Sofonisba Anguissola

Anguissola grew up in Cremona, the daughter of a minor nobleman who had an unusual idea for the 1540s: that his daughters should be trained as painters, since as women they couldn't join a guild or take commissions for altarpieces anyway, and portraiture carried no such restriction. Sofonisba became good enough that when her father sent a drawing of hers to Michelangelo in Rome, the aging master wrote back with corrections and kept up an informal correspondence with her for years.

In 1559, Philip II of Spain invited her to Madrid, officially as a lady-in-waiting to his young queen, but really to paint the Spanish court. She spent about fourteen years there, becoming one of the very few women to hold a position as a court portraitist anywhere in Europe, before Philip arranged and funded her marriage to a Sicilian nobleman.

She lived to be over ninety, mostly in Palermo, and kept painting almost to the end. In 1624 the young Anthony van Dyck, already an established portraitist in his own right, visited her, sketched her, and later said he had learned more from that one conversation about painting than from anything else he'd seen in Italy. She was by then nearly blind.