CREMONA – The call from Gary and Anita Klesch, owners of a formidable collection of 16th and 17th century paintings, was not answered immediately. Not out of pride, but out of laziness. For some time the spouses had in fact purchased a painting by Sofonisba Anguissola (Cremona 1532 ca. – Palermo 1625), ‘Portrait of a Lady in White Satin’ and consulted the art historian Marco Tanzi, full professor of History of Modern Art at the University of Salento, to carry out an in-depth investigation. The long courtship finally bore fruit, having finally got to the point he started writing. «In the end I wrote too much and a book came out – he explains – in which I tried to put in their place all those things that I have supported for at least 30 years. That is, Sofonisba should be studied as if she were a painter, not as a painter and a woman and therefore differently from her male colleagues or worse as if she were the protagonist of a romance novel. This latest work of mine, I will immediately clarify, intends to talk about the paintings: it wants to reveal Sofonisba’s first artistic style, cultivated both in Cremona and at the court of King Philip II in Spain, it wants to recognize what her works are by clarifying the attributions, it wants to understand the reason for the obvious changes in quality, why the inspiration sometimes appears very weak when it does not refer to elements of local painting”.
WOMEN PAINTERS
Moving away from conventional narratives about Anguissola, often rooted in a somewhat fictionalized biography, this book provides a fresh and fact-filled perspective, highlighting the diverse artistic production and rich history behind this vibrant portrait and much of the production . «A fashionable phenomenon has been built on women painters – the scholar claims – whether Sofonisba, Artemisia Gentileschi or Lavinia Fontana, and instead no work has been done to establish balanced stylistic and qualitative rankings as is usually done for all other artists.. Do we have ten signed and dated works? On the basis of those we reconstruct the catalog and see that stylistically this work cannot go together with that one and let’s line them up in an ordered chronology. Let’s try to understand what the influences are, the figurative areas, the exchanges. Instead we only talk about her private life, about Sofonisba, a virtuous and rare young woman, about her wanderings among the courts of Europe, about her father Hamilcar, ambitious and skilled weaver of social and economic relationships around the beginnings of his eldest daughter and her sisters.
A NEW LOOK
The enigmatic ‘Portrait of a Young Lady in White Satin’ which is the subject of the publication (Mandragora editore, pp. 96. 24 euros, with English translation alongside and a rich iconographic set) it is placed chronologically almost at the end of his stay at the Spanish court, the seventies of the 1500s. The painter, now in her forties, “comes out with a flourish that redeems the boredom of all the painting of those years”, writes Tanzi. Here is therefore a favorable opportunity to provide, in a new light, the coordinates of the life and work of the Cremonese artist, often an object of curiosity due to his peculiar social life, rather than of careful study of the formal data of his production, influences, models, contexts.
Marco Tanzi
The portrait of the painter seen with new eyes emerges, finally free from the scansion of the stages of a biography that has the flavor of a novel, free from some erroneous attributions traced back, among many, to her first master, Bernardino Campi. Tanzi begins with a long, very accurate biographical excursus on his youthful activity, followed by a chronological list of portraits signed and dated from his Cremonese debut to his very first years at the court of Madrid. For each one it provides the reasons for the stylistic choices, the philological investigation, the doubts argued about the attributions, the curious seriality of some of them (what to think about, if not the promotional policy of the head of the family, Amilcare, «who knew how to think with shrewd cynicism about the recipients of their daughter’s works, behaving accordingly with the size and quality of the painting), the quality levels (“the good rendering of some, the modesty of others”).
THE KLESCH PORTRAIT
On portraiture at the court of Madrid, Tanzi does not repeat the virtuous exercise performed for the Cremonese portraits because «the painter no longer signs her portraits and it is difficult to recognize which is the basic model and which are copies». Our painting appears for the first time in the catalogs of the most important Roman collection of the early nineteenth century, that of Napoleon’s uncle, Cardinal Joseph Fesch (1763-1839) in Palazzo Falconieri in Rome and in other nineteenth-century inventories mentioned as Titian’s school. At the 1863 auction the portrait went unsold, we find it several years later, in 1926, in a private collection with attribution to Lavinia Fontana «almost inexplicable from the point of view of style – writes Tanzi – comparisons with the most famous works of the ‘Emilian artist’. We finally come to the stylistic analysis of our Portrait of a Young Lady in White Satin, naturally confirming the attribution to Sofonisba Anguissola «but attempting to explain – specifies the scholar – to which Sofonisba Anguissola it belongs. If the Cremonese component is still, in some respects, tangible, the Klesch portrait nevertheless demonstrates an international dimension that none of the paintings listed in the Cremonese decade possess”.
BROCADE AND DIAMONDS
The Klesch portrait «is a work with an international scope because here Sofonisba finds herself immersed in a new and extraordinary environment for a girl from the Po Valley province, which in some way fascinates her, but in this case is not able to swallow her up in the dynamics of very boring court portraits to be repeated endlessly.” And in fact the lady moves here with surprising freedom: the monumentality of the meticulously embroidered brocade dress allows us to glimpse the irresistible charm of a young body: the eyes shine, the cheeks are red, the hand touches the belly perhaps alluding to a pregnancy, she hints at a smile that would like to open more, releasing an intense desire to live. Even the jewels are described with great detail: a crown on the head and a necklace with pearls, rubies and perhaps diamonds dyed black on the back as was common in the 16th century as well as the gloves and the gorget. «I can say without any problem that I have never seen a portrait of Sofonisba Anguissola so wonderfully bright with color and joyful with feeling: a sign of truly mature moderation. A court portrait with all the trappings, in which Sofonisba manages for once to remain free in the approach to her character, reconnecting in many aspects, as will never happen again on other occasions, to the unforgettable models of her education”.
