A “Let’s Talk Art” lecture will be held this week on Italian Renaissance artist Sofonisba Anguissola, whose career created a gateway for future generations of women artists.

The lecture will be held at 5 pm on Oct. 16at the Hammond Regional Arts Center and given by Skyler Simoneaux, an art history graduate in the College of Fine and Performing Arts.

“Originally, I chose to focus on Sofonisba because of her lessons with Michelangelo, but very quickly fell in love with her tenacious personality, and her ability to transfer the emotions of her subject onto the canvas with simple ease,” said Simoneaux. “Sofonisba is an amazing artist to work on, and after almost two years of research she still finds ways to surprise me.”

Anguissola was a late Renaissance painter best known for her portraiture. A noble family raised her, and her father wanted his children to have a well-rounded education that included the fine arts. When Anguissola was 14 years old, he sent her and her sister Elena to study with respected portrait and religious painter Bernardino Campi. When Campi moved to another city, Anguissola studied with painter Bernardino Gatti. Anguissola traveled to Rome at the age of 22 and met Michelangelo, and was informally trained by him. She eventually became one of the first known female artists to achieve international fame.

“The Renaissance has quite a few female artists working at the same time as Sofonisba, but she is the only known woman of noble blood that was trained as a painter. The other women were working in their fathers or husbands workshops as craftsmen, and rarely ever signed their works,” said Simoneaux. “She changed how society viewed women artists by turning the act of making art into a fashionable and socially acceptable career for women, and proved to her male contemporaries that a woman could give them strong competition.”

The lecture will focus on Anguissola’s life, from her start as a child prodigy to the peak of her career, and then her disappearance from art history after her death. Simoneaux will also focus on the recovery efforts by feminist art historians to bring Anguissola back to the forefront of art history, as well as her own research on the same subject.

Students who wish to go to the lecture can find the Hammond Regional Arts Center on 217 E. Thomas St., located across from the Columbia Theatre.