Sofonisba, Lavinia, Artemisia: Their Radical Late Work

A groundbreaking account of the fascinating late paintings of three women Renaissance artists by one of the field’s pioneers

Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, and Artemisia Gentileschi—the most important women artists of Renaissance Italy—all deviated radically from their earlier work in their last years. Because their late paintings are anomalous and puzzling, they have been virtually ignored, and treated as peripheral to the artists’ core identities and oeuvres. In this book, Mary Garrard, a founding pioneer in feminist art history, presents a major reevaluation of the late works of Anguissola, Fontana, and Gentileschi, showing how in their final years they deliberately changed direction to produce bold, transgressive, and surprising paintings that upended gendered expectations.

While great male artists have been praised for their “heroic” or “tragic” late works, historians have largely overlooked the creative imaginations of older women artists. In this important book, Garrard questions that bias as she explores the adventurous late-life art of Anguissola, Fontana, and Gentileschi. What emerges is a compelling account of how each artist met the universal experience of ageing with an idiosyncratic response—Anguissola through influential formal innovation, Fontana through quirky yet deadly serious humor, and Gentileschi through satirical dialogue with her own early work.

Adding new chapters to the stories of these artists, Sofonisba, Lavinia, Artemisia challenges art historians and critics to consider what is missed when late-life creativity goes unnoticed.