Anguissola’s Angles

(smarthistory.org)

In Sofonisba Anguissola’s paintings, there is a subtle kind of listening happening — a quiet attention paid to the soft and steady rhythms of daily life. Her work does not stand with feet planted wide and arms akimbo, declaring its presence. It is a gentler calling, a drawing in through the whisper of intimate spaces and the shared, silent understandings of her subjects’ eyes. 

In the simple act of sisters playing chess (The Game of Chess: or Portrait of the artist’s sisters playing chess), Anguissola weaves a tale not of grandeur but of the quiet moments that stitch together the fabric of daily life. The intent and knowing stares are rendered with a grace that fills the frame with the unspoken stories of the women within it.

Her self-portraits, too, are a quiet challenge to the grandiose self-presentations of her era’s men. They are meditations, a kind of silent conversation with the self. Her gaze meets ours across time, asking us to see her — as artist, as woman, as both seer and seen.

Anguissola finds in the understated a celebration of life’s quiet beauty. She captures the mundane moments with a fidelity that transcends their simplicity. Her touch brings forth not just the image but the feel of her subjects, the emotional resonance lingering beneath the surface.

In her world, the Renaissance speaks in a voice less concerned with the spectacle and more with the inward journey. Her paintings stand as a testament to the quiet power of stillness, to the eloquent truths too delicate to be spoken. Anguissola maps the contours of her world in the language of gestures and glances, finding in the everyday a drama as rich and deep as any fabled quest or celestial vision.

With her art, Anguissola quietly asserts the importance of the domestic sphere, the feminine narrative, the subtle detail. She invites the viewer to tune in to history, to the often-ignored stories of humanity. Her legacy is one of perspectives, a gentle insistence that we lean in closer and acknowledge the spaces designated to the margins of the grand historical narrative. Her paintings are not declarations as such. Instead, they are gentle invitations that flirt for our attention. 

(Un)Gentle Gentileschi

(nationalgallery.org.uk)

In Artemisia Gentileschi’s canvases, viewers find dramatic stagings of the female form, where each painting enacts a complex narrative of defiance. Her figures are not simply static. They seem to exert force, to act upon the viewer with an almost kinetic energy. In Judith Slaying Holofernes, there is a tumultuous movement and emotion, the canvas itself barely containing the violent resolve of its protagonists. The biblical story is there, but it is Gentileschi’s personal inflection of the tale that lends the image its formidable motivations.

Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting discards the traditional modesty metaphor for a more assertive self-insertion into the artistic tradition. The self-portrait is a careful measure of presence, asserting her place in the art historical dialogue with quiet authority. The look she gives the viewer is one of recognition, as if she is aware of the future conversations her presence will provoke.

In her portrayal of Lucretia, Gentileschi delves into the narrative with a storyteller’s concern for the inner life of her subject. Here is a character at the precipice of her fate, depicted with an intimacy that suggests the painter’s deep meditation on choice and consequence. The moment is less about the act itself than about the psychological landscape that precedes it.

The palpability of Gentileschi’s paintwork, the way the thick layers seem to pulse with the life of her subjects, lends a sculptural dimension to her art. Gentileschi’s brush does not just apply color but seems to mold the very substance of flesh, giving her figures a manic presence that is rare in the era’s depictions of women.

Gentileschi’s work is a sustained argument about the representation of women, both in the art of her day and in the broader scope of history. Through her work, she conducts a masterclass in the reinterpretation of the female narrative, repositioning the female body as a moment of power, agency, and emotional depth.

The viewer of Gentileschi’s work is asked not just to look but to witness: to engage with a world where women are the central figures, not as objects to be gazed upon, but as subjects with stories that demand to be told. In her hands, the canvas becomes a space of revelation, a challenge to the passive consumption of images, and an invitation to a more profound engagement with the stories that art can tell.

Saville’s Figurative

(gagosian.com)

Jenny Saville’s approach to the canvas is one of confrontation and challenge. Her subjects are fleshy behemoths, often female forms that push against the edges of the frame, spilling over and beyond the conventional boundaries of beauty and taste. They are not the nymphs or odalisques of historical portraiture but titanic figures that demand we acknowledge the reality of the body in all its mass and mess.

Saville’s work claims female form from the male gaze that has long dominated art history. Her figures are not offered for the viewer’s taste but assert their presence, imposing a physicality that cannot be ignored. In this, Saville aligns herself with a tradition of painters who have sought to render the body with harsh honesty, from Lucian Freud to Francis Bacon, while also defying that tradition as well.

Saville’s comprehensive work is a defiant denial of the sanitized body, the body as it is sold to us in advertisements and has undergone cosmetic surgery. Instead, Saville presents the viewer with a visceral reality, a raw form that some may find uncomfortable. Her paintings don’t merely display bodies. The thick, palpable layers of paint mimic the layers of skin and tissue, while the often blurred or smeared features convey a sense of movement.

Saville has been criticized for her fixation on the grotesque, which some see as an indulgence in the carnal. Yet, what these criticisms often miss is the empathy at the heart of her work. Saville’s bodies are not spectacles; they are embodiments of experience – distinct lives lived in the physical world. They are marred and marked by existence, and there is beauty in this that Saville captures without sentimentality.

In pieces such as Plan and Fulcrum, Saville explores the body as a landscape, with folds of flesh rendered as terrain. She questions the viewer’s own relationship with their body, prompting a reflection that is as existential as it is physical. Saville’s paintings resist easy consumption. They are not restful or pleasing in any traditional sense. They are a reminder that art can confront and disturb, shuffling us from complacent observation to active engagement.