Sofonisba Anguissola – Portrait of a Canon Regular of the Lateran

Portrait of a Thirty-five-year-old Canon Regular of the Lateran

1546-1550 circa

Oil on panel, 18.8 x 14.8 cm

Inscribed on the back of the panel: Anno natiuitatis sue [sic.] XXXV”; lower down in ink with a different calligraphy: “Characa”

This charming panel painting, radiant in colour scheme and in excellent condition, portrays a young Canon Regular of the Lateran, showing incipient balding, sitting comfortably in an armchair with a red velvet back and brass studs, holding a prayer book in his right hand, in the simple but sumptuous setting of a study. Behind him to the left, the room is lit up with a wide view of a fantastical Flemish style landscape, playing on varied blues to highlight a river crossed by a white bridge, a building in the distance that looks like a castle, and closed to the right by the usual bright, full folds of an elegant green curtain.
On the back of the panel is the inscription «Anno natiuitatis sue [sic] XXXV» and lower down, in different writing and ink «Characa», clearly referring to Giovanni Caracca, the Italianized name of the painter Jan Kraeck, originally from Haarlem, who worked for the Dukes of Savoy, Emmanuel Philibert and Charles Emmanuel I from 1568 to 1607. The painting’s clear style does not however correspond to that readily recognisable as the Fleming’s: so I wonder if the inscription in fact relates to an old reference in a Piedmontese collection – or, in any case, Savoyard – and would tend to credit the work to an artist working in that specific area and well known for portraiture.
Returning to the painting itself. That the sitter is a Canon Regular of the Lateran is revealed by his dazzling white cassock, as if freshly laundered, with a white linen rocchetto (from whence their popular name of old, “Rocchettini”) falling to a few inches below the knee; however, for this private, non official portrait, and arguably due to the oppressive summer heat, he is not wearing the typical black cloak with a small matching hood, open from the chest downwards.
The portrait is a jewel from the early production of the Cremonese painter Sofonisba Anguissola. Indeed, I would suggest an adolescent work, given family norms. For example, a few years ago a small, signed canvas of the Annunciation, from a private collection, was added to the catalogue of her younger sister Europa Anguissola. It derived from the fresco by Bernardino Gatti known as Sojaro in the drum of the Church of Santa Maria di Campagna in Piacenza, with an inscription stating that it was her first work, made at the age of thirteen as a gift for another younger sister, Minerva. In my opinion our painting is one of the works that, well documented among the biographical events of Sofonisba’s youth, her father Amilcare had his daughter paint so that he could then present it – exercising well-aimed, exclusive choice – to a figure of influence from their city or elsewhere. Indeed, the shrewd Amilcare Anguissola wove a thick network of relations with the major courts of the Po valley to promote the artistic talents of his oldest daughter, sometimes by sending self-portraits and small easel paintings, both sacred and profane. It was also a policy with another precise objective: that of finding husbands for the family gynaeceum; he complained on many occasions of the impossibility of providing his daughters with adequate dowries: Amilcare’s income was certainly not large but there is also no doubt he played a game of lowering the bar in order to avoid lavishing large sums.
Amilcare writes and presents small paintings, writes and presents small paintings, writes and presents small paintings with an incessant arrogance, equal only to his petulance: states the daughter to La Paleologa in Mantua. He presents small pictures to Ercole Gonzaga; writes to Ercole II d’Este to announce the gift of a small painting; writes several times to Michelangelo (to Michelangelo!); promises a small picture to Annibal Caro on three occasions, gives it to him, then after a while asks for it back: which the poet does not appreciate. Not to speak of the shenanigans involved in sending Sofonisba to the court of Madrid, with personal letters to Philip II. Later, in Cremona in 1566, with his daughter already in Spain, he would entertain Giorgio Vasari at home, who writes in a letter to Vincenzo Borghini da San Benedetto in Polirone of «the wonders of Sofonisba».

On the first of February 1556 we learn of a sojourn Sofonisba made in Mantua through the letters of her ineffable father Amilcare, who thanks Margherita Paleologa «for the highly virtuous demonstrations worthy of the most honoured princesses by your most excellent ladyship continually shown to sisters Minerva and Sophonisba, your passionate servants and my daughters.» While on 12 March of the next year he presents la Paleologa with a «small painting done by Sophonisba» and begins the insistent process of promoting the next daughter, Europa.
