Abstract
This paper discusses the self-portraits of Sofonisba Anguissola, a Cremonese woman painter who represents not only the Renaissance “virtuosa” women but also iconographically new self-images of the Italian painter as “myself with a paintbrush” in the humanism era. Sofonisba and her father Amilcare feature the image of a new virgin-lady painter with a paintbrush and an easel, as the Roman goddess of silence Lara, who is interpreted as the symbol of art of painting, and the Roman painter Martia, who has been discussed by Boccaccio. This paper argues the ways in which many copies of Sofonisba’s self-image with a paintbrush indicate that her self-image was seen and wished for almost as a symbolic figure of the art of painting.
