Sofonisba Anguissola: ‘Celebre’, ‘Forgotten’ or ‘Great’? The Main Problems in the Historiography of Creativity

Abstract

Every year the women’s art becomes more and more relevant issue: interest to the women’s art in common and to its individual representatives is growing. Sofonisba Anguissola, due to a lot of documentary evidences and a fairly large pictorial heritage, is an important figure for understanding the general problems of female creativity in the 16th century. In Russia, the artist is still little known, and information about her in works is mostly very general and often contains inaccuracies and errors, which determines the relevance of the study. The purpose of this article is to analyze the historiography of S. Anguissola’s work, which would allow to define the current state of affairs in the issue of understanding of the topic, as well as to identify problems and prospects related to the consideration of her art, which has been evaluated in different ways since its first mention in the literature. The 16th and 17th centuries biographers talked about her mostly in a rather high tone. Art connoisseurs, without detracting from her skills, noted that she adopted too much from other artists. With the rise of feminist art studies, the perspective of S. Anguissola’s work has changed towards greater appreciation. In modern literature there are scientific works that demonstrate new aspects and approaches to the study of the artist’s art, such as pedagogical view of her works, the degree of influence of various masters, her staying in Spain, the artistic specificity of self-portraits. Comprehensive study of the S. Anguissola’s art allows not only to identify the artistic features of her works, but also to consider the socio-cultural context in which she lived and worked. In the conditions of the development of modern art history, marked by a growing popularity of gender studies, the balanced approach to the artist biography and to her art is a necessary quality for a scientist to correctly understand her place in the history of art.