Restoration Conversations magazine

Restoration 

Conversations 

ISSUE 6, AUTUMN 2024 

Special 

features: 

Vanessa Bell 

at MK Gallery 

FAMM opens its 

doors in the heart 

of Provence 

WOMEN’S STORIES: TODAY AND THROUGH THE CENTURIES

From the Editor 

As we move towards winter, this issue of Restoration Conversations 

brings a splash of garden colour, with stunning works by contemporary 

botanical painter Marieluise Bantel, in conversation with the British 

Museum’s impressive oeuvre of floral works by Mary Delaney, whose 

fascinating story flows from Molly Peacock’s pen in The Paper Garden. 

Federica Parretti’s recounting of twentieth-century painter Lola Costa and 

her garden estate, Il Palmerino, re-conjures a reality we’ve always known: 

women of all ages and eras find their power among flowers. 

The varied exhibitions featured in this issue, with their wealth of insights 

and impressions – from Christian Levett’s newly opened FAMM museum 

in Mougins, to the silent ‘Revelations’ of Sant’Orsola’s ‘unconstructed’ 

exhibition venue, also provide ‘fertile mind-space’ for growing. Louise 

Bourgeois’ late works at the Museo degli Innocenti and Museo Novecento 

or Vanessa Bell’s ‘A World of Form and Colour’ at MK Gallery – with her art 

chock-full of ‘Charleston brightness’ – constitute another kind of garden, 

where paintings and gouaches grow as plentiful as plants. Our ‘Personal 

Reflections’ series continues with Glynis Owen’s heartfelt story of her 

tribute in bronze to cellist Jacqueline du Pré. Enjoy the issue! 

Fondly, 

Linda Falcone 

Managing Editor, Restoration Conversations 

Managing Editor 

Linda Falcone 

Contributing Editor 

Margie MacKinnon 

Design 

Fiona Richards 

FPE Media Ltd 

Publisher 

Calliope Arts Foundation, London 

Video maker for RC broadcasts 

Francesco Cacchiani, Bunker Film 

www.calliopearts.org 

Instagram: @calliopearts_restoration 

YouTube: Calliope Arts 

Autumn 2024 • Restoration Conversations 3

Charleston Festival 2024, ph. Lee Robbins 

4 Restoration Conversations • Autumn 2024

CONTENTS AUTUMN 2024 

MANY TALENTS, MULTIPLE VENUES 

6 Vive la Différence! 

12 New Babies at Ninety-Nine 

18 A Cage and a Choir 

24 Upcomiing Insights 

38 A Radical Female Perspective 

WHEN GARDENS GREW 

36 What Shall We Plant this Year, Signora? 

42 Flora Delicana 

48 Preserving a Paper Garden 

50 Late Bloomer 

56 Begin Again, with Blooms 

SAFEGUARDING LEGACIES 

62 Personal Reflections... Jacqueline du Pré 

68 Florence’s Daughters at the Innocenti 

74 Vasari... and Milestone Women 

80 Art Detectives for Violante 

86 With Every Clue You Pursue 

92 Revelations at Sant’Orsola 


FAMM in Mougins on the evening of the opening, 

ph. Jérôme Kelagopian 


Vive la différence! 

FAMM opens its doors in the 

artistic heart of Provence 

No one needs an excuse to attend a party in the south of France 

on a balmy night in June when the sun, just past the solstice, 

lingers in the sky ‘til late in the evening and the scent of lavender 

perfumes the air. But, if one were looking for an excuse, what 

could be better than the opening of a new museum in the 

beautifully preserved hilltop town of Mougins, once home to 

some of the most famous artists of the twentieth century? We 

will leave those artists unnamed, however, because the museum 

in question – FAMM – celebrates a different group of artists. As 

the phonetic pronunciation of its name cleverly suggests, FAMM 

(a homophone of the French ‘femme’) is a museum dedicated 

solely to the work of female artists – the first such private 

museum in Europe. 

Works by some 80 artists, created from the mid-1800s to the 

present, fill the four floors of the museum. Well-known names 

such as Mary Cassatt, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo and 

Helen Frankenthaler share wall space with the less familiar 

Jane Graverol, Giosetta Fioroni and Sahara Longe. FAMM’s 

itinerary takes visitors through the history of modern art from 

Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Surrealism to Abstract 

Expressionism and figurative and contemporary art. 


Above: Christian Levett (centre) with guests at FAMM’s inauguration, ph. Jérôme Kelagopia 

Our host for the VIP opening is Christian Levett, 

the museum’s owner, whose eponymous collection 

is the source of the artworks on display. In fact, 

the Christian Levett Collection contains over 500 

paintings, sculptures and photographs by women 

from which FAMM will choose a rotating selection 

of 100 works to exhibit. The museum is housed 

in a modest, stone building that in an earlier life, 

during the Middle Ages, was the village prison. In 

the ten years before its reincarnation as FAMM, it 

was the Mougins Museum of Classical Art where 

Levett showcased his collection of classical 

antiquities. 

In its most recent transformation, the relatively 

restricted dimensions of the building presented 

design challenges, which have been admirably 

met by Levett’s team. Bold colours on the walls 

open up the spaces, and well-placed lighting 

illuminates the works and creates the volume 

necessary for the larger pieces. Discrete ‘bumpers’ 

along the floor prevent viewers from getting too 

close to the works without the need for more 

obtrusive barriers. Glass balustrades add to the 

openness and a lift, which transports visitors from 

the second floor to the basement level, helps 

traffic flow smoothly throughout. The small but 

welcoming entrance hall contains only a few 

artworks providing a capsule of what the museum 

is all about. On the left is Juana Romani’s Baroqueinspired 

Herodiade, from 1890, while straightahead 

is Tracey Emin’s Always More, a neon 

installation created in 2015. Turning to enter the 


gallery proper, the visitor comes face-to-face with 

a “wall of women”, photographic portraits of many 

of the artists whose works are exhibited within. 

These portraits neatly disguise the lockers behind 

them – one is tempted to see them as an allusion 

to the hidden depths of the lives of the artists. 

But, back to the party. The evening begins with 

a welcome glass of champagne, served up at 

the nearby ‘L’Amandier’, the restaurant formerly 

owned by renowned chef Roger Vergé and now 

by Levett himself. Guests mingle at the all-night 

cocktail party while groups take it in turns to tour 

the museum. Later, there will be live music with 

a swing band and a DJ set for those who want to 

dance as the stars come out. Stars of a different 

kind are also on hand. Among the guests are 

several of the contemporary artists whose works 

are displayed in the museum: sculptors Beth 

Carter and Nicole Farhi, painter Elizabeth Columba 

and photographer Delphine Diallo, among others. 

Their pride at being included in the collection and 

seeing their work exhibited in the company of 

some of their artistic heroines is palpable. 

A visitors’ booklet identifies the artworks and 

provides background information about each 

of them in the artists’ own words. Multi-lingual, 

well-versed guides are stationed on every floor to 

answer questions. They are both knowledgeable 

and eager to share what they have only recently 

learned about the artists and their works. (Shout 

out to the helpful young woman on the basement 

level who provided valuable insights into Stacey 

Gillian Abe’s ‘Whispers of Sorghum II’, pointing out 

the historical and cultural significance of Abe’s 

use of indigo in her striking portrait, as well as the 

subtle embroidered elements which add texture 

and a delicate contrast to the strong figures.) 

Above: FAMM, installation shot, with Lee Krasner’s Prophecy (centre), ph. Jérôme Kelagopia 


CaptionsFAMM installation shot, with Jenny Saville’s Generation (centre) and Cecily Brown’s Couple (left), ph. Jérôme Kelagopia 


Above: FAMM installation shot, with sculpture by Barbara Hepworth and paintings by Amaranth Ehrenhalt and Perle Fine, ph. Jérôme Kelagopia 

Moving from one room to the next, it is no surprise 

to bump into Christian Levett leading one of the 

tours. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the 

art and artists in his collection and a passion for 

sharing it with all those who show an interest. A 

champion of women artists and an astute collector 

of their works, he has supported exhibitions of art 

by women in London, Florence and elsewhere. 

“The most important thing [in creating a collection],” 

says Levett, “is that each piece is a great work of 

art. If that is the criterion, you end up with a rich 

and diverse collection.” 

Is it necessary or desirable to have a gallery 

solely devoted to women artists? The benefits 

of an all-woman exhibition were questioned as 

far back as 1976, with the ‘Women Artists, 1550- 

1950’ exhibition at the Los Angeles County 

Museum of Art, curated by Linda Nochlin and 

Ann Sutherland Harris. Harris herself expressed 

the view that this female-only exhibition should 

not be seen as a model to be repeated over 

and over, but rather hoped it would be a pivotal 

event which would make any future exhibitions 

with this theme unnecessary. 

Perhaps visitors to FAMM will be drawn to the 

museum in part by its women-only theme – and 

why not, when women’s art still makes up such a 

small percentage of the works exhibited elsewhere 

on gallery walls? But the art here speaks very 

loudly and clearly for itself. These are works that 

are worthy of any art institution. So, while visitors 

may come for the novelty of a ‘women’s museum’, 

they will stay – and return – simply to appreciate 

the beautiful, challenging, innovative, witty and 

thought-provoking artworks that make up this 

groundbreaking collection. And that is something 

to celebrate. 

MARGIE MACKINNON 

Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins (FAMM) is 

located in Mougins, France. Visit www.famm.com/ 

en for information on tickets and opening hours. 

A FAMM guide is also available on the Bloomberg 

Connects App. 


New babies at 

ninety-nine 

Louise Bourgeois and ‘Do Not Abandon Me’ 

Louise Bourgeois’ gouaches are wilfully intense but also 

imprecise – their colour left to spread or fade without apology. 

For those unfamiliar with the technique, gouache is opaque 

watercolour, and its end result is matte and highly pigmented. 

The artist, who is one of the twentieth century’s most famous 

sculptors, lacks control in these pieces – which appears to be 

very much the point. 

Her Florence show at the Museo Novecento is entitled ‘Do Not 

Abandon Me’, just like her ‘motherhood series’ on display. Its title 

reminds me of something a teacher once told me after serving 

several summers at a camp for foster children: “No matter the 

abuse, they always want their mother.” That statement had left 

me feeling unsettled, and for me, the show has a similar effect. 

