In 1559, the young noblewoman Sofonisba Anguissola (1532?–1625) travelled from her native Cremona to the court of Philip II of Spain, where she was appointed lady-in-waiting (dama della reina) to the monarch's new bride, Isabel of Valois. The Italian seems to have charmed the court from the first, dancing with Ferrante Gonzaga during the wedding celebrations. But it was Anguissola's skill as an artist that distinguished her amongst the Queen's ladies and upon which contemporaries consistently remarked (fig. 1.1). Indeed, by the time she arrived in Spain, Anguissola was already famed as a painter; her skill was appreciated by none other than Michelangelo. In addition to tutoring the young queen in painting, Anguissola produced portraits of the royal family during her fourteen-year tenure at the Habsburg court (fig. 1.2) that were distributed across Europe. She was also the only female artist Giorgio Vasari identified, in the second edition of his Lives (1568), as possessing the capacity for invenzione and capable of creating portraits that ‘seem truly alive’. Today Anguissola is, arguably, one of the best-known female artists of the Early Modern period and a relatively well-documented exemplar of a female artist at court. Even so, no official commission is known for the paintings she produced in Spain and she signed no paintings there, lacunae that pose significant difficulties to defining her mature oeuvre.

Thanks to the ground breaking work of the last four decades, Anguissola, along with a handful of women painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – the Flemish-born Caterina van Hemessen (1528?–aft. 1567) and the Italian Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–aft. 1654) among them – are now regularly included in introductory art history survey texts.