Sofonisba Anguissola, "the First Great Woman Artist of the Renaissance"

Sofonisba Anguissola (died 16 November 1625)

Born in Cremona, Italy, probably about 1532, Sofonisba Anguissola was the eldest of seven children--six of them daughters--born to Amilcare Anguissola and his wife, Bianca Ponzone, both of whom were members of noble families.

Sofonisba Anguissola, self-portrait,
1552

Amilcare made sure that his daughters received an excellent humanist education, but he also recognized his daughters' creative gifts. Unusual for the period, when women artists followed their fathers or brothers into the studio, Sofonisba and her sister Elena were apprenticed to a local painter, Bernardino Campi, in 1546. As Germaine Greer writes, when he sent his daughters to study painting, Amilcare Anguissola "was setting an extraordinary precedent." 

While Sofonisba may have been recognized as a "prodigy," Greer notes that her father may also have had other motives in providing his daughter with training as a painter: he had six daughters for whom he would have to provide dowries. His son did not study painting, but his daughters "were encouraged to develop as many accomplishments as they could," including painting. The arrangement with Campi was not a usual apprenticeship, since he had no other students and the two Anguissola "apprentices" were "treated as paying guests in the household." 

In any case, as Greer concludes, the investment in Sofonisba Anguissola "was a wise one." She was not only able to earn a good living, but she also was able to teach her younger sisters, or at least three of them, to paint.* And after three years with Campi, Sofonisba continued her training with another Cremonese, Bernardino Galli. 

In 1552, Sofonisba traveled to Rome, where she was introduced to Michelangelo. Encouraged by Michelangelo, she was also informally advised by him--he sent her sketches to draw and offered his critiques and advice.

As a woman, Anguissola could not study anatomy or draw from life; instead, she focused on portraits which, as Greer clarifies, were deemed appropriate for women because "portrait painting did not imply any unbecoming breadth of experience." By 1558, she had gained enough of a reputation that she was in Milan to paint the duke of Alba--he, in turn, recommended her to Philip II of Spain. In 1559, Anguissola traveled to Madrid. She spent nearly twenty years as court painter and lady-in-waiting.

Anguissola's portrait of
Elisabeth of Valois, queen of Spain

There she also taught the Spanish king's third wife, Elisabeth of Valois, who was an amateur painter. Among the portraits Anguissola painted was one of the king's sister and regent, Joanna of Castile, whom we have already met. And she would also tutor Elisabeth of Valois' daughter, Isabel Clara Eugenia, who would be yet another Habsburg women to serve her family as regent.

After the death of Elisabeth of Valois, Philip II married for a fourth time, and Anguissola also painted a portrait of the new queen, Anne of Austria. (The 1734 fire in the royal palace destroyed most of Anguissola's paintings from her period in Madrid as a court painter.)

About 1573 (dates vary), Philip II provided Anguissola with both a dowry and a husband, marrying her to a Sicilian nobleman, Fabrizio de Moncada. (Although she was in her fifties, as an unmarried woman, Anguissola would have been a ward of the king, and marrying would have allowed her to "escape" that "filial role," as Greer indicates, though she would then have been a ward of her husband.)

Sources disagree about whether she relocated to Sicily or whether she remained in Madrid. In any case, after Moncada's death in 1579, she remarried in 1580, this time not to a husband of someone else's choice, but to a man she chose for herself, Orazio Lomellino, a Genoese nobleman. From 1584 until about 1616 or 1620, she lived in Genoa.

Anguissola's portrait of
Joanna of Castile

By 1624 the couple was in Palermo, where, on 12 July, Anguissola was visited by the Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck. He sketched a portrait of her (he thought she was ninety-six years old at the time [she was likely about ninety-two]), and believed that she was nearly blind (she suffered from cataracts). 

The entry on Sofonisba Anguissola in the National Museum of Women in the Arts Database notes that she is "arguably the first known woman artist to achieve international fame." (On this article, see update, below.)

Ilya Sandra Perlingieri's beautiful Sofonisba Anguissola: The First Great Woman Artist of the Renaissance is out of print, but you can still find used copies. I have used Germaine Greer's The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work here (and elsewhere, when talking about women artists). 