Co-curator Stefania Rispoli put the art’s energy into words: “For 

Bourgeois, maternity was the fil rouge or common thread of her 

whole artistic practice, and its conception was not necessarily 

positive. She depicts a dramatic, often complex brand of 

maternity, which encompasses both mother and daughter.” 


The exhibition ‘Do Not Abandon Me’ was created in 

close dialogue with the history of the building that 

houses our museum, the Ex-Leopoldine Convent, a 

complex established in the 13th century and run for 

centuries by all-female communities.” 

Sergio Risaliti 

Exhibition co-curator and the 

Museo Novecento’s artistic director 

Above: Louise Bourgeois’ Spider Couple at the Museo Novecento for ‘Do Not Abandon Me’, ph. Federica Narducci 


Above: Louise 

Bourgeois, 2007, 

The Feeding. 

Collection: The 

Easton Foundation, 

New York, 

ph. Christopher 

Burke 

Right: Gouache on 

paper by Louise 

Bourgeois, on show 

at ‘Do Not Abandon 

Me’, ph. Federica 

Narducci 

Louise Bourgeois’ 

art is © The Easton 

Foundation / 

Licensed by S.I.A.E., 

Italy and VAGA 

at Artists Rights 

Society (ARS) NY 


Bourgeois’ mother – whom she called her best 

friend – died just after the artist turned 21, and her 

struggle with the trauma of that loss was life-long. 

In the Bourgeois show, we see multiple mothers, 

not their faces, usually their bodies. Whatever the 

sentiment they convey, they are all vessel-like and 

there is a rare form of beauty in their protruding 

bellies, from expectation or pain. There is a 

variety of mothers here. Some face the threat of 

miscarriage. Some seem more peaceable than the 

babies they’ll be bearing. 

The Bourgeois babies are as bright as blood lost 

during delivery, and even in the quiet of Museo 

Novecento – a monastery-made-museum – it is 

clear these beings are born into a world of struggle. 

That is what I get from a good number of the weton-wet 

gouaches, which form the backbone of this 

well-hung exhibition. The gouaches represent five 

years of art production, which the artist began at 

the age of 94. I am in awe of Bourgeois undaunted 

at 99, still searching her subconscious – still driven 

to bring brush to page. 

But I am not a mother, and I do not have a clue 

what to do with these babies. The artist’s late-inlife 

newborns are feverish in their hunger, despite 

the works’ ubiquitous breasts, and in picture after 

picture, their needs look unnourished. Obviously, 

these kids are going to require some sort of a 

game plan to survive the messy aftermath of birth, 

and I want to know what Bourgeois proposes to 

do about it. 

In a mostly red show, muted by the solid white 

of thirteenth-century walls originally built to 

enclose and educate all-female communities, 

Right: Louise Bourgeois, 2008, Pregnant 

Woman. Collection: The Easton Foundation, 

New York, ph. Christopher Burke 


You cannot arrest the present. You have to abandon, 

every day, your past. And accept it. And if you can’t 

accept it, then you have to do sculpture! You see, 

you have to do something about it. If your need 

is to refuse to abandon the past, then you have to 

recreate it. Which is what I have been doing 

Above: Installation view with visitor, at Louis Bourgeois’ exhibition ‘Do Not Abandon Me’, ph. Federica Narducci 

I seek out the show’s in-print bits, to search for 

my answer – or hers. On one panel, a quote by 

the artist stands out like a lamppost: “You cannot 

arrest the present. You have to abandon, every 

day, your past. And accept it. And if you can’t 

accept it, then you have to do sculpture! You see, 

you have to do something about it. If your need 

is to refuse to abandon the past, then you have 

to recreate it. Which is what I have been doing.” 

Yes. She’s got a point. 

As soon as I began ‘listening’ more closely to 

the show, another ‘answer’ seemed to surface, 

thanks to the artist’s several small-scale works 

in fabric. Bourgeois’ textile sculpture Umbilical 

Cord, from 2003, usually in a private collection 

in New York, is especially poignant. I had seen it 

often in photograph form, and imagined it to be 

a life-sized piece. Instead, it could fit in the arms 

of a child, and the tiny baby found in the figure’s 

gauze belly would fill a real baby with delight. 

“These textile works are linked to the artist’s 

biography, because her parents were famous 

tapestry restorers living in the South of France. 

So fabric is an element associated with her life 

as a daughter, which she takes up again, and 

rediscovers as a mother and a mature woman,” 

says Stefania, who co-curated the ‘Louise 

Bourgeois in Florence’ project, with the Museo 

Novecento’s artistic director Sergio Risaliti, Philip 

Larratt-Smith from New York’s Easton Foundation 

and Arabella Natalini at the Museo degli Innocenti 

(see pp. 12-18). 

It is heartening to imagine Bourgeois, needle 

and thread in hand, engrossed in the possibly 

therapeutic craft that engaged women for 

centuries: doll-making. To call her sculptures 

‘dolls’ will strike some readers as derogatory, but I 

believe it a reference to that inborn human need 

to cradle and be cradled, and frankly, a woman 

best known for monumental bronze spider 

sculptures with spindly legs and magnet-like 

strength has earned the right to make something 

soft, if she wants. 


But speaking of softness, my imaginary dialogue 

with Bourgeois actually reached its resolution in 

a story Margie MacKinnon told at a celebratory 

September event at the Museo Novecento. She 

and fellow-exhibition sponsors Wayne McArdle 

and Christian Levett had missed the June opening 

because it coincided with the inauguration of 

FAMM, Christian’s museum for art by women in 

Mougins, France (see p. 6). 

She described her and Wayne’s first walk 

through the exhibition a few days later, as follows: 

“We arrived early in the morning and had the 

place almost all to ourselves. There was one other 

visitor – a young woman, a tour guide as it turned 

out, who was quite visibly pregnant. She asked 

us if we would take her photograph in front of 

one of Bourgeois’ vibrant gouache paintings of a 

pregnant woman – two women with their bellies 

bulging with the life inside them. It was a touching 

moment. And I have thought since about how, 

one day, this mother will sit down with her child 

and show her (or him) the photograph, and it will 

be one of that child’s earliest interactions with art 

– a personal connection with Louise Bourgeois, an 

artist for whom the mother and child relationship 

was a recurring and powerful theme.” 

My take away is this: The Bourgeois conversation 

is going to continue with many a baby currently 

in their mother’s belly. Those who struggle the 

hardest will likely “do sculpture”. But some will 

sew, or make gouaches of their own. Yet one thing 

is certain: whatever they do, these babies – even 

if they grow to be a hundred – will never stop 

wanting their mothers. 

LINDA FALCONE 

Above: Louise Bourgeois, 2003 Umbilical Cord, Private Collection, New 

York, on show at ‘Do Not Abandon Me’, ph. Federica Narducci 



A cage and a choir 

Louise Bourgeois at the Innocenti Museum 

Not long before Filippo Brunelleschi began hoisting his peppery 

stew up to the top of Florence’s Cathedral to feed workers 

building his massive dome, he won another historic commission, 

at ground-level, from the then-powerful Art of Silk Guild, of 

which he was a member. Brunelleschi was a goldsmith, not 

formally an architect, so his commissions were regulated by 

the ‘silk people’. He was to build a foundling hospital in Piazza 

Santissima Annunziata (1421–1428), on merchant Francesco 

Datini’s dime, and the children it took in were to live in a lofty 

and graceful place that recalled protection, not abandonment. 

That was how Brunelleschi came to design the first-ever example 

of Renaissance architecture. 

Today, Brunelleschi’s hospital is home to the Innocenti Institute, 

Museum and Archive (see p. 68), which preserve its multi-century 

history, whilst expanding its social vocation in support of children 

in today’s world. Yet to fully understand the museum’s impressive 

collection and its recent one-work show featuring twentiethcentury 

French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois, we’d best 

go back to 1419, when the Duomo ceiling stood gaping, just a 

few blocks away. The cathedral, whose building started in 1296, 

was partially open-air during the 140 years of its construction, 

because no one knew how to build a dome large enough to 

cover it. Without the dome, not just the cathedral, but Florence 

itself, was incomplete. 

Left: Installation view of Louise Bourgeois’ exhibition Cell XVIII (Portrait) at the Museo degli Innocenti. 

ph. Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy of the Istituto degli Innocenti 


The still unbuilt cupola, which would ultimately 

become the largest masonry vault ever built, 

was on everyone’s mind. Florentines knew the 

shape well from their icons of the Virgin Mary; 

the cupola was her cape. The ‘Madonna of Mercy’, 

they called her, for she sheltered humanity 

under the maternal arc of her silky robe. Once 

Brunelleschi’s hospital was ready to be filled with 

children – and artwork – the Madonna of Mercy 

icon was revisited and became the Madonna of 

the Innocents, as babies in swaddling clothes or 

toddlers wearing the Innocenti’s uniform were 

depicted under the Madonna’s generous mantel. 

“Mary was understood as the force connecting 

the Earthly plane and the Divine Sphere, but 

she was also the figure that best represented 

the welcoming of children, and paintings of her 

are well-represented throughout the museum,” 

explains Arabella Natalini, the museum’s scientific 

curator and co-curator of the Louise Bourgeois Cell 

XVIII (Portrait) exhibition, hosted at the Innocenti 

Museum, from June to October 2024, as part of the 

‘Louise Bourgeois in Florence’ project, sponsored 

by Calliope Arts and Christian Levett Collection / 

FAMM, which included the show ‘Do Not Abandon 

Me’ at the Museo Novecento (see p. 12). 

We are inside the Museum’s rafted gallery, 

making our way to the sculpture on show, as Dr 

Natalini recounts the work’s connections with 

the place. “As plans for the ‘Louise Bourgeois in 

Florence’ project developed, I initially thought we 

would display Cell XVIII (Portrait) in the gallery, 

in direct conversation with Jacopino Del Conte’s 

Madonna degli Innocenti (of the Innocents) 

painting, because of the Bourgeois sculpture’s very 

clear connection with our Madonna iconography. 

Then it occurred to me the figure would also fit 

well in the choir – a room that once hosted the 

Innocenti’s female community. It was a place of 

segregation, but also of female fellowship.” 

On the way to the Choir Room, we pass the 

orphans’ art collection, commissioned to the likes 

of Domenico Ghirlandaio, Sandro Botticelli and 

Piero di Cosimo. To create art for the foundlings, 

they called in the crème de la crème. “Silk Guild 

patrons understood the importance of art and 

beauty in the development of the individual, from 

childhood onwards,” says Natalini. “A foundling 

hospital had to be functional and welcoming, 

but also beautiful. In the Renaissance mind, the 

building’s structural grace needed to be matched 

with outstanding inside art – as food for the 

children’s souls.” 

