Timken Museum, Balboa Park, through March 29, 2026

by Cornelia Feye

December 2, 2025

Portraits are ubiquitous. Our social media feed and photo files are flooded with portraits of our friends and family, as well as self-portraits, selfies, taken throughout the day, to send to friends or post online. They are deleted as quickly as they are created if they are not congruent with the way we want to see ourselves.

In the 16^th Century, portraits were rare, expensive, and required a long time to create. It often took weeks, if not months for a subject to sit and for a painter to paint.  But as today, the sitters wanted a very specific image of themselves to translate onto the canvas.

The purpose of 16^th century portraits, as well as our selfies is similar. They aim to reflect an attractive appearance, social standing, intellectual—or physical—pursuits, and how we want to be perceived in the present and in the future.

The Timken Museum managed to borrow a portrait painting by Sofonisba Anguissola, one of the earliest female portrait painters in the 16^th century from the Prado in Madrid. Anguissola’s portrait of the poet Giovanni Battista Caselli is the centerpiece of the small but exquisite exhibition Poetic Portraits: Allegory and Identity in 16^th Century Europe.

Both the painter and the painting are extraordinary. Anguissola depicted the well-known poet Giovanni Battista Caselli of Cremona in northern Italy as an old man with grey hair and beard, but with an attentive facial expression looking at the viewer over his left shoulder, one eyebrow raised. With his left hand he points at a painting of the Virgin with Christchild and St. John—a subject Sofonisba Anguissola frequently painted. He also points at an armillary sphere depicting the planets, set on a pile of books. Anguissola is telling us that Caselli was pious, but also man of the world, familiar with the latest scientific discoveries. His right hand holds a feather, with which he writes in elegant Italian handwriting in a book of his poetry. We know this because Anguissola told us on the spine of the book rime del Casellio, rhymes of Caselli. The poet’s expression speaks to us across the centuries. “Look,” he seems to say, “I can straddle science, art, and faith,” which was very much in line with Renaissance values.

Sofonisba Anguissola was herself a Renaissance woman at a time when few women ventured beyond their parental or marital home. She was the oldest of six sisters, and her father was the nobleman Amilcare Anguissola. He insisted that all of his six daughters learned Latin, music and painting. He probably hoped that some of them could earn a living and he wouldn’t have to provide six dowries. At least Sofonisba was able to make a comfortable income from her portrait commissions and was therefore financially independent. She and her sister Elena studied with the Cremona artist Bernardino Campi from 1546 to 1549. When he moved away, she studied with another local Master, Bernadino Gatti. Soon Sofonisba surpassed her teachers in engaging the spectator with the sitter, which is apparent in her portrait of Caselli.

Her fame spread quickly and when she was in her 20s, she was invited to the Spanish Court of Philip II in Madrid as court painter of the Queen. She stayed for ten years until 1570, when she married a Sicilian Lord, Fabrizio de Moncada, in an elaborate ceremony held at the Spanish court, which also provided a generous dowry. (well played, Senor Anguissola!). Sofonisba followed her husband to Palermo, where he died four years later. She was recalled to the Spanish court and on her journey back she wanted to visit her family in Cremona. But during the sea voyage, she fell in love with the ship’s captain Ortazio Lomellino, and they got married as soon as they reached Genoa. Moving forward she divided her time between Palermo and Genoa and became famous enough to be included in Giorgio Vasari’s 16^th century art history bookwhich praised her for “the breathing likenesses” she created in her portraits.

In the Timken Galerie, on the wall left to Caselli’s portrait, a more classical Renaissance portrait anchors Sofonisba Anguissola’s painting within the context of her time and the evolution of portraiture.

Giovanni Boltraffio’s Portrait of a Youth holding an Arrow, from ca. 1500, depicts a beautiful, idealized young man with long blond curls wearing a laurel wreath. He faces the viewer directly, in contrast to Sofonisba’s three-quarter view of the poet Caselli. In his right hand the youth holds an arrow with feathers, reminiscent of Caselli’s feather pen. Indeed, the laurel wreath and the arrow identify him as a poet, since the symbols of the god of poetry, Apollo, were a bow and arrow. “Renaissance audiences understood such symbolism instinctively, reading these works much like the verses and sonnets they admired,” says Derrick Cartwright Ph.D., Director of Curatorial Affairs.

