La Sacra Famiglia con sant'Anna e san Giovanni Battista

By 1592 Sofonisba Anguissola was about 60 and living in Genoa, a long way from the Spanish court where she had spent more than a decade as lady-in-waiting and painter to Philip II's queen. Rome had since issued instructions on how sacred pictures ought to be made, most influentially Cardinal Paleotti's book of 1582, which asked them to teach ordinary people and move them to devotion rather than show off. What she painted is a family at night around a single candle. The child stands between his mother's knees holding his grandmother's hand, a dog waits in the shadows, Joseph is half out of the light, and the small John the Baptist looks out from behind a table. She had only taken up groups like this in the 1580s, and very little survives from these last working decades.