The unstoppable paternal activity would bear fruit, for in 1559 he managed to have Sofonisba chosen as lady in waiting and painting teacher for Elisabeth of Valois (1546–1568), third wife of Philip II of Spain. The father’s letters addressed to the courts of Gonzaga, Este and Farnese to accompany the small portraits (not forgetting that in 1556 Amilcare wrote to the Duke of Ferrara, Ercole II dʼEste, mentioning two self-portraits by his daughter that he had given him “many years” before) attest to great ability when it came to “noble procuring” to build his daughter’s public image of being a «virtuous and rare young woman» in possession of a good and complete education, able to read, write and play music, besides painting; so much so as to interest Francesco Salviati who would ask news of her in his correspondence from Rome with Bernardino Campi (1554), praising the latter for being master of the: «beautiful Cremonese artist you made» and passing on the news that already at that time, circulating in Rome, were her «works of art, that all here marvel at», as stated by Bernardino’s biographer, Alessandro Lamo. Going back a few years, it is interesting to note that Amilcare had rapid success, and, as regards this study, not least among his main interlocutors are Lateran canons, having the most important roles in the congregation. Already by 1550, when Sofonisba was eighteen, the humanist Bishop of Alba, Cremona Lateran, Marco Girolamo Vida was warmly praising her merits: inter egregios pictores nostri temporis merito connumerari potest.
My daughter Beatrice then found a letter from Ercole Gonzaga dated 1552, in which the cardinal, regent of the duchy of Mantua, bishop of the city and “protector” of the Lateran canons, thanks Colombino Rapari, Abbot of San Pietro al Po in Cremona and several times Rector General of the above canons, for the gift of a painting:
Reverend father, I don’t know whether I got more pleasure from the painting by our virtuous and rare young woman, sent by you her father, the singularity of the master, the happiness of the smile so well expressed, or the affection and good will of the sender, but I do know that the painting is very dear to me for all these reasons and I send the heartfelt thanks I owe to you, with the desire to show such thanks in deeds, memory and gratitude for this pleasure she has given me […].
To some extent Colombino Rapari became Sofonisba’s mentor, as she seemed to have access to the great Cremonese monastery and to maintain relations with members of the Order. Indeed known are at least three portraits from the period preceding her departure for the Spanish court portraying as many Lateran canons: the first is a possible Portrait of Colombino Rapari himself, signed by Sofonisba in 1552, with important implications for the heretical situation at Cremona, known of exclusively from two photographic reproductions at the Frick Reference Library, whose most recent appearance was registered in an auction at The Anderson Galleries of New York on 28 February 1925, lot 67. Signed and dated 1552, with a somewhat shaky transcription, «Sophanisba Angussola / Virgo F. / M.D.L.II.» lost to American antique collecting and only recently come to light, after various events, in studies dedicated to Sofonisba.
We know of portraits of two other canons: the famous one, dated 1556, at the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo in Brescia (inv. 137), several times mistakenly identified as Ippolito Chizzola, and the other, found more recently in a private collection after several passages of ownership in the antique market, also identified as Chizzola.
It seems curious that all three paintings by Sofonisba Anguissola of Lateran canons have been identified as Ippolito Chizzola, the preacher from Brescia, because in 1620 Ottavio Rossi stated that the painter drew the Brescian portrait of Chizzola «as he was preaching, some say in Cremona, some in Genoa»; but there are no characteristics in the sitter to support such a hypothesis. None of the three paintings portrays a canon as he is preaching and the most obvious suggestion that appears to me – besides the attempt to individuate Colombino Rapari in the canvas lost in New York – is to imagine the sitters of the two other canon portraits from among those listed in the 1550s in documents relative to meetings at the Monastery of San Pietro al Po; as the painter might have been commissioned to paint the likenesses of the principal Canons Regular of the Lateran in Cremona. Nonetheless, the latter painting, previously at the Dorotheum, now in private hands, is a fundamental element in the study of the panel under examination, because the subject is the same man, although slightly older, as the one seen sitting in the centre of our gorgeous, little painting.
