• Sofonisba Anguissola From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Portrait of Diane of Andoins and her daughter Catherine, attributed to Sofonisba Anguissola From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Sofonisba Anguissola Geni.com
• Diane d'Andoins
• Catherine de Gramont
• Informally trained by Michelangelo
• The great early art historian Giorgio Vasari later wrote this about Anguissola GENI Profile Wikipedia
• Portrait of Massimiliano Stampa, third marquis of the northern Italian city of Soncin, painted 1557. This is Sophonisba Anguissola's first major commission. The Walters Art Museum.
• Portrait of Queen Elisabeth of Spain
• The Prado Philip II now recognised as by Anguissola

  ---

Sofonisba Anguissola

Sofonisba Anguissola (also spelled Anguisciola) (c. 1532 – 16 November 1625) was an Italian Renaissance painter born in Cremona. 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. Elizabeth of Valois, the queen of Philip II of Spain, was a keen amateur painter, and 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, 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 Palermo, and later Pisa and Genoa, where she continued to practice as a leading portrait painter, apparently with the support of her two husbands, living to the age of ninety-three.

Self-portraits and family members were her most frequent subjects, but, in her later life, she also painted religious themes, although many of her religious paintings have been lost. Anguissola became a wealthy patron of the arts after the weakening of her sight. In 1625, she died at age ninety-three in Palermo. Anguissola's 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), Bergamo, Brescia, Budapest, Madrid (Museo del Prado), Naples, Siena, and at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Art historian 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.