We can pause here, to imagine that this ‘food’ 

would have been especially important for the 

female children. The Innocenti’s male orphans 

were taught mathematics, music, grammar, 

painting and sculpture. The clergy took the boys 

who were best at their books, and others became 

members of the merchant class. Girls were often 

sent into service in patrician homes from 8 to 15, 

but all of them were taught to sew and weave. 

They were not educated with the boys, and 

were seldom taught to read or write, and never 

to use the abacus. Female cultural literacy was 

almost exclusively image-based, and through 

devotional art, they learned the power of story, 

and imagined the sacred figures worthy of their 

daily devotion, when they gathered in the Choir 

Room – to work and pray. 

In my mind, the orphans’ paintings were 

important for another reason too – they gave 

the girls a chance to enjoy the excesses of 

colour. From childhood and through their teens 

they wore all white. Blue frocks were allowed 

once they reached womanhood, but at 30, black 

became the only colour option available. After 36, 

they were transferred to the ‘hospice of Orbatello’, 

as old maids, where we can assume the black garb 

continued. Amidst the colour codes of their wellordered 

quasi convent-style life, I can’t help but 

think they got a thrill from works like Ghirlandaio’s 

Adoration of the Magi, whose supernatural 

brightness is intoxicating even today. 

“Do you see?” asks Dr Natalini, once we 

reach the Choir Room. “The Bourgeois figure’s 

downward slanted gaze looks towards the headlike 

figures her mantal enshrines and protects. 

Despite being caged, she is welcoming.” To me, the 

‘babies’ Bourgeois’ figure protects look like bombs 

Right: Museo degli Innocenti’s gallery, art itinerary, photos Pietro Savorelli, courtesy of the Istituto degli Innocenti 



Above: Arabella Natalini, exhibition co-curator, scientific director at the Museo degli Innocenti. ph. Olga Makarova 

waiting to go off – and I have yet to read whether 

that was the artist’s intent. The Choir Room is 

darkened, small and cavern-like, lit only by its 

ten display windows and tabernacles, which host 

small-scale devotional figures in papier-mâché 

and votive statues the girls created and ‘dressed’ 

in the miniature robes they sewed during spare 

time, mostly in the 1700s and 1800s. Bourgeois, 

the daughter of tapestry-restoring weavers would 

undoubtedly have appreciated their handiwork. 

Fabric was one of her preferred media, as Cell 

XVIII (Portrait) itself suggests. 

“When mass was held in the church on via 

Colonna, the Innocenti’s female community 

‘attended’ by peeking through the Choir Room’s 

long grated windows, to catch glimpses of the 

ritual performed by the male community down 

below,” Natalini explains. “They could not go in 

person, only in spirit.” To me, that is the sentence 

that settles it. This quiet caped figure who also 

watches the world from behind her own silent 

grate, is at home there. 

In my mind, this one-work show is purely site 

specific, and its placement in the Choir Room 

brings me to a simple but definitive conclusion: 

Louise Bourgeois is one of the most talked about 

artists of the twentieth century. She was a person 

of intense, sometimes controversial artwork and 

worldwide success. Her public image is as far as 

you can get from the Innocenti’s women, who lived 

in monastery-like silence. Still, her soul seems in 

conversation with theirs somehow, and we have 

the artwork to prove it. 

LINDA FALCONE 

The Louise Bourgeois Cell XVIII (Portrait) exhibition 

at the Museo degli Innocenti was created in 

conjunction with the Museo Novecento, the City of 

Florence and the Easton Foundation of New York, 

with co-curators Sergio Risaliti, Philip Larrat- 

Smith, Stefania Rispoli and Arabella Natalini. 


Right: Installation view of Louise Bourgeois’ exhibition Cell XVIII (Portrait), ph. Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy of the Istituto degli Innocenti 


Upcoming insights 

The Curators’ Quaderno… our new series 

With the advent of Florence’s Festival dei Popoli 

cinema festival in November and the opening of 

Trieste’s photography exhibition on Fondazione 

Alinari per la Fotografia’s collection from the Wulz 

atelier (December 14), Calliope Arts and the Florentine Press 

are gearing up to produce the third and fourth issues of their 

newest publication The Curators’ Quaderno, which is distributed 

in printed and digital versions to subscribers of The Florentine. 

Calliope Arts co-founder Margie MacKinnon explains the new 

publication’s premise: “Exhibitions, cultural festivals and grant 

projects aimed at the rediscovery of women’s contributions to 

history and their relevance today do not begin on inauguration 

day,” she explains. “They are the product of a far longer process 

of collaboration and ‘care’, in which creative personalities or 

‘curators’ band together to research, rediscover, document, or 

display these women’s achievements. The Curator’s Quaderno is 

about insight into curators’ intentions. It is the starting point of a 

journey the reader shares.” 


Left: Festival dei Popoli 2024, poster. 

Above: Judit Elek, ph. Lucinda Douglas-Menzies 

The first edition of this notebook-style ‘exhibition 

aid’, featuring Lola Costa and Il Palmerino 

captured the spirit of the expat English artist, 

who made Il Palmerino her raison d’être, both 

on and off canvas (see p. 36). Edition Two, Louise 

Bourgeois in Florence, brought together the 

project’s four curators at the Museo Novecento 

and the Museo degli Innocenti, whose evocative 

reflections offer readers an inside look at what 

it takes to build two exhibitions for one of the 

twentieth century’s top sculptors (see pp. 12-23). 

The Festival dei Popoli 

2 to 10 November 2024 

“The Festival dei Popoli, the oldest event 

specialising in documentaries in Europe, 

celebrates its 65th edition in Florence with a 

wide-ranging and articulated programme, with 

special focus on women’s cinema,” says Alessandro 

Stellino, the festival’s artistic director. “It is not a 

question of observing numerical equity merely by 

respecting quotas. Indeed, within the palimpsest of 

this edition, more than 50 percent of participating 

films are shot by women. Therefore, the real issue 

lies in providing an account of the extraordinary 

vitality expressed by a brand of cinema that, today 

more than ever, finds privileged representation in 

the female gaze.” 

The filmmakers featured in The Curators’ 

Quaderno form part of the festival’s cultural 

section ‘Women Trailblazers in Documentary 

Cinema’, which stems from a three-year grant 

programme sponsored by Calliope Arts, whose 

aim is to give women filmmakers and women’s 

stories greater coverage on the silver screen. 


What is it like to be a French-Senagalese filmmaker 

documenting the return of stolen artwork and 

their journey from France back to the Republic of 

Benin? What moved women partisans to collective 

action in the Balkans at the onset of the Second 

World War? International filmmakers Mati Diop, 

and Renata Poljak tell these stories in film in their 

2024 releases Dahomey and Woods that Sing, 

respectively. 

Another film worthy of note is Remanence 

(Sabine Groenewegen, 2024), which combines two 

recently discovered archival sources to evoke the 

lost history of a Dutch women’s peace movement 

from the 1930’s that brought women together in 

collective action. One of the Festival’s highlights 

is the in-person presence of Hungarian filmmaker 

Judit Elek, who will host master classes inspired 

by her work spanning more than half a century. 

Meet the trailblazing director who, in the words 

of György Ráduly, Director of the Hungary Film 

Archive, has made “taboo-crushing films that are 

ground-breaking in terms of theme and choice 

of form, whether present-day psychological 

vignettes, sociological reports or works serving to 

probe historical traumas.” To join us at the Festival, 

held at Florence’s Teatro della Compagnia, please 

check venue dates and screening times at www. 

festivaldeipopoli.org 

A Wulz Studio exhibition 

13 December to 27 April 2024 

Are you curious to see samples representative 

of the wonderful outcomes of our project ’5,000 

Negatives’, designed to restore, research and 

digitize negatives, photos and other objects from 

the Wulz Studio Archive, with a special focus on 

Wanda and Marion Wulz? Calliope’s fans and 

friends will remember the sisters from our very 

first Florence project as donors of the exhibition 

‘Fotografe!’ organised by FAF (Fondazione Alinari 

per la Fotografia) and supported by CR Firenze. 

The partners are back together, this time for the 

Wulz Studio’s Trieste exhibition at the Magazzino 

delle Idee, created in collaboration with principal 

organiser ERPAC (Ente Regionale Patrimonio 

Culturale Regione Friuli Venezia Giulia). 

We are building a new Quaderno in anticipation 

of the show curated by Federica Muzzarelli and 

Antonio Giusa, which is scheduled to run from 

December 14 until the end of April. Readers can 

already begin to browse the newly ‘uploaded’ Wulz 

online archive (a project outcome!) at www.alinari. 

it. In the meantime, we have also started collecting 

insight from the project’s team of experts on 

everything from restoration to the search for 

accurate attributions. 

Wanda and Marion’s oeuvres have proved to be 

an ‘attribution headache’, even for the sharpest 

photography specialists, since the sisters worked 

together for decades, on both sides of the camera. 

The project’s photography consultant Emanuela 

Sesti shares the quirks of the quest. “It has been a 

challenge to check and confirm attribution of the 

sisters’ photographs. They took pictures of each 

other with great frequency, or they would swap 

places behind the camera, and often try to capture 

the same subject. Wanda would snap a photo, then 

step aside for Marion’s turn, and to determine ‘who 

took what’, we’ve tried to locate each vintage print 

in search of a possible signature. Then, we match 

the image with its negative, to see if the negative’s 

placement in the archive provides further 

information. Archival study by Marta Magrinelli has 

also uncovered whether the sisters documented a 

particular photograph in their invoices, ledgers or 

personal diaries.” To learn more about the venue 

Maggazzino delle idee and the Wulz Studio show, 

visit: www.magazzinodelleidee.it 

Would you like to receive your complimentary 

copy of The Curators’ Quaderno each time 

an issue is hot off the press? Become a The 

Florentine subscriber, by signing up on line: 

theflr.net/subscribe 


Above: Wanda Wulz, 1932 c. Three women perform gymnastic exercises, conversion of a glass plate negative. 

