Autoportrait en miniature (Anguissola, Boston)

Sofonisba Anguissola painted this in Cremona around 1556, a few years before her skill carried her south to Madrid to serve as a lady-in-waiting and painting tutor at the Spanish court. It is barely three inches tall, done with the tip of the brush, and she shows herself holding a large medallion out toward us. Around its rim runs a line of Latin: the maiden Sofonisba Anguissola, painted by her own hand from a mirror, at Cremona, her way of insisting, in an age that rarely let a woman claim it, that the work was wholly hers. At the center sit interwoven letters no one has fully decoded, though many read in them the name of her father Amilcare, who pushed hard to have his daughters trained as painters.