*Elena Anguissola ended her painting career, begun with her sister when the two apprenticed with Campi, when she became a nun. In addition to Sofonisba and Elena, Lucia, Europa, and Anna Maria also became painters--only Minerva did not. Europa and Anna Maria married and gave up painting. Lucia, born in 1536 or 1538, died before 1568. An early biographer thought that, had she lived, Lucia Anguissola would have become a better artist than Sofonisba.

Update (November 2019): Sadly, as of November 2019, a profile of Sofonisba Anguissola is no longer to be found in the NMWA database. I have nonetheless left in the quotation because I thought it an important assessment of Anguissola's reputation. An archived version of the NMWA profile is--at least temporarily--available here.)

Update, 16 December 2019: The Prado Museum (Madrid) is now hosting a special exhibition, "A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana" (through 2 February 2020). According to the museum's website, the exhibition has put together "a total of 65 works," including some fifty-six paintings, the art coming from "more than" a score of European and American connections: "the Museo del Prado is presenting a survey of the careers of these two painters, who achieved fame and renown among their contemporaries but whose artistic personalities became obscured over time."

In her splendid review of the exhibition for the New York Times, Deborah Solomon praises the show and the art, but adds, "The Prado show, which was curated by Leticia Ruiz Gómez, takes the form of a double feature, pairing two artists who flourished in the same era, in the same area of northern Italy, but who probably never met. Their works are made to mingle in the galleries in a pas-de-deux. But is this approach appropriate? It is hard to imagine that male artists would have to share the galleries quite this way, and you wonder if the curators at the Prado think that women need to team up to better confront the patriarchy."

Indeed.

Isabel of Portugal: Duchess of Burgundy, Queen of Italy, Naples, the Germans, and Spain, Empress of the Holy Roman Empire

Isabel of Portugal, regent of Spain (born 24 October 1503)

Isabel of Portugal was the daughter of Manuel I of Portugal and his second queen, Maria of Aragon, who was the daughter of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. 

Isabel of Portugal in 1526,
at the time of her marriage

(Interestingly, Maria was the second of Isabella and Ferdinand's daughters to marry Manuel--Maria's elder sister, Isabel, had been married, first, to Afonso of Portugal, but after his untimely death just a year after their marriage, the young widow was married, much against her wishes, to Manuel, who was Afonso's uncle. And, by the way, after Maria of Aragon's death,  Manuel married his niece, Eleanor of Austria . . . So, yay for traditional marriage, I guess.)

Named after both her grandmother and her aunt, Isabel of Portugal was married to her cousin, the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, in 1526. (According to the terms of the marriage arrangement, Isabel's brother, John III of Portugal, married Charles's sister, Catherine of Spain, a woman whom we have met before.)

Through her marriage, Isabel gained a number of titles, some of them indicated in the heading of this post. She was the Holy Roman empress, the queen of the Germans, the queen of Italy, the queen of Spain, the queen of Naples and Sicily, and duchess of Burgundy. But she also gained another title: regent of Spain.

Charles recognized the importance of marrying a woman with the ability to govern. In a letter to his brother, he noted that marrying Isabel of Portugal was "the only sure way of securing stability in the Spanish kingdoms in his absence." 

When Charles was forced to leave Spain for the empire, he appointed his wife as his regent, a role she fulfilled admirably. The Cortes recognized her position on 27 July 1527; she served as regent from 1529 until 1532.  She was personally involved, as well, in the education of her two children, Philip, born in May 1527, and Mary, born in 1528. Charles returned to Spain in April 1533, and when he left again in April 1535, Isabel was regent once more. 

But after Isabel's early death in 1539, at the age of thirty-six (she died after giving birth to a child, her sixth, a stillbirth), Charles had difficulty in finding a suitable replacement for her. Historian Andrew Wheatcroft describes the emperor as "hamstrung" because he "could find no one to replace her effectively." He would not "countenance the appointment of any of his male kin whom he judged inadequate to the role," nor any female "unless she was married, widowed, or old enough to be widowed."

A portrait by Titan, from 1548,
after Isabel's death

Ultimately Isabel's eldest son, Philip II, was old enough to act his father's behalf; Charles appointed him to act as his representative in Spain in 1543. 