Alinari Archives – Wanda Wulz Archive, Florence. Alinari Foundation for Photography 


A radical female 

perspective 

Vanessa Bell at MK Gallery 

Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) is best known as a painter and 

founding member of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of English 

artists, writers and intellectuals which was influential in the first 

half of the twentieth century. She was born into a well-to-do 

literary and artistic family. Unusually, her parents encouraged 

her and her sister, the writer Virginia Woolf, to follow their 

own intellectual pursuits (while her two brothers studied at 

Cambridge). On the death of both parents, the four siblings 

moved to the then unfashionable Bloomsbury area of London, 

where they were intent on creating a new, freer way of living, 

after leaving behind the “gloom and depression” of their 

Victorian family home in Kensington. 

Bell was also a founder member, along with artist and critic 

Roger Fry and painter Duncan Grant, of the Omega Workshops, 

a project that combined artists’ studios and public showrooms 

with a view to incorporating the principles of modern art into 

the design of furniture, fabrics and household accessories. 

During the two world wars, Vanessa and other members of the 

group sought refuge in Charleston, a farmhouse in the Sussex 

countryside. It was not just her home but the embodiment 

of her artistic practice. Her life and her art were inseparable. 

Every visitor to Charleston was a potential model, every surface 

a potential canvas. 


Above: Vanessa Bell, 1912, Conversation Piece, University of Hull © Estate of Vanessa Bell, DACS 2024 


Ahead of the opening on October 19 of the 

exhibition Vanessa Bell – A World of Form and 

Colour, Restoration Conversations sat down with 

Fay Blanchard, Head of Exhibitions at MK Gallery, 

to discuss the artist and the renewed interest in 

her work and legacy. The exhibition, her largestever 

solo show, includes drawings, paintings, 

ceramics and furniture. 

Restoration Conversations: What was the 

impetus for the Vanessa Bell exhibition? 

Fay Blanchard: I think it is part of a general, 

sector-wide attempt to redress the balance in 

terms of the gender split of artists that have been 

exhibited [in the past]. Everyone is looking at 

‘who are the female artists that have not had the 

recognition they deserve?’ Around the time of the 

Second World War there was quite a big backlash 

against Bell’s work. At that time, the more angsty 

style of [Francis] Bacon and [Lucian] Freud became 

popular. And then it moved on to the abstraction 

of Victor Pasmore and [Patrick] Heron, and then 

you’ve got pop coming in. Bloomsbury didn’t 

align with any of those things and, in comparison, 

looked as if it wasn’t particularly avant garde. And 

I think also there was a lot of snobbery around it, 

that feeling that the art wasn’t socially engaged 

enough, and that it didn’t follow the accepted 

trajectory of modernism. 

Then, more recently, there’s been a huge reevaluation 

of Bell’s work and of Bloomsbury 

more widely. An academic called Christopher 

Reed published an important study looking at 

Bloomsbury as a subculture that created their 

own space where they could live in a different 

way within the dominant culture, rather than as 

a group with a manifesto to change the world. 

There have also been younger academics such 

as Rebecca Birrell and Claudia Tobin who have 

been looking at female artists not through the 

male-dominated accepted story of modernism 

but looking at the work on its own terms and [in 

Bell’s case] thinking that what she was doing was 

quite radical. She was taking traditionally female 

subjects but then presenting them in a radical 

new way. 

RC: More specifically, why is MK Gallery 

doing this show? Many of the paintings and 

objects can be seen at Charleston, Bell’s 

home in Sussex which has been preserved 

almost exactly as it was at her death in 1961. 

FB: With a lot of our historic shows, we like to 

take things out of one environment and put them 

in another to see how they get on; with George 

Stubbs, for example, we were taking paintings out 

of stately homes, putting them in a white cube 

gallery and actually looking at them as paintings. 

After visiting Charleston, I had the same thought 

about taking Bell’s works out of the house where 

it is impossible to disconnect them from the 

artist’s life. I wanted to see these paintings as 

paintings in a contemporary gallery space with 

great lighting to see them afresh. 

RC: The show, which comprises over 120 

pieces, includes almost an equal balance of 

paintings and decorative and other objects. 

Part of the Omega Workshops project was to 

blur the distinction between fine and applied 

art. Does the exhibition reflect this? 

FB: Yes, that’s how we are approaching it. For 

example, her designs for rugs very directly lead 

up to her working in painted abstraction, so that’s 

how we’re telling the story. With the other design 

items, we are not seeking to recreate Charleston 

as that would be impossible … and naff. So, what 

we’re doing instead is taking a lot of the items 

from Charleston and presenting them alongside 

the paintings [in which they appear] to show that 

the house was a never-ending project but also 

a kind of muse. I don’t know if that’s been done 

before, to present the paintings with the items 

from the house. 

RC: You are curating the show and creating a 

plan for the exhibition while waiting for the 

works on loan to be delivered to the gallery. 

How much is likely to change when you 

actually have the works in front of you? 

FB: When you have decided on the kind of 

narrative that you want to tell, that generally 


Above: Festival of the Garden, Charleston, ph. Holly Fernando 


Above: 


Left: Vanessa Bell, 1950 c. The Garden Room 

at Charleston © estate of Vanessa Bell. 

All rights reserved, DACS 2024. CHA/P/1567 

Recto, Charleston © The Charleston Trust 

doesn’t change enormously in the middle of 

installing the show. But there are always surprises. 

There are always things that are bigger, or smaller, 

than you think. There may be paintings you 

intended to put together, but the frames look 

awful together. Sometimes what worked on paper 

doesn’t work in the space … 

RC: Do you have a particular favourite object 

or painting in the exhibition? 

FB: There are a few that I am really fond of. One 

is Iceland Poppies (1908 –09) (pictured on the back 

cover). Bell is renowned as a colourist but I don’t 

think her work as a colourist very early in her 

career is that well known. The range of grays is so 

well handled, and then that pop of the red poppy 

is absolutely gorgeous. I can’t wait to see that in 

the context of the later works and how she comes 

back to that in other pieces. Another painting 

which I’ve never seen in real life that I’m excited 

we are including is Nursery Tea (c. 1912). She very 

deliberately pushed herself to work in a bigger 

scale. It was a real statement piece for her, because 

it’s a painting of children and nursemaids. It is a 

subject associated with a domestic space and a 

domestic scale, but she just blows it up to gallery 

scale, with these flat areas of colour and blank 

faces. It is a completely unsentimental depiction 

of childhood. 

RC: Vanessa Bell’s relationship to her garden 

has recently been examined in the ‘Gardening 

Bohemia’ exhibition at the Garden Museum 

in London. Does the garden at Charleston 

feature prominently in her work? 

FB: Yes, there are lots of paintings of the garden. 

Very often she’s inside the house looking out into 

the garden, or she’s bringing the garden into the 

house. The plants in her still lifes are still growing 

at Charleston, and she has her favourites – red 

hot pokers and artichoke flowers appear over and 

over again, sometimes in a way that you think 

there might be some symbolism there. 

RC: Do the gardeners at Charleston refer to 

the paintings to continue the sort of planting 

that Vanessa had there? 

FB: Yes. During the First World War they had to 

make the garden a vegetable garden. Afterwards, 

Roger Fry redesigned it, and it became primarily 

a flower garden. The Charleston gardeners 

still have some of the original plans to be able 

to maintain it as it was. And a huge amount of 

Vanessa’s photography was taken in the garden. 

RC: Are there photographs in the show too? 

FB: Yes, they are wonderful, but she didn’t 

use them as the basis of paintings. She was 

a prolific photographer, but it was a very 

individual practice. Alongside all the usual 

family shots, there are some which are more 

artistic or experimental. A lot of the time she 

was recording the plays they put on and the 

fancy dress. The impression you often get in the 

official photographs of Vanessa Bell is that she is 

quite stern. And in these photographs, they’re all 

messing around with the children and the dogs, 

they’re laughing … I really wanted to bring that 

side of Charleston into the show. 

RC: Bell has been described as having been 

overshadowed by other, better-known 

members of the Bloomsbury Group, in 

particular her sister, the writer Virginia Woolf. 

Has she finally emerged from that shadow? 

FB: Virginia actually brought more light onto 

Vanessa and the rest of the group during their 

lifetimes. Having a catalogue essay written by 

Woolf would bring greater audiences to Bell’s 

work. And it didn’t hurt that Bell’s closest friend, 

Roger Fry, and husband, Clive Bell, were the 

leading critics at the time, both of whom were 

putting emphasis on the work of the group. The 

two sisters were definitely competitive, although 

they apparently deliberately set out from a young 

age not to do the same thing. Virginia was words, 

Vanessa was images. After her death, Virginia’s 


The house in spring/summer, ph. Lee Robbins © The Charleston Trust 

reputation continued to grow whereas Vanessa 

was sidelined in her own lifetime. But before that, 

Virginia would have been a huge asset to have 

on your team. 

RC: In her canvases, Bell creates spaces so 

skilfully – walls, colours, upholstery, carpets 

and ceramics – we feel as if we are stepping 

into her world. Conversely, stepping into 

Charleston (the house) feels like entering 

into one of her canvases. Can you think of 

another artist whose art so intimately reflects 

her life? 

FB: There are quite a few examples of artists 

who made their home into a total work of art. 

And there are people like Niki de Saint Phalle, 

with her Tarot Garden where she lived in one of 

the sculptures. In Frida Kahlo’s house in Mexico 

City, she surrounded herself with things from 

her artwork, but didn’t make the house into one 

of her artworks. The closest thing I can think of 

is Monet’s garden. But I can’t think of any other 

example of an artist creating their house as an 

artwork and then going back to it as a sort of 

inspiration and a muse to then paint. Rebecca 

Birrell argues that Bell made Charleston a subject 

of her work because it was a consciously radical 

move to present this female-led space from a 

female perspective and in a modernist avant garde 

technique. And maybe that’s why Vanessa Bell not 

only created Charleston, but then recorded it over 

and over again in her paintings, because it just 


feels like a celebration. She seems to be saying, 

“this is where we’ve come from – the ‘gloom and 

depression’ - and this is where we are now – this 

light-filled, pattern-filled, free environment that 

we’ve made.” 


The exhibition ‘Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and 

Colour’, curated by Fay Blanchard and Anthony 

Spira, is on at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes from 19 

October 2024 to 23 February 2025. 

Calliope Arts is providing support to the exhibition 

through the Vanessa Bell Circle of Friends. 

Right: Music Room vase, 

potted by Phyllis Keyes, 

decorated by Vanessa Bell, 

c. 1932, Charleston Trust 

© Estate of Vanessa Bell. All 

rights reserved, DACS 2024 


“An English city girl with a French education, 

Lola learned to keep the estate alive. She was 

the ‘signora’ behind the easel painting her farm 

labourers, but she would stop mixing colours to 

help with the harvest.” 

