look closer

Lucia looks up mid-capture, certain of the game. The gaze out of the picture was itself a novelty; sitters were supposed to be looked at, not looking.

Amilcare Anguissola, a minor nobleman of Cremona, ran a household experiment a century ahead of schedule: he gave his six daughters the full humanist education normally reserved for sons, Latin, music, and, for the ones who wanted it, painting. The eldest, Sofonisba, wanted it entirely. Barred as a woman from studying anatomy or the nude, the standard ladder to the grand style, she aimed her training at the one subject fully available: the people at her own dinner table, caught alive. In 1555, in her early twenties, she painted three of her sisters playing chess under an oak, and on the edge of the board she signed it in Latin: Sofonisba Anguissola, virgin, daughter of Amilcare, painted her three sisters and a servant from life. Painted from life is the manifesto. Lucia, on the left, has just taken a piece and looks out at us with the mild certainty of an older sister who is winning; little Europa in the middle grins openly at the loser; Minerva, caught mid-objection, raises a hand; the servant leans in over her shoulder. Nobody poses. It is one of the first paintings in European art in which a family is doing something rather than sitting for something, and visitors noticed: Vasari, detouring to Cremona a decade later, wrote that the figures lacked only speech. The career that followed ran through the front doors of places women did not enter. Michelangelo, sent her drawings, tested her from Rome: draw a boy crying, harder than a boy laughing. She sent back a boy bitten by a crayfish, and the old man passed the sketch around; Caravaggio lifted the idea decades later. At 27 she was called to Madrid as court painter and lady-in-waiting to the queen of Spain, and spent 14 years painting the most guarded family in Europe; because a lady of the household could not take painters' fees or sign like a tradesman, her royal portraits went unsigned, and for centuries the best of them were credited to men. Museums have spent the last several decades quietly amending labels. She outlived nearly everyone in the story. At about 92, in Palermo, she received a young Flemish visitor named Anthony van Dyck, who sketched her in his travel notebook, wrote down her advice about placing the light high so the wrinkles cast no shadow, and noted that he had learned more about painting from one blind old woman's conversation than from anything else in Italy. Her eyes were failing; her opinions were not. The chess game hangs in Poznań, still winning its argument.