10 hours ago
6
Like its predecessors from the Ideas Roadshow series, this essay film looks like a high-grade PowerPoint presentation but shines because of its exceptional subject: the pioneering female Renaissance artist Sofonisba Anguissola and her psychologically luminous portraiture. The film is centred on this queen’s gambit: her c 1555 portrait of her three sisters and housemaid playing chess, which clocked up numerous firsts. Apart from being the first Renaissance all-female group painting and the first to juxtapose women of different classes, its most groundbreaking accomplishment was depicting real-life – rather than symbolic or idealised – women.
Narrated by Elizabeth van Sebelle, the film sticks to basic summaries to relay the context. Born around 1532 into a lapsed aristocratic family from Cremona, as the eldest child Anguissola got a fancy Carthaginian first name (her father was Amilcare) and artistic training a cut above the average woman of the time. Initially schooled by distinguished local painters, she impressed Michelangelo in her early 20s when he challenged her to draw a weeping boy. Her artistic apprenticeship was meant in part to bolster her marriage chances rather than to give her a career in her own right – a career she had, nevertheless, becoming court painter to Philip II of Spain, and subtly influencing her peers.
The showpiece analysis is brisk and compelling, from a history of chess as an emerging cultural status symbol to rival literature and music, to the painting’s Leonardo-inspired composition. While the image undoubtedly displays Anguissola’s empathic talents, there’s something particular going on in its matrix of sisterly gazes, as delineated here: moving from seven-year-old Europa’s amused reaction to adolescent Minerva’s stupefied gawp on losing her queen, to the self-possessed 18-year-old Lucia staring outwards (presumably at the artist). Anguissola is selling the family’s credo of education and the transmission of good character.
One drawback is that confining the film to a single painting means the analysis of Anguissola’s influence feels limited; charting the specific imitators of The Game of Chess is interesting, but less so than understanding the broader impact of ordinary women’s representation. And the titbits in her biography hint at greater dramatic possibilities than this purely academic treatment gets across; after leaving the Spanish court, she fell in love with a sea captain, lived childless in Genoa and Palermo, before dying aged 93. This is an intriguing primer, but there’s ample biopic potential for this lady on fire.