Federica Parretti 


“What shall we 

plant this year, 

signora?” 

An interview with Federica Parretti 

on artist Lola Costa 

Federica Parretti, president of the 

Cultural Association Il Palmerino and 

manager of its garden-estate, recounts 

the life and art of twentieth-century 

English painter Lola Costa, her grandmother 

and the former owner of Il Palmerino, who 

immortalised the estate and the people who 

frequented it, in highly evocative canvases. 

Following the first-ever monographic show of 

Lola’s works at the artist’s home, fittingly called 

‘Return Home’, we sat down with Federica to 

record Lola’s story through four of the works 

displayed. 

The following are excerpts from that 

interview, whose intent, in Federica’s words, is 

to “describe the seasons of Lola’s life and art 

– her youth, maturity, and her late period – in 

order to truly see her life”. 

The farmers’ cycle, which Lola began as 

soon as she moved to Il Palmerino in 1935, 

captures what most struck her: the rhythm of 

the seasons. Before coming to Tuscany, Lola 

lived in London and Paris, highly industrialised 

cities. As a 33-year-old ‘city girl’, she first met Il 

Palmerino’s labourers, while standing in front 

of her easel. It was her way of introducing 

herself to these people, her way of relating to 

them. Lola did not want to be the aloof signora 

locked up in the house. For each phase of the 

harvest, from seeding to threshing, she was 

expected to give instructions. “What shall we 

plant this year, signora?” Lola adored nature, 

and she would work alongside the staff and 

farmers, to prune the vines (at first with a 

novice hand) or treat the well water. Beyond 

the vineyards and olive groves, there were 

chickens and rabbits to tend to, and in wartime, 

the building of a pigeon coop, for wild meat 

was a prized commodity during World War II, 

when resources were scarce for everyone. 

Lola’s diaries – which are now being 

studied – are filled with her observations, 

as to who the workers were and what they 

said and did. One peasant woman gave her a 

Left: Lola Costa, 1936 c. Fertilising cabbages 


Above, left: Lola Costa and life’s stages at Il Palmerino, Angeli Archive. 

Right: Lola Costa, 1937, Tulips and playing cards 

worthy piece of advice, “Don’t ever learn to milk 

your cow, because you’ll end up having to do it 

every day, whereas now, you can say you don’t 

know how.” That was the wisdom of the farming 

people, their Tuscan attitude. 

While compiling her archive, we have 

discovered two notebooks with sketches and 

drawings linked to studies of local farmers, the 

peasants, their postures and movements – how 

they used their bodies. She was not the only 

painter of her time to focus on ‘labour’ as a 

central theme. It started with the Macchiaoli, and 

painters like Lega in the 1800s, and of course, in 

Italy’s fascist years, ‘work’ was a central part of 

ubiquitous political discourse – it was in the air. 

Lola’s 1937 work, Tulips and Playing Cards, 

recounts the art fellowship Lola and her husband 

Federigo Angeli shared. She was already a painter 

when they met. Here, she rolls three of Federigo’s 

paintings into one. They worked in the same 

studio for twenty years, and painted the same 

subjects, she from her side of the room, and he 

from his. Her fruit plate looks thrown together, 

and it speaks of autumn, with several varieties 

of apples and inedible chestnuts. The tulips are 

wild – a rarity at Il Palmerino, even then. She 

includes Empoli glassware, along with the glass 

fruit plate, through which we see a table cloth, 

whose decorative motif recalls the patterns used 

in frescoes from fifteenth-century Florentine 

palaces – where Federigo worked as a restorer 

or to reproduce highly academic replicas of 

Renaissance art or decorative motifs. She looked 

at his work with admiration, and measures herself 

against him. Lola’s painting was freer, more daring, 

and despite the ‘tame’ nature of her subjects, her 

mindset as a painter was far more contemporary 

than that of her husband. 

The Garden (1950 c.) is Il Palmerino seen from 

Lola’s bedroom window, and the variety of greens 

she uses is striking. Federigo had trained her in 

brushwork, but there, she goes back to painting 



with a knife, the way she did before their fellowship. 

When Lola was widowed in 1952, at the age of 49, 

she took a stance against Federigo’s family, who 

urged her to leave the place: Il Palmerino was 

hers and she would manage it alone. By then, 

her affection for the estate was visceral. Lei è il 

Palmerino. Her adolescent children were sent to 

work, so they could contribute, because for Lola, 

the property was the thing. 

The yellow light in her garden picture is that 

of Florence. Our lives lie in the shade of that hill, 

with Florence hiding behind it. We see all of Il 

Palmerino here, the field, and the forest brush. 

The Italianate garden leading straight through to 

the productive fields. She used to call the land 

her own, ‘my trees’, she would say, and even today, 

every decision we make about the estate begs the 

question, “Would Lola like it?” 

With Artichokes and Eggs, we see Lola’s 

definitive style. Questo è lei. The year is 1974, 

and by this stage, her works are almost incisions. 

She scrapes the colour away and leaves forms 

and her brushstroke has become incisive. She is 

no longer ‘the learner’. Look at the intensity and 

vibrancy of her purple! That purple lasts a single 

day before turning yellow, and she captured the 

moment and froze it in time. We believe it to be 

a tribute to Vernon Lee. Violet for Violet Paget – 

Lola never called Lee by her penname, she was 

signorina Paget at home. In Lola’s mind, despite 

the author’s death, they shared a house. When Lee 

lived here, the vegetable garden – and artichokes, 

specifically – were right outside the front door. 

Lola’s lemon trees were started by Lee, and they 

are still alive and well today. 

Above: View of the exhibition ‘Return Home’ at Il Palmerino, ph. Viola Parretti; Right: The Curators’ Quaderno, cover, Issue 1 


Lola Costa, 1974, Artichoke flowers and eggs 

Lola is painting in morning light, and the canvas 

brings to mind her ‘still-life philosophy’. Fruit could 

be eaten only once, but its soul could be captured 

forever within the fibres of the canvas weave. 

For Lola, 1974 is post-cancer. During her recovery, 

she took up oil painting again, a media she had 

abandoned, at Federigo’s death. She worked with 

watercolour during that more than two-decade 

hiatus. With her diagnosis, Lola returned to oils. 

The doctors gave her three months to live, and, as 

if to spite them, she lived another 33 years. She 

regarded her tumour with the same gumption 

she’d conjured while deciding to stay on at Il 

Palmerino: “I’m going to prove you all wrong. 

I’m going to show you what I can do.” That’s the 

power of positive thinking, Tuscan style. 

LINDA FALCONE 

The ‘Return Home’ exhibition was part of the 

‘Estate Fiorentina,’ an initiative proposed within 

the City of Florence’s Operational Plan. It marked 

the start of a three-year programme entitled ‘The 

Florentine Garden: Early Women Ex-pats and 

Artists of Today’ organised by Il Palmerino 

Cultural Association and Calliope Arts 

Foundation, in collaboration with the British 

Institute of Florence (BIF). Its calendar will 

include lectures, exhibitions and a residency 

grant for a contemporary artist (TBA). A 

painter’s Florentine Garden: Lola Costa 

and Il Palmerino is the title of a lectureconversation 

with Federica Parretti at the 

BIF (November 6), viewable online. The event 

doubles as the in-town presentation of the 

debut issue of The Curators’ Quaderno. 


Captions 


Flora Delanica 

The art and science of a paper garden 

In mid-eighteenth-century England, 

average life expectancy for women 

was 40 years. So, it is remarkable 

that in 1772, at the age of 72, Mary 

Granville Pendarves Delany was not 

only very much alive, but chose that 

moment to invent a new art form and 

begin creating what would become, 

over the course of the following decade, 

a collection of 985 individual flower 

portraits. Perhaps even more remarkable 

is the fact that the collection, known as 

the Flora Delanica, survived intact. It 

currently resides in the British Museum 

in London, where it has been carefully 

safeguarded, ever since Delany’s greatniece, 

Augusta Hall, Baroness Llanover, 

bequeathed it to them in 1897. 

Born into the aristocracy, Mary 

Granville enjoyed many of the privileges 

that status conveyed but, as a member of 

a lesser branch of the family – without 

property or any substantial income – 

Mary and her parents set their sights 

on her attaining a position as a maid 

of honour to the Queen. When they 

found themselves on the wrong side of 

the succession battle following Queen 

Anne’s death, Mary’s prospects dimmed 

further. She had to make an advantageous 

marriage and was essentially bartered as 

a bride to Alexander Pendarves, a wealthy 

parliamentarian and landowner 45 years 

her senior. 

Of her husband, Mary wrote, “he was 

altogether a person more disgusting 

than engaging” and of the marriage, “I 

lost, not life indeed, but … all that makes 

life desirable – joy and peace of mind.” 

Seven years later she was (mercifully) 

widowed, but the bulk of her husband’s 

fortune went to a nephew, while Mary 

was left with a modest pension of a few 

hundred pounds a year. 

Left: Mary Delany, 1776, Aeschelus hippocastanum (Heptandria monogynia), Vol. I, 7, Horse chestnut, the British Museum 


Left: John Opie’s 

portrait of Mary Delany, 

National Portrait 

Gallery, London 

Right: Mary Delany, 

1780, Rosa Gallica, Vol. 

VIII, 38, Cluster damask 

rose, the British 

Museum 

Far right: Mary 

Delany, 1776, Carduus 

nutans (Syngenesia 

polygandria aequalis), 

Vol. II, 60, Musk or 

Nodding thistle, the 

British Museum 

Mary’s widowhood lasted for 20 years during 

which time she relished her freedom from the 

‘irksome prison’ of matrimony. She gave full 

rein to her creative side, which took the form of 

painting, embroidery, flower and shell work (see 

feature on p. 50). Then, over the objections of her 

family, in 1743 she married Patrick Delany, an Irish 

clergyman with no title or ‘claim to ancestry’. 

What Patrick Delany did have was, in Mary’s 

words, “a real benevolence of heart” – as well as a 

modest estate just outside Dublin called Delville, 

with extensive gardens including a bowling 

green, flower walks, and an orchard. Cultivating 

this garden provided a further outlet for Mary’s 

creative abilities and added to her knowledge 

and interest in all things botanical. 