In the same year, Philip married his first cousin Maria Manuela of Portugal, the eldest daughter of John III of Portugal (Philip's maternal uncle) and Catherine of Spain (his paternal aunt). By 1545, Maria had given birth to a son and heir, Carlos, and had died. In 1554, when Philip left Spain for his second marriage, this one to Mary Tudor, queen of England, he turned to his sister Joanna of Castile to act as regent of Spain in his place.

There is no biography of Isabel of Portugal. You can find references to her in biographies of Charles V and of her son, Philip, but I like Andrew Wheatcroft's The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire, quoted here, because he focuses quite deliberately on the Habsburg strategy of using female family members as regents. 

Joanna of Castile, Regent of Spain

Joanna of Castile, queen of Portugal and regent of Spain (died 7 September 1573)

Born in Madrid on 24 June 1535, Joanna of Castile, archduchess of Austria, was the daughter of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and his wife, Isabel of Portugal. Joanna was named in honor of her paternal grandmother, Juana of Castile, a woman whom we have met before on numerous occasions, and about whom I will post later in the year. (In order to distinguish between the elder and younger women, I've referred to this Juana, the younger woman born in 1535, as "Joanna.")

Joanna of Castile,
painted by Sofonisba Anguissola

After the death of their mother, Isabel, in 1539, Joanna and her siblings were placed under the guardianship of one of their mother's principal attendants, the Portuguese noblewoman Leonor de Mascarenhas.

Although there were many tutors for their brother Philip, Joanna and her sister Maria were educated by Leonor, who made sure to teach them Portuguese, which would prove to be very important for Joanna. (Leonor was so capable she would later be entrusted by Philip with his own children's care and instruction.) 

On 11 June 1552, a seventeen-year-old Joanna was married to her fifteen-year-old first cousin, João Manuel, prince of Portugal (we have already encountered his mother, Catherine of Spain, who was the sister of Joanna's father, Charles, both children of Juana of Castile--got that?).

The marriage was short-lived, however, because João died on 2 January 1554. Joanna was pregnant at the time, and three weeks later, on 20 January she gave birth to João's son, Sebastian, who would one day before King Sebastian I of Portugal. 

But Joanna would not remain in Portugal. Soon after her son's birth, Joanna's brother Philip, then acting as regent of Spain for his father, the Emperor Charles V, needed Joanna in Spain--Philip had just married Mary Tudor, queen of England. He turned to his sister to act as regent of Spain in his place. And so the widowed Joanna, "discreet" and "religious," left behind her infant son to be raised by his grandmother Catherine, regent of Portugal. On her way home from Portugal, before assuming her role as regent, she visited her grandmother Juana of Castile--the actual queen of Spain--in Tordesillas.

As Joanna traveled to Spain and Philip prepared to leave, their father wrote to Philip about Joanna's role as regent. The emperor agreed with his son about his proposals for the government of Spain in his absence, calling them "very prudent": 

I also agree with your choice of the Princess [Joanna], my daughter, so I am sending you the powers signed and suppose you will already have sent for her to come from Portugal. Above all, let me urge you to see to it that the counsellors who are to surround her be dispassionate men of character and authority. Lay down rules for their guidance in case of conflicts, and try to limit the sphere of each one as far as it is possible without hindering them in the exercise of their offices.

As regent, the widowed Joanna would need "some woman of position and exemplary character to be near her," Charles advised, but he cautioned that his son should "specify the number of ladies she may have, so that they [presumably courtiers or advisers] may not always be importuning her to accept more." Charles thought that Joanna had lived lavishly in Portugal and he emphasized that that Philip should make sure her household was "of reasonable size," for the money needed to keep her in the state she enjoyed in Portugal would be "altogether too much."

Joanna of Castile, regent of Spain

As Philip's recent biographer, Henry Kamen, notes, Joanna of Castile "chose to spend the rest of her life in the service of the crown." Although there is no biography of Joanna, a few details of her regency can be gleaned from those of Queen Juana of Castile and of Philip II.

In 1555, for example, when Juana of Castile had become gravely ill, Joanna wrote of her "great sorrow" at hearing the news and wrote to ask Philip for permission to leave Madrid so that she could go to Tordesillas "to cure and to serve" her grandmother. 

