Sofonisba Anguissola
Wonderful Female Painters
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Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625)
The Game of Chess (1555)
If we want to give a title to Sofonisba’s biography, it could be “The Feminist of the Renaissance.”
Sofonisba was a successful painter in her time, admired by her contemporaries and by great geniuses who would come later. The art historian of the time, Vasari, said of her paintings that “they seemed truly alive and only lacking in speech.” Her work stands out for the realistic expression of the faces in her portraits (reflection, doubts, emotions), what we call “psychological penetration.”
But beyond her virtuosity, Sofonisba is a true symbol of women earning their place in history and fighting for the rights of the entire gender.
We owe part of this to her father, Amilcar, a noble humanist. (Humanists believe human beings should have the freedom to shape their own lives.) He educated his daughters against the long tradition of women being confined to the home and destined only to raise children.
In the visual arts, the recognition of Anguissola blazed a trail for other women to follow. It opened the way for Lavinia Fontana, Barbara Longhi, Fede Galizia, and Artemisia Gentileschi, no less.
In this painting, we see Sofonisba’s sisters during a game of chess. It is not a theme chosen at random; it seems like a simple genre painting, but it has a strong symbolic content. It is an icon of the feminist current of the Renaissance, so related to this new humanism: chess represents knowledge, in this case conquered by women who have, once and for all, the right to learn, to think, and to have an opinion.
Recommended links:
Characteristic Elements of Renaissance Painting.
Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1654).
Lavinia Fontana and the “Maniera“.
The Four Greatest Painters of the Italian Renaissance.
Artistic Movements from Classical Antiquity to Rococo.
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