Eyes: body parts in art

In this second in my informal mini-series called for want of a better title, ‘body parts in art’, I’m focussing on eyes.

I’ll probably do several blogs on this topic as my art books are now frilled with post-it notes book marking thousands of years and a global community of the quizzical, the mendacious, the delighted, the introverted, the desperate, the sublime, the resigned, the dejected, the transported.

In Sofonisba Anguissola’s 1555 painting The Chess Game, the players are Sofonisba’s sisters Lucia and Minerva.

They’re watched with great delight by a third, younger sister, Europa. It’s the expression on this little girl’s face that repeatedly draws me to this painting. She’s facing forwards but looking sideways at Minerva, who’s just about to lose the game and is raising her hand. Perhaps just about to protest against Lucia’s taking of her queen. Young Europa gleefully anticipates a sisterly spat? A lovely little girl’s pudgy face too, with a smile just becoming a laugh – but nothing at all cutesy in this joint portrait.

Off to one side, the girls attract the attention of an older woman. She’s plainly dressed and, given the lavish nature of the girls’ costume, is unlikely then to be their mother, who must outshine them. So a maid or nurse. Her expression is remarkable, her gentle personality conveyed in the tenderness of her gaze.

Sofonisba’s painting of her sisters tells more than of a happy family. Anguissola is billed as one of the greatest female painters of the Renaissance. Let’s make that one of the greatest painters. The Chess Game has a serious point to make. Look, it says, women, girls can be logical, rational, can think ahead, play and enjoy strategic games.

One of six sisters, 5 of whom became painters, Sofonisba worked at the court of Spain’s Phillip II for 13 years. Her first husband was drowned when his ship was attacked by pirates. She married again, but without Phillip’s permission or her father’s permission, countering apparently, that “Marriages are made in heaven and not on Earth.”

View The Chess Game with more of Sofonisba's paintings at the Web Gallery of Art. It’s fabulous online resource. Take a tour.

The Web Gallery address is: www.wga.hu

For other posts in this series see: lips