Summer clips: Sofonisba's Lesson (new edition)

Episode No. 771 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast is a summer clips episode featuring art historian Michael W. Cole.

Princeton University Press has just published Cole's Sofonisba's Lesson, New Edition: A Renaissance Artist and Her Work. The book updates Cole's 2020 edition of the book, an assessment of Sofonisba Anguissola (1532–1625), a pathbreaking painter who substantially made it possible for women to be students of art. Bookshop and Amazon offers Sofonisba's Lesson for $63-68.

Cole's book considers Sofonisba Anguissola's art, how her background, teaching and learning were important to her career and art, and how her relationships with her father Amilcare, her teacher Bernardino Campi, Michelangelo and a series of royals and royal courts resulted in her work — and in work attributed to her.

This new, expanded volume offers new considerations of paintings whose status has been uncertain, and provides an up-to-date illustrated catalogue of over 200 known paintings and drawings that have been associated with Sofonisba. Cole is a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University.

This episode was taped in 2020, when Princeton published the first edition of the book. For images, see Episode No. 457.

Air date: August 13, 2026.