Visible. Plautilla Nelli and her Last Supper restored

By Linda Falcone, Susanna Bracci, Silvia Ciappi and 6 more

Plautilla Nelli and her Last Supper
Sister Plautilla Nelli’s magnificent painting, the Last Supper, has returned to the museum spotlight at Santa Maria Novella, Florence, Italy.

In Renaissance Florence, Plautilla Nelli founded a workshop of nun-artists and authored a 21-foot Last Supper she would sign, ‘Pray for the Paintress’.
Over four centuries later, international art lovers band together to salvage her forgotten masterpiece. Now the world’s largest work by an early female artist is on public display in the Museum of Santa Maria Novella. A four-year journey of restoration and research, this quest is a bridge across time and the contemporary answer to Nelli’s appeal, where the past and present meet and make history, in Florence, today.

INDEX:
Tommaso Sacchi / Introduction

TODAY AND IN HISTORY
Linda Falcone / Unveiling
Silvia Colucci / On the trail of Plautilla’s Last Supper

CONSERVATION AND DETAILS
Rossella Lari / Shared impressions and choral knowledge
Silvia Ciappi / Transparencies of light
Francesco Morena / A porcelain symphony

WORK IN PROGRESS
Susanna Bracci, Donata Magrini / Plautilla’s palette

NELLI ANEW
Andrea Muzzi / ‘A nun who paints’
Padre Aldo Tarquini O.P. / In black and white

Bibliography


Advancing Wome Artists Foundation
Advancing Women Artists, an American not-for-profit organization, is committed to identifying and restoring artwork by women in Florence’s museum storerooms. Myriad paintings and sculptures by groundbreaking women artists have been overlooked for centuries and countless works are currently in need of restoration. As of today, compelling artistic treasures continue to be a silent, undiscovered part of the city’s creative heritage. Through education (publications, seminars, and conferences) and by exhibiting these works in Florence and farther afield, it is possible to reveal this vital cultural legacy and promote its importance in Italy and the world.
www.advancingwomenartists.org

• Language: English
• Publisher: THE FLORENTINE PRESS
• Release date: Nov 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9788897696209

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Introduction

Sister Plautilla Nelli’s magnificent painting, theLast Supper, has returned to the museum spotlight at Santa Maria Novella, following conservation efforts which offer us a rare opportunity to bear witness to this woman artist’s remarkable oeuvre, by restoring her masterwork to the public. Nelli’s testimony is all the more significant when considering that, as a female and a nun, she was forbidden from apprenticing in a traditional workshop setting. This obstacle hindering Nelli’s artistic education could not, however, prevent her from gaining renowned in Florence and beyond, which ultimately triggered her acknowledgment in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives.

Nelli’s Last Supper is the crowning restoration of a series of conservative measures and cultural initiatives made possible thanks to the support of Advancing Women Artists (AWA), a US non-profit organization whose work has given the Florentine convent artist the visibility she deserves. The painter’s acclaim was further enhanced by her first-ever monographic exhibition at the Uffizi Galleries in 2017, in which the Municipality of Florence participated, loaning Nelli’s Annunciation, now on permanent display in the Palazzo Vecchio Museum.

The Last Supper now takes its place among the myriad works attributed to Plautilla Nelli that AWA has restored. Nelli’s largest and most challenging work, the Last Supper was created, with the help of her sister nuns, for the Convent of Santa Caterina da Siena in Cafaggio, but it has been stored at Santa Maria Novella for over two centuries. This long-awaited project was patiently developed in collaboration with the Florentine Superintendence and the Dominican Friars of Santa Maria Novella, and finally made possible thanks to an agreement drafted in 2015 between the City Administration and AWA, which spearheaded a crowdfunding campaign that successfully raised international public awareness about the painting’s plight and its important recovery. The success of this advantageous collaboration is abundantly clear.

Thus, once again, we witness the fulfillment of our shared objective to research, restore and promote art by women in Florence. Indeed, our Municipal Administration has deeply believed in the value of this goal since early days—so much so, that in 2016, the Fiorino d’Oro, Florence’s highest honor, was awarded to Jane Fortune, AWA’s founder and president, who sadly passed away recently. The award was presented in recognition of Fortune’s unwavering dedication to rediscovering artworks by women artists in Florentine museum collections and to rescuing them from oblivion by promoting their work and financing conservation projects and public exhibitions.

Tommaso Sacchi

Councilior of Culture for the Municipality of Florence

Unveiling

Defining moments in Nelli’s modern-day quest

Linda Falcone

Fifty percent of literate women in the Renaissance were confined to convents, because the noble and merchant classes would often provide marriage dowries for their eldest daughter alone. Contrary to our modern view of monastic life, convents were centers of culture and power—so much so, that the number of girls from the same family accepted into a single nunnery was often limited, for rival dynasties feared the consequences of having too many allied and educated women living under one roof. There was indeed power in the convent of Santa Caterina: within its walls, Nelli founded an all-women workshop-of-sorts and sold her art to Florentine nobles who believed them spiritual relics. An entrepreneur and art collector, she bought, sold and traded. But Nelli’s revolution did not stop there. She ventured beyond the small-scale decorative work that nun artists were expected to produce as a way to avoid sloth, and produced large-scale Bible-inspired works, in an era where women simply did not tackle history painting, life-size figures or, least of all, portrayals of the Last Supper, which were considered to epitomize male mastery.