After Juana of Castile's death, Joanna oversaw the dispersal of the queen's household, but she kept many of Juana's possessions for herself. Although her brother regarded them as "trinkets and things of little value," Joanna clearly regarded Juana's rosaries, devotional books, religious images, and portraits of Isabella of Castile (Juana's mother) and Catherine of Aragon (Juana's sister), as important items worth cherishing for their family connections. She also arranged for memorials to her grandmother, to be held throughout Spain.

In 1558, Joanna of Castile received advice from her father, Charles, shortly before his death. Although he had abdicated his title of Holy Roman Emperor in 1556 and retired to a monastery in Spain, his retirement did not keep him from writing to Joanna and warning her to "take a hard line against the Lutheran cells" in Castile. 

In 1559, "in letter after letter," her brother Philip pleaded with her for more money for his on-going wars: "The lack of money is so great that I don't know what to say," he wrote, continuing, "I am in worse straits tha[n] you could possibly imagine."

 "You need to find money from there," she replied to him at one point, "because here all is consumed and spent." Later in that year Joanna and her council "sanctioned an ill-fated military expedition into North Africa."

In the same year she was again faced with "alarming" news about Lutherans in Valladolid. Philip urged her to monitor the situation with "all care and diligence," while her father urged her to take measures against the "heretics."

Joanna issued a strict censorship order, had a new Index prepared, increased the activity of the Inquisition, and, at a series of autos da fé, several heretics were executed.

In December of 1559 Philip returned to Spain, preparing for his third marriage, this one to Elizabeth of Valois. Joanna was called upon to arrange for the new queen's reception. She was also entrusted with the guardianship of Don Juan, her father Charles V's illegitimate son, who had been born in 1547. After Philip's return to Spain, Juana's regency ended.

A plaque on the Convent of Our Lady of Consolation
noting its foundation by Joanna

Aside from her role as regent of Spain, Joanna was deeply involved in religion and with a number of religious foundations.

Like her guardian Leonor de Mascarenhas, Joanna founded a convent for the Franciscan order of Poor Clares in 1559, the Convent of Our Lady of Consolation (Nuestra Señora de la Consolación). 

And, again like Leonor de Mascarenhas, Joanna of Castile was a supporter of the newly established Jesuit order. Joanna repeatedly intervened on behalf of the Jesuits, and she was a friend of its founder, Ignatius of Loyola.

She conducted a correspondence with her confessor, Francisco de Borja and Ignatius using the pseudonym Mateo Sánchez, perhaps even requesting that she be admitted into the order under this name. 

The Convent of Our Lady of Consolation, Madrid
now known as the
as the Convent of Las Descalzas Reales

After her regency ended in 1559, Joanna retired to the convent she had founded. In 1569, Joanna and Leonor de Mascarenhas welcomed the mystic, writer, and theologian Teresa of Ávila when she visited Madrid.

Juana died in the Convent of Our Lady of Consolation, now known as the Convent of Las Descalzas Reales, on 7 September 1573; she was just thirty-eight years old. In 1582, when Joanna's sister, Maria, the Holy Roman Empress, returned to Spain (where she had also been a regent, from 1548 to 1551), she and her daughter, Margaret, would take up residence in this convent. 

About Joanna of Castile, Kamen concludes:

The princess [Joanna], always relegated to the background by historians because she abstained from any political role after her short regency in 1554-9, was the effective centre of Philip's family circle. When Philip returned to Spain in 1559 she bought a group of houses in the middle of Madrid . . . [which] became her home and retreat. All her energies were dedicated to helping her brother. Philip in his turn lavished affection on her. She was the inseparable companion of queens Elizabeth [of Valois] and Anne [of Austria, Philip's fourth wife]. In 1572 she fell seriously ill, and never recovered. Her early death, in September 1573 at the age of thirty-eight, was a severe blow to the king, who had leaned on her for advice and affection. Philip was at her bedside when she died.

There is, unfortunately, no biography of Joanna of Castile. Her story can be put together only in bits and pieces. I have used Andrew Wheatcroft's The Habsburgs,  Henry Kamen's Phillip of Spain, and Bethany Aram's Juana the Mad: Sovereignty & Dynasty in Renaissance Europe.

Update, 7 September 2025: I just discovered a 2021 publication focusing on our Joanna, a collection of essays edited by art historian Noelia García Pérez, The Making of Juana of Austria: Gender, Art, and Patronage in Early Modern Iberia (click here).