Old Woman Studying the Alphabet with a Laughing Girl

This is a drawing, black chalk heightened with white, and for its date it is unusual twice over. Sofonisba Anguissola was a woman making art at a level that would soon carry her to the Spanish court, and she was drawing an everyday scene of no grand subject, something very few Italian artists bothered with in the 1550s. An old woman bends over her letters, learning to read late in life, while a girl beside her laughs at the sight. Anguissola had a gift for these lively small moments. She was already known for a drawing of a boy howling after a crayfish bit his finger. The sheet is kept in the Uffizi's cabinet of drawings in Florence.