If you had six daughters in the 16th century, you had a problem. Dowries, after all, add up. The solution for Amilcare Anguissola — one of whose six daughters was the celebrated painter Sofonisba Anguissola — was to encourage them to develop and perfect their talents.
In this, he was following the advice of Baldassare Castiglione in his hugely influential “The Book of the Courtier” — a guide to standards of behavior and education for Renaissance men and women. Thus, five of his daughters took up painting. (The sixth became a writer and Latin scholar.) One died young. Two stopped painting after marrying. Another became a nun. Sofonisba, the eldest, helped to teach the others. She proved exceptional.
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Born into minor, impoverished nobility in Cremona, Italy, Sofonisba Anguissola (c.1532-1625) would end up as a lady-in-waiting to the queen of Spain, Elizabeth of Valois, and a painter in the powerful court of her husband, Phillip II. Her brilliance was recognized by Michelangelo and Giorgio Vasari, who mentions her in “The Lives of the Artists.” Anthony van Dyck paid homage to her in a portrait made before her death, at the impressive age of 93.
She had, in other words, a very successful career. But her depictions of herself and her family before her move to Spain are her most interesting works. This tiny self-portrait at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, painted around 1556, is one of at least a dozen self-portraits she made — more than anyone since Albrecht Dürer and the most until Rembrandt. It was painted in varnished watercolor on parchment.
Self-portraiture is an inherently beguiling genre. Artists must observe themselves in a mirror, capturing a moment that is necessarily fictional, since the viewer can never see the actual movements of the hand performing the creative act. This fictional aspect makes self-portraiture intrinsically playful, and Anguissola made much of this.
In one self-portrait, for instance, she showed her image on a portrait being painted by her teacher, Bernadino Campi. Confusing! Interestingly, her image is larger than the image of Campi.
This oval-shaped miniature is, by contrast, just over three inches tall. In it, Anguissola has allowed herself to be overshadowed by a medallion, which obscures nearly her entire body. Still, she remains very much present. The Latin inscription around the medallion’s border says, “The maiden Sofonisba Anguissola, depicted by her own hand, from a mirror, at Cremona.”
The mirror Anguissola used appears to have distorted her eyes, one of which seems unnaturally magnified. (The work was painted a quarter-century after Parmigianino’s celebrated “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” which it loosely resembles.) Modestly dressed in a manner conforming to Castiglione’s advice, she smiles wryly, as if inviting us to interpret a puzzle.
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One of Anguissola’s ancestors, according to family tradition, was the Byzantine warlord Galvano Sourdi. He helped to liberate Constantinople from the Saracens in the early 8th century using “Greek fire,” a recently developed weapon that sent flames across water. Sourdi’s family shield carried the sign of the asp, a venomous snake, which in Latin is “anguis.” So after victorious battles, his supporters were said to have cheered “Anguis sola fecit victoriam!,” meaning “The snake alone delivered victory!”
This led to his nickname, “Anguissola,” which the emperor eventually bestowed as a surname on his descendants. The Latin phrase became a family motto.
The art historian Patrizia Costa has suggested that the monogram on the shield in this self-portrait may contain, in coded form, this family motto — or it may simply signify Anguissola’s father, Amilcare. Either way, Anguissola clearly wanted to honor her family’s claims to prestige. She succeeded. But the picture’s small size, along with her wry smile, suggest that she did so in the spirit of Castiglione, with just the right amount of wit, brevity and nonchalance.
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