulder and the other clasped in his small hand, Amilcare’s gesture toward his son is at once protective and guiding. Asdrubale, his heir, will carry his father’s legacy.

The painter brings a warmly sophisticated air to what easily could have been a stilted exercise in symbolic posturing. This insightful skill, which surely must have been honed by her own status as a woman in Italian Renaissance culture, as well as by her closeness to the subjects, is in part what makes her subsequent royal portraits so significant. At the court of King Philip, the same sense of familial intimacy is suffused within a genre more commonly trussed up in the stiff, formal spectacle of courtly pomp and circumstance. Unlike the suitably intimidating but rigid pictures by Coello, Anguissola’s strongest royal portraits expressively convey the inevitable tensions between public station and private life.

This kind of observation is used by Perlingieri in attributing to Anguissola’s hand hitherto unidentified or misattributed paintings. Her attributions are difficult to argue with, although it would take a firsthand acquaintance with all the pictures to really know. Perlingieri dreams of organizing a full-dress exhibition of Anguissola’s paintings, an idea whose time has surely come.

Interestingly enough, it is within this wholly traditional, often stodgy arena of art historical scholarship that one of the more interesting features of her book can be found. What’s notable is that it was not meant to be read just by art historians. Although her effort at abandoning academic style for more gracefully accessible writing unfortunately tends toward the sentimental, there’s no doubt that Perlingieri has a general audience in mind.

She attempts an end run around academe for good reason. Especially in the United States, male art historians, which historically means most art historians, have kept artists like Sofonisba Anguissola obscure. Forget piggish conspiracy theories concocted by men against women artists. The real problem is that, for more than a century, American culture has regarded art and the study of art as a feminine pursuit. Art historians have thus nervously tended to overcompensate in their choice of artists on whom to focus research--much to the benefit of male artists, regardless of their relative position in the historical pantheon.

Does this mean that Anguissola should in fact be considered the artistic equal of the greatest male artists of her day? The equal of Tintoretto, Pieter Breughel, El Greco, Annibale Carracci, Caravaggio?

In absolute terms, the answer must be no. Her significance is undeniable but not as great. For unlike her male counterparts, Anguissola was forced by social circumstance to paint with one eye closed and two hands tied behind her back. Her paintings can be a complicated mix--often remarkable in their own right, frequently astonishing in light of the obstacles she faced, always poignant in regard to what, in a more perfect world, might have been.

Feminist art historian Linda Nochlin put it best in “Why have there been no great women artists?,” a watershed essay published in 1971. “Disadvantage may indeed be an excuse,” she wrote, warning against puffing mediocrity; “it is not, however, an intellectual position.”

Nochlin was one of two guest curators for “Women Artists: 1550--1950.” (The other was Ann Sutherland Harris.) A certain poetic symmetry emerges here. The inspirational acclaim heaped on that LACMA show has, from home ground, now spawned the notable achievement of Perlingieri’s scholarship; likewise, the acclaim that surrounded the unprecedented career of Sofonisba Anguissola did the same for a variety of younger women painters, who suddenly began to emerge near her place of birth. Lavinia Fontana of Bologna, Fede Galizia of Milan, Barbara Longhi of Ravenna--there are plenty of artists yet to receive their due.