Lost Renaissance Painting Resurfaces in North Carolina

A family in Durham, North Carolina, just discovered they owned a priceless piece of art history hiding in plain sight.

Portrait of a Canon Regular, painted in 1552 by Sofonisba Anguissola, one of the few famous female artists of the Renaissance, had been missing for nearly 100 years. Art historians only had a faded black-and-white photo from the 1920s to prove it once existed.

Then came an unexpected twist. In 2024, art historian Michael Cole gave a lecture about Anguissola at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The talk was posted on YouTube, where the North Carolina family happened to watch it.

They realized the painting they'd inherited, purchased at a local auction in 1977, was the lost masterpiece everyone thought was gone forever. The painting recently made its public debut at the Winter Show in New York City, priced at $450,000.

The portrait shows a clergy member mid-lecture, his hand resting on a Bible open to the Gospel of John. An eagle, symbol of St. John, holds the book in its talons against a dark background. The recent conservation revealed Anguissola's full signature and the date 1552, making it her earliest signed work.

Anguissola was just 20 years old when she painted it. Born around 1532 in Cremona, Italy, she started artistic training as a teenager and quickly impressed the art world. Even Michelangelo praised her work and wrote to her father about her talent.

Why This Inspires

Anguissola broke barriers in a world that rarely recognized women artists. She became court painter to the Spanish royal family and lived to be around 93, creating portraits so lifelike that fellow artist Giorgio Vasari said they "appear to breathe."

Her path wasn't easy. Women artists had to be exceptional just to have careers, as art dealer Robert Simon notes. Any woman artist from this era who succeeded had to be "really good" because mediocrity wouldn't have been tolerated.

Though her fame faded over centuries and some works were credited to male artists like Titian, recent decades have restored her reputation. Today, she's recognized as one of the major figures of the late Italian Renaissance.

Fewer than 20 signed paintings by Anguissola survive today, making this rediscovery especially meaningful. Her brilliant portraits from the 1550s, created before royal court restrictions limited her creativity, are now her most valued works.

Thanks to one curious family and a YouTube lecture, another piece of women's art history is back where it belongs: in the public eye.