Timeless in expression | Visualia by Eric Bos, episode 1434

Here we look into the eyes of Sofonisba Anguissola. It is 1556, she is then 24 years old and she paints a portrait of the Madonna with her child. At the same time it is a self-portrait. Her artist’s gaze spans more than 4.5 centuries, which makes looking back and forth a sensation.

She looks in a mirror, with that at us, in the hall of the Rijksmuseum Twenthe where twenty paintings by her and her sisters hang. That doesn’t seem like much, but there are only 28 paintings by Vermeer in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Sofonisba knows how to inspire a complete exhibition with that few works.

In Sofonisba’s time, women had to be able to make music, paint and read, but Sofonisba Anguissola (ca. 1532-1625) was far superior to her equally talented sisters as a painter. In all self-portraits we see her dressed in decent black, the neckline of her dress trimmed with lace and white cords. She excelled in painting fabrics, you can almost grasp those cords.

Sofonisba was taken seriously as a painter during her life, her parents encouraged her in this, her father Amilcare promoted her. And look, she was praised by her contemporary, the famous art critic Vasari in his artist book.

Her work, as we see in the exhibition, is indeed very special. Her most successful paintings even have an enchanting effect, through a refined form of poetic realism. Such as the stiffly posed, but strikingly lively portraits of the Spanish infantas Catharina and Isabella, when Sofonisba was appointed painter and lady-in-waiting at the Spanish court. Or like the full-length portrait she painted of Elisabeth van Valois.

There are also less successful paintings from another period, but the good ones are really good. Not because Sofonisba was a successful woman, she definitely was, but simply because of her mentality as a person and skill as a painter. She did not paint portraits according to the prevailing standards, but very personally. They are 16th-century portraits, but at the same time they are timeless in expression.

An unusual example is the way in which she depicts some of her sisters during a game of chess in a large painting. The youngest is smiling broadly, because one of them has won. The informal fun splashes off. From everything you can conclude that Sofonisba was more focused on people than on prevailing rules. But also, because as a woman she was not allowed to study anatomy and modeling, she looked for her models among family and friends. As a result, many got something domestic, something spontaneous and familiar.

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