Yet, not only does she paint one, she signs it. And in doing so she speaks to posterity. Renaissance masters did not generally sign their works, but Nelli does even more than that: she accompanies her signature with a call to action: ‘Orate pro pictora, pray for the ‘pictora’—painter in the female form. This petition, inscribed on the Last Supper’s upper left corner, became the guiding motto of its four-year restoration: pray for the paintress so that the hidden half of the Renaissance may be fully revealed. Pray for the paintress so that modern-day women may participate in the strength of her creative legacy and that art lovers the world over may be moved to safeguard her art and share the uniqueness of her story.

During a recent visit to the Large Cloister at Santa Maria Novella, while filming for the upcoming television special on the restoration of Nelli’s masterwork, the film crew spent a significant amount of time focusing on frescos featuring Dominican women. One damaged fresco particularly caught my eye: the once-portrait of Saint Caterina de’ Ricci from Prato, a nun and Nelli’s contemporary. The whole of her face had been completely erased by the vicissitudes of history. ¹ This moving image, or lack thereof, seemed a symbol of ‘oblivion’. It reminded me of Nelli—the pioneering woman whose visage I so longed to see. Perhaps because of her religious role and the sinfulness of self-affirmation, her oeuvre lacks a self-portrait—a fundamental ‘marketing’ tool for early women artists who sought to establish their credibility as professional painters by depicting themselves before an easel. It was then that it struck me—Nelli did not leave posterity an image of herself producing art, but her signature serves the same function. A rarity in her time, it is discreet but still significant—a knowing wink—a self-portrait in script.

Praying for the paintress

In November 2016, just days after being awarded the Fiorino d’Oro, Florence’s highest honor, US philanthropist and author Jane Fortune (1942–2018) was diagnosed with stage-four cancer. Although personal details such as these are not often included within the pages of conservation catalogs, Fortune’s diagnosis was, in fact, a catalyst for ‘historic’ events that followed and, in large measure, this news would change Nelli’s fate as well. For over a decade, Fortune had championed the cause of recovering the art of Nelli and other forgotten women painters of Florence; the time had come for her to witness the worldwide effects of her endeavors. For 46 days, beginning 1 March 2017, advocates of Advancing Women Artists would spare no effort to raise the seed money needed to fund a significant portion of the Last Supper’s conservation program, through a crowd-funding campaign called ‘TheFirstLast’ and, in so doing, demonstrate to the organization’s founder how her legacy was already being embraced and upheld by art aficionados the world over.

Fittingly, the campaign’s launch was celebrated in Nelli’s adoptive home, in the atmospheric ancient Refectory of Santa Maria Novella. The city’s First Citizen, Mayor Dario Nardella, made the project’s first gift followed by donors from Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, United Kingdom, USA and United Arab Emirates. Fortuitously, the campaign was made public exactly one week before the Uffizi’s first ever Plautilla show, ² which featured 15 of the 20 paintings and drawings attributed to the artist that had been restored by Fortune and AWA starting in 2007.

In the months following these two Nelli-centered events, the artist’s achievements were widely publicized in the international press. She made the headlines in over 90 magazines and newspapers worldwide, including The Guardian, USA Today, Italy’s Corriere della Sera, Spain’s El Pais, Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Woche, to name a few. Those tracking Nelli’s newfound fortune could not help but wonder what Bonfire-of-the-Vanities friar Savonarola would have thought to see one of his most devout followers make the pages of Vanity Fair. Nelli, Florence’s new ‘grande dame’, is debuting in the hallowed halls of the Uffizi, Fortune remarked. "She is finally getting her due and her Last Supper will soon be saved—it is the jewel in her crown." ³

Three days before the campaign’s Easter Sunday deadline, despite gifts from 409 donors from 14 countries, ‘TheFirstLast’ was $10,000 short of its goal. ⁴ It was Holy Thursday—the very evening Nelli’s painting depicts—and somehow the inscription below her signature would not leave my mind. With so much enthusiasm surrounding the recovery of Nelli’s opus, accepting the possibility of not reaching our target did not seem an option. Defeat could not be the message sent to the artist across the ages, nor could failure be the message modern women would glean from our efforts. Because all known options were exhausted, there was only one solution left—the one Nelli herself had provided some 460 years before: ‘ Orate pro pictora’.

The prayer sent to the skies on that Thursday on Nelli’s behalf did not make mention of the dollars and cents AWA hoped to collect in less than three days’ time. It was a wish that our best intentions might remain steadfast beyond all setbacks—because, sums aside, success was everywhere. Artists, art professors, actors, writers, students and professionals from all over the globe had mobilized for Nelli. Images of her Last Supper were generating ‘fan mail’ from cultural institutions and historical societies throughout the world—from the Far West to the Far East; few had known of this ‘hidden’ treasure, everyone wanted to see it saved.

The next day, Good Friday, I received an email, whose message was simple. It was from Mark Smith, an Italophile author and tour manager in North Carolina who I did not know personally: ‘How much are you missing?’ he wrote. ‘I want to put you over the top.’

Mark made his major gift in honor of his mother Helen Dehnke Smith,