Widowed again in 1768, Mary was fortunate to 

have Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, the wealthy, 

well-connected Duchess of Portland as a friend 

and benefactor. Soon after Patrick Delany’s death, 

the duchess invited her friend to live with her at 

Bulstrode, her large estate in Buckinghamshire. 

It was there that the first seeds of Mary’s paper 

garden were sown. With an eye for colour and 

hands that were strangers to idleness, she began 

one day to cut petal-shaped pieces from a bit 

of red paper that matched a geranium on her 

bedside table. Then she found more colours and 

cut more shapes. Before long she had created an 

image of a flower so realistic that her friend the 

duchess mistook the paper petals for real ones. 

That was all the encouragement Mary needed to 

begin her collection. 

Each flower in the Flora Delanica is composed of 

many bits of coloured paper glued together onto 

a black India ink background. Occasionally, Mary 

would touch up the pictures with watercolour 

or ink and, the odd time, she even added a real 

part of a plant – a leaf or (once) a flower. To truly 

appreciate the complexity and delicacy of these 

collages, which Mary called ‘mosaicks’, it is best 

to view them in person at the British Museum’s 


Department of Prints and Drawings. There, with 

magnifying glass in hand, it is possible to see 

just how many separate elements go into each 

picture, which might number in the hundreds, 

and to get a sense of the deftness of touch and 

visual acuity necessary to create an image that 

the naked eye registers as a continuous, flat 

surface, much like a still life painting. 

To make these pictures, Mrs Delany would 

have used: tweezers, a bodkin (an embroidery 

tool for making tiny holes), a flat ‘folder’ to 

makes creases, brushes, bowls, a mortar and 

pestle for grinding pigment and, of course, a 

small pair of sharp scissors. Her gift for being 

able to cut out images as easily as she could 

draw them is evident in her portrait of the 

‘Nodding Thistle’. A relative of the dandelion, 

it is a thorny specimen, best kept at arm’s 

length. Did it remind her of her first husband, 

Alexander Pendarves? In Mary’s hands, its 

leaves, in unbroken lines cut freehand, twist 

and turn as if trying to escape a terrible fate. 

Even a quick glance at Delany’s ‘Damask 

Rose’ confirms that she was also adept in her 

use of colour. The various shades of pink in the 

petals are arranged to highlight the details of 

the specimen and to ensure that every effect of 

light is caught. She may have been an ‘amateur’, 

but she learned from artist friends such as 

Letitia Bushe, a talented watercolourist, how 

to mix her own pigments to achieve the most 

natural looking hues. The papers she used 

varied. Some were large sheets of handmade 

paper that she painted with watercolours, 

others were seconds from paper-stainers or 

remnants of wallpaper. Among the features of 

‘Damask Rose’ is a circular bite mark in one 

of its leaves (anticipating the Apple logo by a 

couple of centuries). Another whimsical quirk 

can be found in the ‘Everlasting Pea’ which 

includes a curling tendril in the self-referential 

shape of a pair of scissors. 


Above: Mary Delany, 1782, Portlandia grandiflora, Vol. VII, 91, the British Museum 


It would be wrong to imagine Mary Delany as a 

solitary figure sitting by the fire quietly cutting 

her paper shapes. Bulstrode, nicknamed ‘the Hive’, 

was a meeting place of the Duchess of Portland’s 

many artistic and scientific friends. The duchess 

herself was an inveterate collector of flora and 

fauna and often entertained visits from the most 

eminent botanists, ornithologists, conchologists, 

and entomologists of the day, who helped her to 

catalogue her collection. One of these was the 

botanist Joseph Banks, whose home Mary visited 

to see samples and drawings from his travels 

with Captain Cook. The system for classifying 

plants by genus and species devised by Swedish 

naturalist Carl Linneaus was very much in vogue 

and inspired Mary, in 1769, to translate British 

apothecary William Hudson’s Flora Anglica from 

Latin into English. 

English explorers travelled the globe in the 

1700’s and returned with plant specimens that 

were prized as much for their exoticism as 

for their medicinal qualities. As Mary’s skill in 

creating her flower collages became known 

beyond her circle (extending even to royalty), 

plants were sent to her from a variety of sources. 

She received a sunflower from Lord Dartmouth, 

the Secretary for Trade and Plantations; an 

asphodel lily from former Prime Minister, Lord 

Rockingham; and a wild senna plant from Lord 

Mansfield, which likely came from his garden 

at Kenwood in Hampstead Heath. Mary worked 

from observation and took care to portray each 

plant accurately, true to size, with the correct 

number of stamens and styles. On the back of 

most of her pictures, she identified the specimen 

using the Linnaean system of classification, 

along with the date and place the picture was 

made. Her friend Joseph Banks said that her 

collages were the only representations of nature 

on which he could rely to describe botanically 

any plant without fear of committing an error. 

Completed in 1782, the ‘Portlandia Grandiflora’ 

was one of Mary Delany’s last collages. It would 

have had particular significance for her, as the 

flower was named for her dear friend, the Duchess 

of Portland. Originating in Jamaica, the specimen 

came to Mary through the botanist at Kew 

Gardens at the request of the King and Queen. 

Its large waxy leaves and huge blossoms made it 

a relatively easy subject for an 82-year-old whose 

eyesight was fading. Yet she still managed to vary 

the shades of pink in the flowers and delineate 

the delicate veins in the leaves. She included 

the sepals at the base of each of the blooms. It 

might be fair to say that ‘Portlandia Grandiflora’ 

represents the essence of Mary Delany: a woman 

who spent a lifetime in creative activity, who was 

driven by a curiosity about the natural world and 

the scientific advancements of her century and 

who valued the deep friendships that sustained 

her. The collage was accompanied by a separate 

sheet in Mary’s handwriting, describing the plant 

and its origins with reference to Brown’s History 

of Jamaica. Below was this poem: 

Fair flower! that bears the honoured name/ Of 

HER whose fair and spotless fame/ Thy purity 

displays. Emblem of Friendship’s sacred tie,/ Thy 

form is graced with dignity/ Superior to all praise. 


All of Mary Delany’s flower portraits can be 

viewed on the website of The British Museum. 


Conserving a 

paper garden 

Caroline Barry, Head of Pictorial Art Conservation 

at the British Museum shares her insights 

Views of the study room at the British Museum’s Prints 

and Drawings Department, ph. Margie MacKinnon 


Restoration Conversations: What 

conservation challenges do Mary Delany’s 

collage works present, compared to other 

works on paper, such as drawings? 

Caroline Barry: The primary challenge is the 

brittleness of the glue MD used for the collage 

pieces. The natural aging of the glue has caused 

it to become dry and puts the paper fragments 

at risk of becoming loose, if the drawing needs 

to be moved around the museum or on loan. 

We mitigate this by the custom of storing most 

drawings in the collection within acid-free card 

mounts, so that the paper does not flex when 

handled. We also carefully check the collages 

prior to exhibition and loan and re-adhere any 

lifting areas. 

RC: How have the conservation techniques 

used for MD’s works changed over the last 

50 years? 

CB: Many of the collages were conserved and 

mounted at the museum in the 1980s. At the 

time, Conservation was a recognised profession 

and the ethics were well established. With 

subsequent research into improving techniques 

and materials, there is now a wider range of 

suitable adhesives and repair papers that we can 

choose from. 

‘Health and Safety’ considerations are probably 

where the biggest changes have occurred in 

the last 30 years. For example, the collages 

were treated for possible mould growth with 

a chemical that we no longer use, as it is a 

potential irritant to humans and hazardous for 

the environment. We would now avoid using 

chemicals wherever possible and use alternative 

techniques (that might take longer but pose less 

risk to our health and environmentally). 

RC: Have the conservators made any 

unexpected discoveries while working on the 

flower mosaicks, for example, with respect 

to the materials she worked with? 

CB: We have recently started to investigate 

one of the pigments MD used, a bright orange/ 

red which is quite sensitive to light. We hope 

we can identify what pigment MD used, with 

help from our Scientific Research Department. 

More knowledge will help us to advise whether 

exposure to light levels should be reduced 

further than normal levels, when these particular 

examples are requested for exhibition or loan. 

One noticeable difference conservators 

noticed was in the pigment used for the 

distinctive black background MD applied. 

Most examples are a stable black ink/pigment, 

but in some cases, she also used a particular 

ink containing iron. This Iron Gall ink is well 

known for degrading paper over time and 

conservators found the paper was very brown, 

brittle and fragile – needing a lot more time to 

repair and stabilise. 


More technical details about Mary Delany’s works 

can be found in: Mrs. Delany and Her Circle (Yale 

Center for British Art) by Mark Laird and Alicia 

Weisberg-Roberts. 


Late Bloomer 

Molly Peacock on the making of Mary Delany 

One Friday in 1986, the poet Molly 

Peacock read a little article in the 

New York Times about an exhibition 

at the Morgan Library of paper flower 

‘mosaicks’ by an eighteenth-century woman 

named Mary Delany (see feature on p. 42). “It 

had to have been a Friday because that was 

the day you could dip into all cultural events,” 

she explains. Her interest was piqued. “I was a 

young poet trying to find my way in New York 

City, living in a studio apartment. I was teaching 

seventh grade, teaching 12-year-olds and thinking 

that I should be swooning over great big abstract 

paintings. In fact, I was meant to be meeting a 

friend at MoMA, the modern art museum, but I 

derailed that, and insisted on going to see the 

Delany exhibition.” ‘Mosaick’ was the word 

Delany used to describe her floral creations. 

Mounted on black backgrounds, each picture 

portrayed a single rootless specimen composed 

of petals and leaves cut from coloured papers of 

varying hues and deliberately layered to create 

an impression of depth. 

Today, Molly and I are chatting over Zoom, she 

in her condo in her current home city of Toronto 

and I at home in London. I had just finished 

reading her life of Mary Delany, The Paper 

Garden (An Artist Begins her Life’s Work at 72). 

Part biography and part memoir, the book weaves 

elements from the author’s own life into those of 

her subject and celebrates the late-life blooming 

of Delany as an innovative but unheralded 

collage artist. Molly felt a personal connection 

to Mary Delany and her works. In the book, she 

confessed that while her head loved the “big, 

bold, symphonic” works of modern artists, her 

heart was drawn to “the small, the miniature, the 

detailed work that has its sources in the kind of 


Above, left: : Mary Delany, 1776, Magnolia grandiflora (Polyandria polygynia), Vol. VI, 57, the British Museum 

Above, right: Mary Delany, 1777, Passiflora laurifolia (Gynandria pentandria), Vol. VII, 54, Bay leaved, the British Museum 

handiwork – crisply bordered or patched with 

cut geometrical shapes and defined by stitching 

– that her maternal grandmother had used 

to create quilts and embroidered tablecloths. 

