Anguissola sofonisba biography of williams

Biography

Italian portrait painter from Cremona, the first woman artist to achieve international renown. She was one of six painter sisters: (1) Sofonisba, (2) Lucia (c. 1542–c.

Sofonisba Anguissola: Biography Of This Renaissance Painter

1578), Europa (c. 1542–c. 1578), Elena (fl 1546–84), Minerva (fl 1558–69) and Anna-Maria (c. 1555–c. 1611).

Their humanist father gave the sisters extraordinary classical educations. He promoted them and their work shamelessly, sending Sofonisba's drawings to Michelangelo and eventually securing her service as lady-in-waiting to the queen of Spain, Elizabeth of Valois (1454-68), a position that gave her opportunities for painting formal court portraits that followed the norms for that type of imagery.

While in Spain she married the brother of the Viceroy of Sicily. Upon hes death she remarried and moved to Genoa and finally to Palermo in Sicily where she retired and was famously visited by Van Dyck in 1623, when she was in her nineties.

Sofonisba was the best known of the sisters, she was trained, wi