I would like to suggest emphatically that the panel is the first work carried out by Sofonisba Anguissola, when little more than a child, in a place where, thanks to paternal plotting and the good offices of Abbott Colombino Rapari, she had a rich source of human material on which to exercise her precocious passion for portraiture. Unlike her younger sister Europa, who at the age of thirteen copied a famous work of art by her teacher, Bernardino Gatti, Sofonisba is precociously attracted to faces, and also unwittingly, to physiognomy, the study of the various facial expressions made by people and their position in space: it had to be painted from life. My impression, simply put, is that the portrait was made while Sofonisba was studying the arts, literature and painting with her sisters, under the guidance of Bernardino Campi, between 1546 and 1549, before he moved to Milan, where he would become the pupil of governors Alfonso d’Avalos, Marchese del Vasto, and Ferrante Gonzaga, Count Guastalla and Prince of Molfetta, and the favourite of the pro-Spain aristocracy; then of Bernardino Gatti known as Sojaro, educated in Parma at the school of Correggio. In my opinion, the years between fourteen and eighteen clearly explain the inevitable little uncertainties and slight grammatical errors that with time would disappear thanks to her rigorous commitment (with a father like Amilcare behind her…), tenacious, daily application and the acquisition of ever more solid and mature personal means of expression. All the same, the two Bernardinis are not the only models to which the painter adapted in her years of training: her vision is more open and permeable with respect to the main offerings of the Lombard “little Antwerp” (to use Roberto Longhi’s famous definition). Camillo Boccaccino and Antonio Campi, for example, made a small canvas (83.5 x 68.7 cm) in a private collection portraying the Madonna and Child, St. John, St. Elisabeth and Two Angels Holding up the Curtain and, silhouetted in the background, St. Joseph, in which one can grasp the scope of these two masters in the 1540s. I won’t describe the painting, instead referring the reader to a study I made of it some years ago, but worthy of note, in comparison with our thirty-five-year-old canon, is the rendering of the green curtain, much like that in the background of this small canvas and drawing inspiration from that in which the angels are tangled in the Piperari altarpiece signed by Antonio Campi in 1546, now in Sant’Ilario at Cremona.
If the first painting signed and dated by Sofonisba is the Portrait of a Nun in Southampton (City Art Gallery, inv. 1979/14) – which according to tradition portrayed her sister Elena, who had taken holy orders with the name of Sister Minerva at the Dominicans of San Vincenzo in Mantua – that dates back to 1551, there is absolutely no guarantee there aren’t other anepigraphic and undated works preceding the young nun at Southampton. I am thinking particularly of the small format works her father presented to chosen notables who might have been able to help him promote his elder daughter socially. In fact I’d go further, confirming that the paintings that begin to establish her hard-won early maturity date from the mid 1550s, with the Game of Chess at the Muzeum Narodowe of Poznań (inv. MNP FR 434) and the Portrait of a Dominican Astronomer, previously part of the Gino Calligaris Collection at Terzo d’Aquileia, both from 1555, and in 1556, with the abovementioned Portrait of a Canon Regular of the Lateran from Brescia, the delightful small tondo with the Self-Portrait of the Fondazione Custodia (Lugt Collection), in Paris (inv. 6607); and the Portrait of a Lady at the Galleria Borghese (inv. 118).
The works that follow closely on the young nun of Southampton, which is to say the presumed Colombino Rapari of unknown whereabouts and the Self-Portrait at the Uffizi (inv. 1890, n. 1824), both from 1552, but going as far as 1554 and the Self-Portrait at Vienna (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, inv. GG 285) – to which might apply the definition Roberto Longhi gave for another painting referred to Sofonisba portraying Three Children, in the collection of Lord Methuen at Corsham Court, in Wiltshire: «Here too a moving record of three young provincial aristocrats. Three melancholy little beasties, rodents dressed in silk and serge of vivid stripes that throw a soft shadow on the beige wall behind» –some more some less, all these works show clumsiness and uncertainty of different sorts that would soon be surpassed after the dividing line of the Game of Chess at Poznań.
