Stanford art historian uncovers portrait linked to famed female Renaissance painter

This summer, the dream of finding a forgotten masterpiece in the attic became a reality for Renaissance scholar Emanuele Lugli, assistant professor of art history in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. What he found was a portrait that is likely by the most important female Renaissance painter, Sofonisba Anguissola, and it was in a storage area at the Art Museum of Ravenna in Italy. 

Emanuele Lugli. Photo by Harrison Truong for Stanford University

Lugli was researching Renaissance paintings featuring doctors and medical imagery for an upcoming Venice exhibit on Renaissance bodies. In the museum’s attic storage, he saw a 1550s painting described as a portrait of Socrates and attributed to a minor Roman painter. When he looked closely at the depiction of a bearded man holding a cup with a snake winding out of it, Lugli did a double take. 

The big bright eyes of the man depicted, the fine hatching on his face, the thicker paint emphasizing the volume of his lips, the composition, and, above all, his resemblance to Anguissola’s self-portrait—if the portrait wasn’t by Sofonisba Anguissola herself, Lugli thought, it could only be by her sister, Lucia, whom she taught to paint. 

Lugli followed his a-ha moment by consulting books, articles, museum curators, and other Renaissance art scholars. All pointed to the Anguissola sisters. Lugli’s case for new attribution for the piece was recently published in The Burlington Magazine, an art and art history journal. 

“While this is definitely an Anguissola painting, I wanted to be tentative as to whether it’s by Sofonisba or Lucia in part because the painting has not been restored, which could change the colors a little bit or reveal some new details,” Lugli said. “Unless you find a signature, everything is kind of an open process, and my goal at this point is to have someone restore the painting.”

Restoration of the painting would lead to more study. It would also likely result in the painting being displayed for the public, which the Ravenna Museum curator told Lugli has never been done. 

Following allegorical hints

Sofonisba Anguissola was arguably the most successful and influential female artist of the Renaissance. Praised by Michelangelo, she was for many years a painter in the Spanish court of Phillip II. She retired with a royal pension and painted and taught until she died in her nineties in 1625. 

Anguissola’s paintings play with feminist and allegorical references. A well-known portrait of three of her sisters playing chess shows one taking the king with her queen. Another shows her sister Minerva with a brooch featuring the Roman goddess of the same name, who represents wisdom. 

Such visual puns lead Lugli to several theories about who the newly discovered portrait depicts because of the inclusion of the cup with a snake. At the time of the painting’s creation, a cup with a snake symbolized medicine or poison and could also allude to John the Baptist, who is supposed to have survived drinking from a poisoned cup as a test of his faith. Only later would it become a visual trope in depictions of Socrates, who drank poison, Lugli said.

Lugli thinks the painting could depict an apothecary, a trade the Anguissola family briefly plied. Or it may use imagery linked to John the Baptist to suggest the subject’s name, as with the Minerva brooch. In Italian, Johnis Giovanni, and there was an Anguissola cousin with that name. 

The bearded man could even refer indirectly to Sofonisba herself. The painter shares her name with a Carthaginian queen represented in an eponymous 1524 tragedy by Italian writer Gian Giorgio Trissino that ends with the protagonist drinking poison to refuse to submit herself or her realm to the conquering Romans, according to Lugli. The play is understood to point to both political resistance and the strong will of its female protagonist.

“The man in the portrait could be a fictional character who is basically Sofonisba in drag,” Lugli said. “It’s in line with the kind of paintings Sofonisba and Lucia were making.”

Discovering female painters of the Renaissance 

Scholarship on female Renaissance painters—even those now considered as important as Sofonisba Anguissola—remains fraught, according to Lugli. The lack of certainty about which Anguissola sister painted the bearded man is, for him, evidence of the increasingly robust consideration of both painters.

“In the art history of women painters, we’re still paying the cost of decades or centuries of, basically, neglect,” Lugli explained. “Until very recently, we only had a handful of names of women painters in the Renaissance, so we tended to attribute all the paintings to them.” 

With increasing scholarship has come increased understanding of female artists’ travels, influences, and styles, and those complexities make attribution a more elaborate process. 

“One part of our jobs as art historians is to interpret and teach and make sure people appreciate the objects we have,” Lugli said. “But we also need to do this kind of sleuthing to increase the number of objects by finding lost pieces, trying to connect the dots, and spotlighting painters who have been neglected.”

In a forthcoming children’s book, Lugli will seek to expand appreciation for the first professional female Italian painter, Lavinia Fontana.