At the time this portrait was made, van Hemessen was twenty-three years old and a registered master of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke. Across the top right corner she inscribed in pale yellow letters: CATHARINA DE / HEMESSEN / PINGEBAT / 1551, Catharina de Hemessen was painting this, 1551. In Latin, pingebat is the imperfect tense, used for an action still in progress, while pinxit is the perfect, denoting a completed act: she painted this, it is done.
Three years earlier, on her self-portrait now in the Kunstmuseum Basel, she had signed differently: EGO CATERINA DE HEMESSEN ME PINXI 1548 ETATIS SVAE 20, I, Catharina van Hemessen, painted myself, 1548, at age twenty. That formula is first person, reflexive, and records her age. A second portrait from the same year, now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, already drops all three, reading simply Catherina de Hemessen pinxit 1548: third person, perfect, no ego, no me, no age. Within a single year, the assertive personal declaration of the self-portrait had given way to the more impersonal professional formula of the commissioned work.
By 1551 the perfect has become the imperfect, and pingebat has replaced pinxit. The imperfect in artist signatures carried a specific resonance. In Book XXXV of his Natural History, Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) praised the Greek painter Apelles of Kos (fl. 4th century BCE) for signing his works ‘Apelles faciebat’ — Apelles was making this — rather than the completed ‘fecit,’ a habit Pliny interpreted as a gesture of modesty, implying the work remained open to criticism and revision, the artist declining to declare it finished. The painter’s equivalent, pingebat over pinxit, drew on the same construction. Michelangelo (1475–1564) signed the Pietà in St Peter’s Basilica, Rome, MICHAEL ANGELUS BONAROTUS FLORENTINUS FACIEBAT, adapting the sculptor’s form of the same imperfect, and Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) used effingebam in his 1500 Self-Portrait, signing Albertus Durerus Noricus ipsum me proprijs sic effingebam coloribus aetatis anno XXVIII, I, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, was depicting myself in these my own colours, at age twenty-eight (Boffa 2013).
Whether van Hemessen was conscious of that lineage when she moved from ego me pinxi to pingebat cannot be established. Antwerp in the mid-sixteenth century was sufficiently steeped in humanist scholarship (Pliny circulated in print editions from 1469 and was widely read in learned circles) for the resonance to have been available to a painter working within a cultivated workshop tradition, even if it cannot be proven to have been sought. That painters of the period moved between the two forms without apparent consistency makes it difficult to read intention into either choice, though for a woman operating professionally in a field with almost no precedent for her presence, the act of signing in full, on every securely attributed work, was already not a neutral gesture.
The sitter, for all her evident wealth, has not survived the centuries with a name; the painter has.
References
De Clippel, K. (2004) Catharina van Hemessen (1528–na 1567). Een monografische studie [Catharina van Hemessen (1528–after 1567). A monographic study]. Brussels: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten
Droz-Emmert, M. (2004) Catharina van Hemessen. Malerin der Renaissance [Catharina van Hemessen. Painter of the Renaissance]. Basel: Schwabe Verlag
Boffa, D. (2013) ‘Sculptors’ signatures and the construction of identity in the Italian Renaissance’, in A Scarlet Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Sarah Blake McHam, pp. 35–56. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/2011416/Sculptors_Signatures_and_the_Construction_of_Identity_in_the_Italian_Renaissance (Accessed: 24 May 2026).
National Gallery, London (n.d.) Portrait of a Woman, NG 4732. Available at: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/catharina-van-hemessen-portrait-of-a-woman (Accessed: 24 May 2026).
National Gallery, London (n.d.) Portrait of a Man, NG 1042. Available at: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/catharina-van-hemessen-portrait-of-a-man (Accessed: 24 May 2026).
Pliny the Elder (c. AD 77) Naturalis Historia [Natural History], Praefatio, 26. Translated by H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library 330. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Catharina van Hemessen, artist entry no. 37344. RKDartists. Available at: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/artists/37344 (Accessed: 24 May 2026).
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Catharina van Hemessen, Self-Portrait, 1548. RKDimages, image no. 41167. Available at: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/41167 (Accessed: 24 May 2026).
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (n.d.) Catharina van Hemessen, Portrait of a Woman, 1548, SK-A-4256. Available at: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-A-4256 (Accessed: 24 May 2026).
Sutton, E. (ed.) (2019) Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands, 1500-1700. Amsterdam University Press