Apologies for this excursus, but I consider it important to provide precise chronological and formal data points in order to place our small portrait, and in such a special case it is worth explaining the timing and manner of stylistic evolution of the painter, that give reason for possible stumbling blocks but also for that joyous freshness of touch that often only adolescence grants. At this point we start the game of stylistic comparisons with works from Sofonisba’s Cremonese period before the departure for Spain; at least for the time being, those she made for her father to present as gifts to the high profile individuals of the moment are lost, although they would have provided a crucial frame of reference to reconstruct an itinerary “without works”: so we have to content ourselves with what there is. The signed and dated paintings go from 1551 to 1559; here is the full list:
 1551 – Portrait of a Nun (Elena Anguissola?) Southampton, City Art Gallery, inv. 1979/14
 1552 – Portrait of a Canon Regular of the Lateran (Colombino Rapari), whereabouts unknown
 155[2] – Self-Portrait – Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, inv. 1890, n. 1824
 1554 – Self-Portrait, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, inv. GG 285
 1555 – Game of Chess, Poznań, Muzeum Narodowe, inv. MNP FR 434
 155[5] – Portrait of a Dominican Astronomer, (previously) Terzo d’Aquileia, Gino Callegaris Collection
 1556 – Portrait of a Canon Regular of the Lateran, Brescia, Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, inv. 137
 1556 – Self-Portrait, Paris, Fondazione Custodia (Lugt Collection), inv. 6607
 1556 – Portrait of a Lady, Rome, Galleria Borghese, inv. 118
 1557 – Portrait of a Lady (Bianca Ponzoni Anguissola?), Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, inv. GG3352_061
 1558 – Self-Portrait, Rome, Palazzo Colonna, inv. 268
 1560 – Portrait of an Old Gentleman, Stamford, Burghley House, inv. PIC323
 1561 – Self-Portrait, Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera, Reg. Cron. 1309
For eminently stylistic reasons the 1550s guaranteed group can reasonably be supplemented by the following works, lacking chronological indications but datable based on the likelihood of their formal data:
 Self-Portrait – Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, inv. 60.155
 Self-Portrait – Milan, Museo Poldi Pezzoli, inv. 322/634
 Self-Portrait at the Easel – Łańcut, Museum Zaner, inv. S.916.m
 Self-Portrait at the Clavichord – Naples, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, inv. Q 1930 n. 358
 Family Portrait (Minerva, Amilcare and Asdrubale Anguissola) – Nivå, Nivaagards Malereisamling, inv. 0001NMK
 Portrait of Archimede Anguissola – (previously) Cremona, private collection
 Portrait of Lucia at the Clavichord with a Woman in the Background – Althorp, Spencer Collection, inv. P39
 Portrait of Massimiliano Stampa (after Bernardino Campi) – private collection, (previously) Richmond, Cook Collection
 Portrait of Giulio Clovio – (previously) Mentana, Federico Zeri Collection
 Portrait of the Poet Giovanni Battista Caselli, Madrid, Museo del Prado, inv. P-8110
 Portrait of Canon Regular of the Lateran – private collection
 Portrait of Pius IV – private collection
 Portrait of a Young Lady – Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, inv. 1890, n. 4047
The first painting to mention, obviously, is the Canon of the Lateran that in relatively recent years appeared on the Viennese art market, and as mentioned above, identified with no decisive evidence as Ippolito Chizzola, like the Canon from Brescia. We are not able, at least for now, to establish his anagraphical identity, but what is certain is that it is the same person portrayed on our small panel. The facial features are indeed the same: the face has got a little thinner and has lost the aspect of youth, the pallor has increased, taking the place of the redness in the cheeks, and the eyes have become narrower, probing and jaded. So much for the sitter; as regards style we need to put his face in sequence with that of the little nun of Southampton (1551) and the self-portrait, in a problematic state of conservation, at the Uffizi (155[2]), to appreciate the decisive affinities in the construction of the face; while the slightly uncertain definition and not entirely homogenous rendering, that shows the timid and contrite character of the sitters, is the same in the portrait, signed but not dated, of Sofonisba’s cousin, Archimede Anguissola, which I published a few years ago when it was registered in a private collection in Cremona (while in the nineteenth century it belonged to the renowned priest collector Monsignor Michele Bignami, who carried out his ecclesiastical magisterium at Castelleone and Casalmaggiore, visited by the greatest experts of the time). Moreover, I have the clear impression that our panel reflects obvious links to the so-called Portrait of Minerva at the Milwaukee Art Museum (Layton Art Collection, Inc., Gift of the family of Mrs. Frederick Vogel Jr., inv. L1952.1), which is it customary to date to the mid 1560s for reasons that in my view are somewhat simplistic. Rather than a portrait of her sister Minerva painted post mortem (1564), it seems to me that in the Milwaukee painting, besides its state of conservation, there are immature technical and executive peculiarities, in the pose’s accentuated and slightly schematic fixity and in the tenuous definition of the facial features, redeemed by the quality of the medallion with pearl pendant at the centre of the small figure of armed Minerva. I am convinced that this portrait dates from earlier in the painter’s activity, nearer our thirty-five-year-old canon, around the start of the 1550s.