“Mrs Delany’s flowers,” she added, “also had the 

carefully crafted but mysterious quality of the 

poems I most admired.” 

On a visit to the British Museum eleven years 

after first encountering the flower mosaicks, 

Molly perused the gift shop while waiting for 

her husband to finish a phone call. Unaware that 

almost all of Delany’s works, collectively known 

as the Flora Delanica, were safely stored upstairs 

in the museum’s Prints and Drawings Department, 

she wandered past the note cards, earrings, 

umbrellas and tote bags into the book section, 

then stopped short when she came across the 

volume that had accompanied the show at the 

Morgan Library in New York – Mrs. Delany: Her 

Life and Her Flowers by Ruth Hayden. Back then, 

she would not have been able to make her rent, 

if she had succumbed to the desire to purchase 

it, but this time she snapped it up and read it on 

the plane back to Canada. Again, her interest was 

piqued. How had an eighteenth-century woman 

invented an art form and produced a catalogue 

of 895 botanically accurate flower portraits which 

she began at the age of 72? “I didn’t intend to 

write a biography,” says Molly, “I intended to 

satisfy my curiosity. How did Mary Delany do 

this? What happened in her life?” 

Eventually, a fellowship grant from a new 

biography centre provided Molly with the means 

to examine Delany’s life. Was she intimidated by 

the wealth of written material – a long life’s worth 

of letters, diaries, a memoir, even an unpublished 

novel – that has been preserved about her? “Oh,” 

she replies, “it was huge, overwhelming. 


Above: Detail of Mary Delany’s Portlandia grandiflora (through a magnifying glass), ph. Margie MacKinnon 


“I ended up weeping on the floor of my little study. I 

thought, ‘how can I possibly do this?’ ...So, I decided, 

I’m not going to write a comprehensive biography. 

I’m going to write a book that tracks every instance of 

her creativity that I can find, so that I can answer the 

question of how she came to do this.” 

I ended up weeping on the floor of my little 

study. I thought, ‘how can I possibly do this?’ 

Then I asked myself, ‘what do I have credentials 

for? I have credentials as a creative person. So, I 

decided, I’m not going to write a comprehensive 

biography. I’m going to write a book that tracks 

every instance of her creativity that I can find, so 

that I can answer the question of how she came 

to do this. And being a poet helped me because 

that’s what you do when you write a poem: you 

go for the absolute essence.” 

When did she decide to weave her own life 

into the story? Very early on, Molly explains, 

“I got the idea of beginning each chapter with 

an image [of one of Delany’s flower portraits]. I 

thought, that will guide me through her life, and it 

will allow me as a poet to respond to each image 

and draw the reader into her life. And to my life, 

because I realised that when I tried to write the 

book as a straight biography, it fell flat. So, it was 

a whole package – the illustrations, the highly 

personal connections – and my agent said, ‘I 

can’t sell this book.’” Some 30 rejections later, the 

book was finally taken up by Bloomsbury UK and 

published to critical acclaim. The Toronto Star 

noted that “Peacock convincingly makes the point 

that Delany’s rarefied oeuvre and her late but 

metaphorically apt ‘blooming’ was the perfect, 

logical product of the life that preceded it.” 

What similarities could there be between an 

aristocratic English woman, born in 1700, who 

consorted with royalty and counted some of the 

most famous names of the day among her friends, 

and a North American baby boomer whose 

modest means had once forced her to choose 

between paying her rent and buying a book she 

desperately coveted? Well, plenty, as it turns out. 

Reading that book, Molly had been intrigued by 

the fact that Mrs Delany had accomplished her 

flower collages so late in life, “but when I realized 

that she’d had a thriving mid-life marriage, I 

began responding [not just to her creativity but] 

to her life as well. She had no children. I had 

no children. She had a deep connection to a 

second husband. I had such a bond … She was an 

artist; I was an artist. She had a plethora of arty 

girlfriends. So did I. We had shared interests and 

experiences, and that allowed me to make some 

comparisons, and also to realise that sometimes I 

was going too far.” 

The creative journey of Mary Granville 

(as she then was) began at the age of six at 

Mademoiselle Puelle’s school for [upper class] 

girls. Her education would include reading, 

writing, arithmetic, French, housekeeping and 

dancing, along with decorative arts. This included 

the art of intricate paper-cutting, in which 

designs were cut from books using tiny scissors, 

knives and pins, and then hand-coloured to use 

as decorations on boxes, bowls and other items. 

The technique required patience, dexterity and 

an eye for detail. 


During her first, unhappy, marriage and in her 

first period of widowhood, Mary filled her days 

with embroidery, dress designing and shell work 

(a popular decorative technique for furniture and 

architectural features). Her natural curiosity and 

observational skills helped her to excel at these 

activities. She delighted in music and, as a child, 

had claimed that if she did not learn to play her 

spinet as well as Handel (a family friend), “she 

would burn [her] instrument!” She corresponded 

with the writer Jonathan Swift and was given 

instructions in drawing by William Hogarth. Later, 

she applied all her creative powers to the design 

of the garden in Ireland that she shared with her 

second husband. In Molly’s view, “the pleasure 

of twenty-five years of gardening with Patrick 

Delany led to the flower mosaicks.” In her second 

widowhood, growing a paper garden allowed 

her to recall the joy of their joint creation and to 

carry on a lifetime of making. 

Throughout her life and in the centuries that 

followed, Mary Delany was supported by a 

sorority of friends who encouraged her work, 

descendants who preserved her letters, art 

historians who recognised the artistic genius 

of her collection and restorers who undertook 

its conservation. “Interest in her work goes in 

waves,” comments Molly Peacock. 

That interest rose with the publication of her 

diaries in the 1860s, then faded again as the 

century drew to a close. An article about her 

in an early edition of the Dictionary of National 

Biography, prompted by the resurgence of 

interest in English women writers that marked 

early-twentieth century scholarship, introduced 

her to Virginia Woolf’s modernist generation, 

who prized her satire and wit. Ruth Hayden’s 

full-length biography, generously illustrated with 

full-colour plates of her flower portraits, first 

appeared in 1980. The second edition, re-issued 

in 1992, remains one of the best-selling books in 

the British Museum bookshop. The expansive 

exhibition ‘Mrs Delany and Her Circle’ was 

held at the Yale Center for British Art in 2009, 

transferring the following year to Sir John Soane’s 

Museum in London. More recently, a selection of 

Delany’s flower collages was included in ‘Now 

You See Us’, the Tate’s comprehensive survey of 

women artists in Britain from 1520-1920. 

“With each wave,” notes Peacock, “she is further 

entrenched in the canon of Western art. And she 

becomes more and more a person to be reckoned 

with. And I would hope that soon places like the 

MoMA, for instance, would not say that Matisse 

invented collage in the twentieth century. What 

… are you kidding me?” 



Below: Author Molly Peacock 

Left: Book cover, Molly Peacock’s 

The Paper Garden 

Molly Peacock is a biographer and poet. She is the author of Flower Diary: 

Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door, as well as The Paper 

Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 (named a Book of the Year by 

The Economist, The Globe and Mail, Booklist, The London Evening Standard, The 

Irish Times, and The Sunday Telegraph.) Peacock is also a distinguished poet, 

the author of seven volumes of poetry, and a poetry activist. Her forthcoming 

book, The Widow’s Crayon Box, will be published in November 2024. 



Begin again, 

with blooms 

An interview with botanical artist 

Marieluise Bantel 


Mary Delaney’s story and her unique 

take on ‘flower painting’ brought 

a contemporary artist to mind: 

Marieluise Bantel, whose many 

blossoms – in paint not paper – bring new 

meaning to the phrase ‘flower power’. Bantel’s 

botanical works depict plants that, in the artist’s 

words, represent “a momentary standstill of 

time, by which one is deeply gripped.” 

At aged 70, she earned her art degree at the 

‘Freie Kunstschule Stuttgart – Akademie für 

Kunst und Design’ and now paints professionally. 

She has exhibited in Germany, Switzerland, 

Spain, Italy, and Belgium, in such varied venues 

as the Residential Palace Ludwigsburg, the Swiss 

Art Expo, the Florence Biennale and Madrid’s 

Van Gogh Art Gallery. Since 2021, Marieluise has 

collaborated with British haute couture fashion 

designer Suzannah London. Restoration 

Conversations was delighted to sit down to a 

fascinating conversation with Marieluise to 

discuss art, ageing, ‘invisibility’ and having eyes 

to see. Hers is a language of flowers, in which 

blooms are people too. 

“I started studying for my art degree, after 

a happy thirty-year career teaching future 

teachers. I needed something new to do, and it 

was finally time to return to art. I was born in 

Germany in 1949, after the Second World War, and 

my parents, who wanted their seven children to 

study, told me that I needed a profession with 

which I could make a living, and ‘artist’ was not 

it. ‘Painter’ was not a woman’s profession. So, 

at the age of 65, despite a lifetime dedicated to 

Pedagogy, I finally took paintbrush in hand and 

decided to spend some time on the ‘other side 

of the classroom’. 

I earned my degree at age 70, with a 

specialisation in flower painting. If I were to 

explain it now – five years later – I’d say I strive 

to see the transience of beauty, through flowers. 

And even then, I thought, “I wish I could paint 

the soul of a flower, the same way a portraitist 

paints the soul of a person, through what their 

eyes express, and how they act – their innermost 

values. So, I began collecting blooms. I decided 

to start with dying flowers. I chose a rose, and 

photographed it at the same time every day, for 

24 days, in order to observe how it changed in 

colour and in fullness. I watched it wither and 

saw its shape transform. 

Why dying flowers? Well, I saw a beautiful 

blossom, and began to reflect upon its 

opposite… because that is how our own lives 

go. I saw my mother, who was so beautiful when 

she was young, and then, when she became ill, 

I watched her decline. 

One day, I held a fading flower against the 

light, and saw colours I had never seen before. 

It was an iris – and they have such a variety of 

hues, the greens and blues, and reds. After that, 

I couldn’t stop. Flowers are like people. They 

have their own expression; they bow or stand 

straight. Some flowers are proud and show you 

their whole beauty. 

