Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532 – 16 November 1625), also known as Sophonisba Angussola or Sophonisba Anguisciola, was an Italian Renaissance painter born in Cremona to a relatively poor noble family. She customary a well-rounded education that included the fine arts, and her apprenticeship in imitation of local painters set a precedent for women to be well-liked as students of art. As a teenager woman, Anguissola traveled to Rome where she was introduced to Michelangelo, who snappishly recognized her talent, and to Milan, where she painted the Duke of Alba. The Spanish queen, Elizabeth of Valois, was a fervent amateur painter and in 1559 Anguissola was recruited to ensue Madrid as her tutor, with the rank of lady-in-waiting. She highly developed became an ascribed court painter to the king, Philip II, and adapted her style to the more formal requirements of endorsed portraits for the Spanish court. After the queen’s death, Philip helped arrange an aristocratic marriage for her. She moved to Sicily, and innovative Pisa and Genoa, where she continued to practice as a leading portrait painter.
Her most distinctive and handsome paintings are her portraits of herself and her family, which she painted back she moved to the Spanish court. In particular, her depictions of kids were lighthearted and next to observed. At the Spanish court she painted formal make a clean breast portraits in the prevailing approved style, as one of the first, and most successful, of the relatively few female court painters. Later in her energy she next painted religious subjects, although many of her religious paintings have been lost. In 1625, she died at age 93 in Palermo.
Anguissola’s example, as much as her oeuvre, had a lasting influence upon subsequent generations of artists, and her good success opened the showing off for larger numbers of women to pursue invincible careers as artists. Her paintings can be seen at galleries in Boston (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), Milwaukee (Milwaukee Art Museum), Bergamo, Brescia, Budapest, Madrid (Museo del Prado), Naples, and Siena, and at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
Her contemporary Giorgio Vasari wrote that Anguissola “has shown greater application and augmented grace than any other girl of our age in her deeds at drawing; she has so succeeded not and no-one else in drawing, coloring and painting from nature, and copying estimably from others, but by herself has created rare and extremely beautiful paintings.”
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