Then considering the few square inches of landscape outside the window on the left, we become aware that the rude, liquid brushstrokes in nuce represent the very same landscape idea of the Game of Chess at Poznań, dated 1555, and of the Family Portrait at Nivå; two masterpieces by the painter, now at the school of her second maestro, Bernardino Gatti known as Sojaro, showing a remarkable Flemingized turn in the choice of lens on the buildings. In fact, at Poznań, the rock at the peak of the cliff, given clearer definition, is the same as that in our panel; equally, at Nivå, the variation on azure blues corresponds to those through the window behind our canon. These are characteristics Sofonisba would keep constantly among her resources throughout her life, we only have to think of the landscape packed with Flemish memories in the eccentric Itria Madonna, donated on 25 June 1579 to the Franciscan monastery of Paternò in Sicily, and today conserved in the Church of the Santissima Annunziata in Paternò.
In conclusion, I believe the Portrait of a Thirty-five-year-old Canon Regular at the Lateran represents the first noted work of Sofonisba Anguissola, still a very young woman but already introduced into the Lateran circle that would offer her, thanks to paternal good offices, her early Cremonese successes, from Marco Girolamo Vida to Colombino Rapari, to reach the heights of the congregation with the gift of the «picture of the joyful» to Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, one of the most eminent figures in Italian political and religious life during the time of the Council of Trent. The painter’s precociousness, corroborated by such illustrious testimonies, and the high number of works cited in sources and documents, prompts further research on these years of somewhat lacking works by the «virtuous and rare young woman». Precisely in this direction, close re-examination is needed of small size portraiture from the Po valley area with a slightly vague quality to identify other works from the period, for the most part lacking guaranteed paintings of the Cremonese painter’s adolescent debut. Undoubtedly also included, with good reason, would be The Portrait of the Artist Herself (panel, 24 x 18 cm), which in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was in the collection belonging to the Milanese duchess, Joséphine Melzi dʼEril-Barbò, and is now lost . Although it is only known from an old photographic reproduction (used in the exhibition catalogue of 1994, but with a suggested attribution by Mina Gregori in favour of her sister Lucia), the small Self-portrait shows the ingenuity and clumsiness of a fledgling painter, from the pronounced disproportion in size between the spread of the cape and the fine, tight-fitting bodice, to the good intentions, despite under-developed expressive means, seen in the physiognomic rendering of her own face; with a precocious inclination towards fashion and the definition of clothes. Moreover, it shows an imaginative and appreciable personal coup in the slightly crumpled booklet in her right hand; a thin hand with slim fingers, just like those by Bernardino Campi, a factor of no small note when it comes to dating the work. It is peculiar that an expert of Gregori’s calibre preferred to go along with the well-worn cliché according to which Sofonisba’s less successful paintings are distributed among her less talented younger sisters (in this case Lucia, who can’t be described as lacking in talent) and wasn’t swayed by important possible new findings – both stylistic and in terms of the story of Sofonisba’s youth – as that proposed in this account. Indeed, on the basis of this little portrait we can begin to glean an idea of the gifts that Amilcare Anguissola carefully reserved for figures of note, more or less important, who might help him in young Sofonisba’s social ascent.

Marco Tanzi