Portrait of Bianca Ponzoni Anguissola

Sofonisba Anguissola painted her mother, Bianca, in 1557. She was a nobleman's daughter, and that shaped what she could paint. Women were barred from the workshops and the study of anatomy that trained male artists for grand religious and mythological scenes, so she made portraits, above all of the people around her. She signed this one Virgo, the maiden, and dressed her mother in a pearl headdress and necklace that also appear in her famous picture of her sisters at a game of chess. That intimacy was itself something new in portraiture. Two years later her growing fame reached Spain, and King Philip the Second summoned her to Madrid to serve as a painter at his court.