Instead of Caselli’s curious expression, Boltraffio’s youth looks at us with dreamy eyes and the mysterious half-smile that made the Mona Lisa so famous. Indeed, Boltraffio was a pupil of Leonardo, and this painting was at one point attributed to the great Master. Boltraffio dressed his youth in a Renaissance style black and red velvet robe with a green undergarment. Caselli, on the other hand, was clothed in contemporary shirt and cloak (as a 2022 thorough cleaning by the Prado revealed. Caselli’s attire had been overpainted with a brown garment, in an effort to turn the portrait into a depiction of St. Peter). The background of Boltraffio’s youth is black. Unlike Caselli, this young man gives us a glimpse not into a specific time and onto a specific person, but into another realm, where gods and artists intermingle.

On the opposing wall, as if in conversation with our dreamy youth, hangs Bartolomeo Veneto’s Portrait of a Lady in a Green dress from 1530. Here too, as in modern portraits or selfies, the attire is very important. The lavish green silk dress, which envelops the sitter’s voluptuous body in shimmering folds, as well as her necklace, ring and red velvet background, signal status, preference, occasion, and underline the sitter’s physical attributes. 

A close contemporary of Titian, Bartolomeo studied with Gentile Bellini in Northern Italy, specifically Venice. These artists excelled at creating religious and allegorical art. Titian and Bartolomeo were also in high demand for their portraits of Italian nobility. For many years, the Timken’s painting was known by a purely descriptive title: Lady in a Green Dress. However, an identity for this figure has recently been proposed by Tatiana Sizonenko, a local scholar of Renaissance art. She has argued convincingly that this exquisitely dressed-woman could be Maria Paleologo. If so, the Timken’s painting was likely produced on the occasion of Maria’s engagement to Federico Gonzaga, 1st Duke of Mantua. Documents show that Paleologo received gifts of elaborate scuffotti—turban-like headdresses— from Isabella d’Este, Federico’s mother. The figure in this portrait wears a scuffia of the type that Isabella herself favored. The small scroll that Bartolomeo painted in the top left corner records not just the artist’s signature but also a useful date: 1530. The painting was a marriage portrait, for Federico, who had never seen his bride in person. Maria was not young anymore and she is not portrayed entirely flatteringly. She died that year and her sister, Margherita, married Federico instead.  

Seen together, these three works—in addition to several other portraits rounding out the exhibition—illuminate how portraiture evolved in the 16^th century. From idealized allegory, to Anguissola’s fully realized poet, to Maria Paleologo in her green dress. Maria displays a real personality, not idealized at all, with a skeptical expression—maybe because her fiancée Federico was known to be a bit of a rogue. These subtle messages about 16^th Century figures arrive through the ages in the viewer’s mind. We get a glimpse at the lives of these real people, how they wanted to be seen, and how the artists expressed their roles in society.

When I asked Cartwright why he chose the Sofonisba Portrait of Caselli as the centerpiece of this exhibition, he answered, “The intention is to include and show more female artists and artists from diverse backgrounds.”  Once he had the portrait secured, the follow up question became, “What could we build around her?” Several smaller portraits fill in the gaps in space and time.

It turns out that 16^th Century portraits were not so different from our selfies, as it may appear at first. What is the purpose of portraiture? As in the Renaissance, “portraits were never ‘just faces’. They were complex statements about identity and ambition, representations of affiliation, and status.”Derrick R. Cartwright, explained.

The ambition of this exhibition is to bring these portraits and their sitters to life, and create a bridge between their and our intention to express our identity, our pursuits in life and do so, preferably looking as attractive as possible.

Poetic Portraits: Allegory and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe is organized by the Timken Museum of Art and made possible through the generosity of the Rembrandt Society and Friends of the Timken. 

The Timken Museum of Art is located in the heart of Balboa Park. Wednesday – Sunday, 10am to 5pm – Free Admission. visit www.timkenmuseum.org.  

Sources: Women Artists, an Illustrated History, Nancy G. Heller, 1987, based on the 1976 landmark exhibition Women Artists 1550-1950 curated by Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris.