Sofonisba Anguissola Loan to Timken

Sofonisba Anguissola, Giovanni Battista Caselli, 1557-1558. Museo del Prado, Madrid

The Prado has lent Sofonisba Anguissola's portrait of Giovanni Battista Caselli to the Timken Museum of Art, San Diego. It's featured in a focus exhibition, "Poetic Portraits: Allegory & Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe," that runs through Mar. 29, 2026. The showing reciprocates for the Timken's loan of its Veronese to the Prado's recent exhibition. 

The Prado owns numerous works by Anguissola, court painter to Philip II and one of the best-known women artists of the Renaissance. Giovanni Battista Caselli is an early work, depicting a poet and sculptor of Anguissola's hometown, Cremona. In the past the key on the table and overpainting of the gown led to the man's misidentification as St. Peter. However, Caselli's name is plainly visible on the book.

The Timken's neighbor, the San Diego Museum of Art, owns Anguissola's Portrait of a Spanish Prince. Believed to show the middle-aged Philip II as a child, it may have been made for a gallery of child portraits. Compared to Giovanni Battista Caselli, it shows the more meticulous style Anguissola adopted for the Spanish court.

Sofonisba Anguissola, Portrait of a Spanish Prince (probably Philip II), about 1573. San Diego Museum of Art