Negotiating Gender through Art, Fashion, and Music in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana’s Self-Portraits with Keyboard Instruments

This paper focuses on the music iconography in two self-portraits by Italian women artists Sofonisba Anguissola (ca. 1535-1625) and Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614). In these images—entitled Self-Portrait with Spinet and Attendant (ca. 1559; Althorp Park, Northamptonshire, England) and Self-Portrait at the Spinet (1577; Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, Rome), respectively—both painters are in front of a keyboard instrument, with their hands in playing position. Art historians have discussed these portraits, not infrequently side by side, commenting on the display of the sitters’ musical and artistic talents, their proper education as Renaissance noblewomen, their femininity and chastity, their female agency, their beauty, and their keyboard as a gendered object. While both pictures share similarities, their keyboard instruments differ in size, shape, and other physical traits. Scholars have not yet examined the instruments’ technical details for a more comprehensive understanding of these paintings. This interdisciplinary study seeks to identify these keyboard instruments based on their structural and sound-producing properties as well as investigate the musical activities and the spaces in which Anguissola and Fontana have depicted themselves. I suggest that Anguissola, rather than presenting a musical performance, creates a visual homage to her formative years under the care of her family’s maid while downplaying her femininity as a musician and painter through her consistently modest and masculine attire in this and other self-portraits. Fontana, in contrast, foregrounds her gender and social status as a nobildonna and conveys tropes of harmony and love through her musical instrument and its sounds.