I explore one of San Diego’s hidden gems: The Timken Museum of Art. For centuries, this Renaissance masterpiece was hidden in plain sight. And so were many paintings by this “Queen” of Renaissance art. Now, Sofonisba Anguissola has returned to the spotlight, and two once misidentified portraits now sit side by side. She was a celebrity in her time (she even corresponded with Michelangelo), but was erased from art history for years until recent decades, where her reputation has grown to be a major painter from the Renaissance.
The exhibition at the Timken, called Poetic Portraits: Allegory and Identity in 16th-Century Europe, is up through March 29, 2026. If you’re looking for things to do in San Diego in March, this is a must-see.
On a rare loan from the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, the painting, “Portrait of Giovanni Battista Caselli” along with “Portrait of a Spanish Prince (probably Philip II)” help showcase how Renaissance portraits advanced technique, process, and changed the way we view and connect with art.
Timken Museum of Art
Poetic Portraits: Allegory and Identity in 16th-Century Europe
November 5, 2025 – March 29, 2026
Reviewing art at the Timken since 1985
This is Art with Bob Pincus. We’re at the Timken Museum of Art standing on the backside of the museum. But we’re going to go around the front side and we’re excited to see an exhibition called Poetic Portraits, Renaissance-era portraiture. Which features a Renaissance painter, Sofonisba Anguissola, one of the great portrait painters of the Renaissance. You may notice looking at where I’m standing, this is a modern-era building, opened in 1965. All the other buildings in Balboa Park where this museum stands are in a kind of vintage Spanish style, but it certainly fits the collection, which is old master paintings, Russian icons, also American art. There were two women, Amy and Anne Putnam, sisters, and they were avid collectors of Old Master paintings. And so they took their collection, kept building it, and then they gave to this museum when it opened. A very good collection which has been built upon ever since.
Portraits
The Timken is very strong in portraits. With the Renaissance you had the idea of humanism, right? And the idea of portraits of individuals being, representing their individuality and so then the portrait goes from being less of a profile portrait to more of a full face or three-quarter face portrait because you’re trying to represent what someone really looks like. This portrait of Giovanni Battista Casselli, from the Prado in Madrid.
He’s a poet from Cremona, which is where she was from. And so it wants to represent him as a very learned man. You know, you have the book of poetry. He’s got the pen out. So we assume he’s going to be writing something if not in that book, he’s going to be writing something soon. He’s got the nice pile of books on his desk. He also has a painting on the wall which would signify, of course that he’s cultivated in terms of the arts, but also that he’s religious, as he should be in this period. That’s what they would want to represent him as. And so he was a prominent citizen of that time in that city. But the idea, of course, is to represent him with the things, the props that identify him as to the kind of person he was. Which is part of the point of the show because it talks about identity in 16th-century Europe. So it’s trying to give the person his identity, not only as a person, but as what he does as a person.
One of the interesting things is that for centuries they didn’t identify who he was.
Apparently, they had painted this cloak of his dark, a dark color. I don’t know what that symbolized, but anyway they thought it was a representation of St. Peter.
And so only through recent conservation and research they realized that, no, it’s not supposed to be St. Peter, it’s supposed to be this fellow. So then they took that dark color off and you see his cloak in the original color.
Oh, yeah, this little painting is going to be added to the show. This is another case of a painting that had been attributed to a different artist.
To Alonso Sánchez Coello. But the curator in 2015 who was working at the Museum of Art, really good curator, John Marciari, said, “No, this is a painting by Anguissola.” And he had very persuasive evidence. So now they’ve re-attributed it, and it’s a portrait of a Spanish prince, but it’s when he’s very young, who’s going to become Philip II, soon to be in charge as it were. Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if they’ve ever been in the same spot.
Bartolomeo Veneto, Portrait of a Lady in a Green Dress, has been in the collection since 1979. As I understand it, for centuries it wasn’t even identified as his painting. Only in recent decades were many of his paintings identified as his. This painting, they still don’t know who the person is in the painting. I think people have always loved this painting because it has kind of an interesting way she looks at you. Look at the way her eyes are sort of following you if you go to the right. [Yeah, yeah.] Yea, and almost like looking at you sideways, right?
