Autoritratto

This little panel is barely the size of a hand, painted in 1554 by a woman in her early twenties from Cremona, at a time when almost no woman could train as a painter. Sofonisba Anguissola holds an open book and points to the line inked across it, which names her and calls her a maiden who made this herself. Shut out of the male world of large public commissions, she turned again and again to the one model always available, her own face, and built a career on it. Within a few years her fame reached Spain, and King Philip II called her to Madrid as a court painter and lady-in-waiting. Her father, sending an early portrait to a duke, once apologised that the hand looked a little off, since she had painted it while watching herself in a mirror.