This week's report - May 10, 2026

For this Renaissance collection, photographic records were scarce. The Bourgine team therefore drew its inspiration from the artworks of the period, and we thank Europe’s best portraitists for their invaluable help.

To these artists, we offer a painter’s blouse suited both to their time and ours.

This idea came from this painting:

Ambrosius Holbein was the elder — and far less famous — brother of Hans Holbein the Younger. He belonged to the refined world of the German Renaissance: Basel and Augsburg, humanist circles, the rise of printing, and portraits of cultivated bourgeois. His career was brief, which partly explains why he was soon overshadowed by Hans, who would become one of the greats.

Sofonisba Anguissola was born into a family of minor Italian nobility. Encouraged by her humanist father — unusually attentive to the education of his daughters — she began training as a painter at an early age. Gifted in the art of portraiture, and especially prolific in self-portraiture, she became one of the first women painters to gain an international reputation in her own lifetime. Obviously, rare.

A few of Sofonisba’s achievements:

- She served as official portraitist to the Spanish royal family for fourteen years.

- While she was still very young, Michelangelo sent her drawings and invited her to respond to them — no small endorsement.

- She painted more self-portraits than any other artist of her time, portraying herself at every age: from young womanhood to old age — around ninety in her final self-portrait.

As so often in art history, her works were long attributed to her male contemporaries, before her hand was belatedly rediscovered in the 2000s. Since then, a number of paintings have been reattributed to her.

A selection of our favorite works: