Self-portrait at an Easel

In 1556 there were almost no women who could call themselves professional painters, and Sofonisba Anguissola painted this partly to insist that she was one. She shows herself at the easel, brush in one hand and a maulstick steadying the other, mid-stroke on a tender Madonna and Child. Every choice is deliberate. She is dressed in sober black, a virtuous noblewoman of Cremona, and the picture within the picture is a religious one, safely proper for a woman to make. Barred as a woman from workshop apprenticeships and from studying the nude, she had trained privately, through her family. Within a few years her reputation carried her all the way to Madrid, to serve as a lady and painter at the court of Philip II of Spain.