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Woman's Capacity to Create: The Unusual Case of Sofonisba Anguissola*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Fredrika H. Jacobs
Fredrika H. Jacobs*
Affiliation:
Virginia Commonwealth University
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Extract

Among the more than 160 uomitti valenti whose lives and works are included in the second edition of Giorgio Vasari's Le vite de’ più eccellentipittori, scultori et architettori, 1568, are several women: Properzia De’ Rossi (c. 1490-1530), Suor Plautilla Nelli (1532-1587/88), Lucrezia Quistelli, who was “taught by Alessandro Allori,” Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532-1625), and her sisters Lucia (c. 1540-c. 1565) and Europa (1542/43-78). Although De' Rossi was the only one of these women distinguished by her own vita, it was Sofonisba Anguissola who accrued the greatest amount of literary adulation during her lifetime (fig. 1). If contemporaneous sources are to be believed, this acclaim may be attributed to her excellence as a portrait painter.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , Spring 1994 , pp. 74 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1994

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Footnotes

*

Some of the material included in this article was part of a paper read at the National Conference of the Renaissance Society of America, Durham, North Carolina, March 1991. The present version profited greatly from suggestions made by the Colloquium of Women in the Renaissance, Washington, DC and by the two readers for the Renaissance Quarterly. Although one of those readers remains anonymous, the other, Mary Garrard, has continued to provide me with direction. It is to her, as reader, critic, and, most importantly, as an inspiring mentor-colleague that I dedicate this study.

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