Here's Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist

An Unusual Portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola has gained new prominence from its illustration in color in a recent publication. In her Women, Art, and Society (1990), Whitney Chadwick claims of the portrait in question, Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola (fig. 1), that in presenting herself in the guise of a portrait being painted by her teacher, Anguissola produced “the first historical example of the woman artist consciously collapsing the subject-object position.” Chadwick's succinct observation opens up the possibility of understanding the painting in a new way, for she points to the peculiar conflation of subject and object that uniquely befell women artists in the Renaissance and complicates their art, especially their self-portraits. From this starting point, I will here explore the form of self-presentation offered by Anguissola in the Siena portrait and several other works in the context of what was a fundamental problem for the Renaissance female artist: the differentiation of herself as artist (the subject position) from her self as trope and theme for the male artist (the object position).