I don’t know what this signifies, but apparently these sleeves that she had were
because she was a falconer. So the bird could land, I suppose. [And the whole piece of these sleeves are beautiful.] Yeah, his reputation has risen over time as a painter. Biographically, very little is still known about him. They know he was active from about 1502 to about 1532. The painting holds up even if you don’t know who it is, right? Just because of the presence of the person in the painting.
And although he’s not obviously considered at the level of like Leonardo da Vinci or that level of Renaissance artist, he’s considered now a major Renaissance portrait painter, like Anguissola. You can see down to the little cross stitching. There’s no detail obviously that he left off, and even the rings are down to the last little [detail]. And you got to love the hair.
This fellow, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, was a star pupil of da Vinci.
It’s really meant to evoke the idea of a symbolic portrait because he’s holding an arrow and he’s wearing a laurel leaf crown. You can see up there, right? And he has an arrow, both of which are supposed to be in that time symbolizing poetry.
We are going to assume that we feel like this is meant to represent somebody who is literary, in that time.
He’s holding an arrow it looks like, but it almost, he’s holding it almost like a reed pen the way he holds it. Yeah, contrasting the red and the black. One time actually I was reminded it was considered to be a work by Leonardo, then reattributed to Mr. Boltraffio.
Of course, if it was da Vinci, everybody would stand and “ooh” and “ah,” but if it’s a Boltraffio, they go, “Oh, that’s interesting.”
This is the one contemporary work in the show. It’s sort of trying to evoke the time through costume obviously and it’s a photographic print. Title wise, it’s obviously meant to evoke a slightly later painter, Artemisia Gentileschi who is 1593-1653
She’s another painter who is seen as somebody who is regarded much more highly now because of her portraits and historical subject paintings.
I thought it was interesting you get this thing where they make a portrait, or in this case an engraving, but it’s based on an earlier painting.
It’s interesting that the idea of like doing an engraving from ‘after Peter Paul Rubens,’ ‘after Titian.’ So that’s supposed to be a representation of Dante in the first page of the book. They can look rather, like he’s almost like etched in marble.And this edition was 1584, which would be a century after the first printed versions of it. It’s interesting to see these little prints, though, the printmaking that was going on at the time. This is supposed to be a portrait of Sofonisba Anguissola. It’s like a print made from the painting that was originally done of her by Anthony van Dyck.
This show made me think about the first really breakthrough book about her, which was written and researched over many years by a woman who taught at San Diego State University in women’s studies, Ilya Sandra Perlingieri. I think she deserves due credit for doing this kind of big breakthrough book. Bernardino Campi is painting Sofonisba Anguissola. And it’s a very clever self-portrait because it actually shows her being painted by another artist. I don’t think it was like a typical thing for every painter to do. So I thought that was kind of interesting, that she wanted to paint the painter painting her. Maybe she felt that it elevated her because that painter was notable in her time, elevating her as a painter and legitimizing her because let’s face it, women painters were really unusual for that period.
She did many self-portraits and I think was quite a skillful self-portraitist, even painting herself when she was of elderly age. Most painters at that time did paint self-portraits. Of course, a famous example being Rembrandt who painted lots of self-portraits. I think that the better portrait painters of that period were humanizing people, sort of along with the idea of the advent, rise of humanism in writing as well. That you made people seem individual and more real rather than just simply representatives of a sort of symbolic nature.
I think she tried for that kind of realism, which was a certain kind of realism that the Renaissance cultivated that people saw it as an advance over medieval painting, for example. Where everybody was kind of more flat and sort of looked more pictographic. Where it seems like an individual you’re looking at rather than just a kind of archetype.
Thank you for watching this episode on the Timken Museum of Art and their current exhibition, which ends on March 29, 2026. And thank you for watching the channel! Please subscribe.
The next episode will be on the MONUMENTS exhibition, which is at two spaces in LA, the Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo, and also The Brick in Los Angeles.
Robert L. Pincus 
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