Where to See Sofonisba Anguissola: Self-Portraits and the Spanish Court

An inscription circles a young woman’s face and the medallion she holds. It identifies Sofonisba Anguissola and says she painted the image herself, using a mirror in Cremona. The miniature self-portrait in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is only 8.3 centimetres high. The claim to authorship is exceptionally firm for so small an object. Look at it before moving on to the portraits that later passed under men’s names.

Anguissola learned painting in Cremona alongside her sisters, within the education of a noble household. Her father helped circulate her self-portraits as introductions to potential patrons. They made skill portable: a face could travel where its maker had not yet gone. A route through Boston, Naples and Madrid follows that movement from carefully presented young woman to a painter trusted with the appearance of the Spanish royal family.

Boston: a name carried in the hand

The cipher on the medallion in the MFA’s Self-Portrait interweaves the letters of Amilcare, her father’s name, according to the museum’s reading. It may acknowledge his support. The Latin text around it insists on her own hand. The two statements sit together: family assistance and personal achievement. Neither needs to erase the other.

Resist the impulse to enlarge the picture mentally into a grand public portrait. Its small scale implies a different encounter, one in which looking is close and deliberate. The painter’s gaze meets yours, but a substantial part of the image is occupied by the object that explains who she is. She has made a likeness that also carries its credentials.

A much larger claim to status appears in Juana of Austria and a Young Girl at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Juana rests a hand on the child’s shoulder; the girl is probably a young aristocrat in her care. The portrait was commissioned for Pope Pius IV in 1561. Gardner bought it in 1897 as a Titian, despite doubts conveyed by her adviser Bernard Berenson. The museum now catalogues it under Anguissola. A woman’s imposing presence survived while the identity of the woman who painted it changed.

Naples: the keyboard as an introduction

Music replaces the inscribed medallion in Self-Portrait at the Spinet, in Capodimonte. Anguissola presents herself at an instrument rather than surrounded by the equipment of painting. The portrait demonstrates one accomplishment while being evidence of another. Her musical education belonged to the cultivated life expected of her social class; the painted image lets that education become part of her professional introduction.

The painting belonged to Cardinal Fulvio Orsini, whose collection passed to the Farnese in 1600. Through the Farnese inheritance it reached the Bourbons of Naples. That chain of ownership is worth remembering when the modest figure at the keyboard seems entirely private. Such images circulated among powerful collectors. The quiet presentation travelled well: it could speak of learning and respectable conduct without making the painted woman appear to demand attention.

Madrid: a poet disguised as an apostle

Someone painted a crucifix over the scientific instrument in Giovanni Battista Caselli, Poet from Cremona, now in the Prado. His comfortable house clothes were also covered with a coarse brown cloak. By the time the painting entered seventeenth-century inventories, the poet had become Saint Peter. Cleaning in 2011 recovered the little armillary sphere. The words on his book helped establish his identity.

The transformation is more unsettling than an ordinary change of title. An owner could alter the objects around a person until the face belonged to another kind of image altogether. Caselli still looks up from writing and points towards a devotional picture behind him. Those gestures remain readable, but we now understand them as the activities of an individual poet. Anguissola’s authorship, unusually, was preserved in the old inventories even while her sitter was renamed.

Madrid: the queen holds a smaller king

Anguissola arrived at the Spanish court in 1559 as a lady-in-waiting to Elisabeth of Valois and continued painting. In the Prado’s Portrait of Elisabeth of Valois, the queen holds a miniature of Philip II. The ruler is present inside his wife’s portrait at a size she can hold between her fingers. A private-looking object performs public dynastic work.

Black clothing does not mean the painting has abandoned luxury. Different textures of velvet and the pale undersleeves make the dark silhouette articulate; jewels interrupt it. The portrait was formerly attributed to Sánchez Coello. Look closely at the hand carrying the miniature, then at the face above it. The relationship between a person and an image of another person gives the formal pose something to do.

The Prado’s Portrait of Philip II also spent time under another author’s name: the Alcázar inventory of 1686 assigned it to Juan Pantoja de la Cruz. Anguissola’s role has had to be recovered within a court where several painters shared models and conventions. Compare the king’s self-contained presentation with the queen’s more elaborate full-length figure. Neither portrait offers a casual meeting, yet the differences in scale and gesture reward more than a glance at the label.

For a compact visit, Boston gives you two very different measures of a portrait, from a palm-sized self-image to a royal double portrait. Madrid lets you compare the court pictures with the remade poet. Confirm access to the individual works before setting out, and take their names with you. In Anguissola’s case, reading the label carefully is part of the looking, because the label has its own history.