To finish my degree, I presented six paintings 

to the examination board. To enable them 

to see the work properly, I held one of those 

canvases against the window so they could 

observe the spaces in the weave. One professor 

stopped me, and asked why I paint as I do, with 

no ground, or preparatory layer – layering paint 

directly on the canvas. I didn’t know what to say, 

except to tell him, “I have to see if it’s possible to 

Previous pages: Marieluise Bantel, 2022, Joy of living (Lebensfreude) 

Right: Botanical artist Marieluise Bantel in her studio 


“I very rarely paint a background on my canvas, 

as I don’t want to distract from the painted 

plants. This also brings out the luminosity of 

the flowers.” 

Marieluise Bantel 


Above: Marieluise Bantel, 2021, Silence (Stille) 


Marieluise Bantel, 2020, Dissolution (Verfall) 

paint this way.” An unprepared canvas absorbs 

more colour, and it’s not always easy to paint 

on a surface that is not smooth, but I found my 

answer – it’s possible. 

I brought high quality canvases to my exam 

– 100 percent linen – but as far as brushes 

and colours were concerned, I chose the 

cheapest ones I could find. That was part of the 

experiment as well. I wanted to prove to myself 

that you don’t always have to have the best of 

the best to do something. You can’t wait around 

for circumstances to be perfect; you’ve just got 

to get to it. Whether or not you do good or bad 

work, depends on you. 

I was invited to do a show in Stratford Gallery 

in England (2024), and the curator told me they 

wanted both the dying flower and the vibrant 

blossom. So, now, I’m starting to depict flowers 

at the height of their happiness. They are life in 

the purest state. They seem to be saying, ‘I am 

here. I want to be seen. I am alive!’ That’s exactly 

how I feel as an elderly person. In our society, the 

older you get, the more transparent you become. 

You are treated as if you are see-through, as if 

you don’t exist. 

In fact, my husband was a judge, and as he got 

older, he used to tell me, “I was very arrogant 

in my youth. Now, I’ve come down to Earth and 

realised I’m nobody, just a fragment in this world.” 

I remember my mother used to tell us children, 

‘We are all just little kernels of corn’ – tiny seeds, 

in a vast universe. When you are young, you don’t 

want to hear that sort of thing. Today, I wouldn’t say 

we are ‘nobody’. But I do think that no one is the 

same as another. And that is true of flowers too.” 

LINDA FALCONE 


Personal 

reflections... 

on Jacqueline 

Du Pré 

MBy sculptor Glynis Owen 

My school diary as a six-year-old records that, “when I grow up 

I am going to be an artist. I am going to share a studio with 

my cousin in Paris.” If art was my first love, music was a close 

second. Growing up, music-making was a joyful part of family 

gatherings. Throughout school and later, at art college, I played 

cello in local orchestras. I followed with interest the emerging 

career of a brilliant young English cellist, Jacqueline du Pré, who 

happened to be the same age as me. I marvelled at her Wigmore 

Hall debut, aged just seventeen, and her highly praised concert 

the same year at the Royal Festival Hall. 

At Goldsmith’s College, London, I united these two interests 

by writing my thesis on Wassily Kandinsky’s study of the 

links between music and art in his paintings, inspired by 

his experiences and the effects music had on him. In 1967, I 

married an artist and, in the same year, Jacqueline married the 

acclaimed pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim. Their clear 

delight in one another’s musicality and career echoed my own 

sense of the pleasure in sharing a creative understanding and 

relationship in art. 


Above: Jacqueline du Pré, 1969, ph. © National Portrait Gallery, London 


Above: Glynis Owen, Jacqueline du Pre, 1990, phs. © Stephen Coe 

Four years later came the concerning news that 

Jacqueline, aged just twenty-six, was losing 

sensitivity in her fingers and had been forced 

to cancel a concert. Two years after that, it was 

confirmed that she had been diagnosed with 

multiple sclerosis (MS). At this time – balancing my 

life between looking after two small boys, sharing 

exhibitions with my artist husband, accepting 

sculpture commissions, teaching, and working on 

sculpture books – I found this news heart breaking. 

How could this happen to someone with so much 

talent so early in her career? In 1973, Jacqueline 

played her last concert. She died, in 1987, at the 

age of 42. 

One morning in 1997, as the sun streamed in 

through my studio window, I stepped back to look 

at a clay sculpture I was finishing. A BBC radio 

recording of Jacqueline du Pré playing the Elgar 

cello concerto filled my studio. My overwhelming 

feeling that gloriously sunny morning, listening to 

Jacqueline’s sublime music, was of the tragedy of 

her short life and the loss of everything she might 

have achieved. This was the moment I decided 

to sculpt a full-length portrait of the young 

cellist playing her instrument, as a tribute to her 

extraordinary life. 

I wanted to work from images of Jacqueline du 

Pré playing the second movement of her iconic 

performance at the Royal Festival Hall. Edward 

Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor, written in 1919 

following the First World War and towards the end 

of Elgar’s life, conveys a sense of the composer’s 

own mortality. It seemed extraordinary that a 

cellist so young could communicate this emotion 

so convincingly and I wanted to convey something 

of this sense in my portrait of her. 

Jacqueline’s personality is described as 

embracing a curious combination of natural 

shyness and absolute conviction. To try to capture 

her likeness and her mesmerizing spirit, I needed 

imagery of her playing. Making a portrait without a 

model is a challenge. EMI sent me some beautiful 

photographs of Jacqueline playing her 1712 Davidov 

Stradivarius cello. These were invaluable but I also 


“My overwhelming feeling that gloriously sunny morning, 

listening to Jacqueline’s sublime music, was of the tragedy of her 

short life and the loss of everything she might have achieved. 

This was the moment I decided to sculpt a full-length portrait 

of the young cellist playing her instrument, as a tribute to her 

extraordinary life.” 

needed to study her in action to appreciate the 

essence and dynamism of her playing. 

Music documentarian Christopher Nupen kindly 

gave me a copy of his 1987 film Jacqueline du Pré 

in Portrait, with a message for me: “This is for your 

soul”. It certainly was! I couldn’t have made my full 

length, half-life size sculpture without his film. I 

watched it repeatedly, freeze framing and replaying 

certain actions, studying Jacqueline’s face, her 

movement and flowing blonde hair. There was an 

extraordinarily transitory change of expression 

as she played – from strong determined focus to 

serene calm. It was quite a challenge to recreate 

those emotional states in clay. 

What set Jacqueline’s playing apart? The 

answer probably lies in the passion and emotion 

she brought to her work, which elevated her 

remarkable talent to another level. On her death, 

Nupen had written that her loss touched “the 

hearts of millions of people all over the world, 

because this great cellist had ways of reaching 

the heart, which are given to the very, very few.” 

At every point in the research and creation of 

this portrait sculpture, I felt overwhelmed by the 

kindness I received, which reflected the depth of 

feeling she elicited in people from all walks of life. 

As it would not be possible to make a smallscale 

bow and pegs in clay, J & A Beare, the violin 

makers who had introduced Jacqueline to her 

much-loved Stradivarius, generously resolved the 

problem and made beautiful miniature pegs and 

a bow carved to scale in wood for the sculpture. 

They said they did it for Jackie who was their 

friend. Even London cab drivers, transporting the 

sculpture to exhibitions, refused to take the fare, 

saying this was for Jackie! 

It is always an exciting time when a finished 

portrait sculpture in soft, vulnerable clay is sent 

away to be cast and some weeks later returns to 

the studio transformed into bronze. 

In 1989, the completed bronze portrait sculpture 

of Jacqueline began to develop a life of its own 

when it became part of the fundraising for an 

exciting new music building and concert hall to be 

built in Jacqueline’s memory at St Hilda’s College, 

Oxford. A limited edition of ten sculptures were 

available for sale, with profits donated to the 

Jacqueline du Pré Memorial Fund to help disabled 

musicians. A program of fund-raising London 

concerts followed, with the sculpture on exhibition 

at each venue. The concert at the Barbican Centre 

was particularly memorable as there I had the 

pleasure of meeting Mstislav Rostropovich – one 

of the greatest cellists of all time – which reminded 

me again of the esteem in which Jacqueline was 

held. 

The final concert was part of a very special 

Soiree Musicale in the State Apartments of 

St James’s Palace with renowned cellist Yo-Yo 

Ma, who movingly played the famous Davidov 

Stradivarius cello previously owned by Jacqueline. 

It was a memorable concert for me because I was 

presented to HRH the Duchess of Kent and, at the 

beginning of the concert, walking through the 

audience to her seat, she stopped to tell me how 

much she loved my portrait of Jackie. 


Glynis in her studio, 2024, ph. Andy Fallon 


By 1995, the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building at St 

Hilda’s College, Oxford, was nearing completion. 

Louisa Service, a fellow of the college who was 

involved with the fund raising for the music 

building, purchased the sculpture as a gift for the 

venue. It excitingly began to feel a reality when 

van Heyningen and Haward Architects came to 

my studio to discuss where the sculpture should 

be displayed. We agreed it would be appropriate 

for it to sit at the side of the stage creating an 

ever-present memory of Jacqueline. 

The Gala Opening of the Jacqueline du Pré 

Music Building in September 1995 was a wonderful 

celebration and, for me, a fitting conclusion to 

the project. What could be better than to see 

my Jacqueline du Pré sculpture on the stage 

surrounded by musicians making music? I felt 

Jacqueline would have appreciated this. 

Jackie was a prodigy who knew from earliest 

childhood that she would be a cellist. Although her 

musical career was cruelly cut short far too soon, 

she left an indelible legacy. I have been fortunate 

to have continued with the career I chose as a 

child, and throughout my life, there have been 

prompts reminding me of Jacqueline. For the last 

forty years, I have lived in the same road where 

Jacqueline lived following her MS diagnosis in 

1971. She moved here to be near Hampstead 

Heath, which she enjoyed so much, as do I. Sadly, 

our paths never crossed, but neighbours have 

described to me the poignant scene of Jackie, 

with her distinctive flowing hair, being pushed 

down the road in her wheelchair to the Heath 

by her husband. I often walk past her house with 

its commemorative plaque. Some years ago, I 

received a call from the 90-year-old former owner 

of my house. Having seen a photograph of my 

portrait of Jacqueline, she rang to tell me she had 

given Jacqueline physiotherapy for her MS. This 

was in the exact place in my studio by the sunny 

bay window where I work and where I had been 

moved to sculpt the portrait. 

Next year, I will be celebrating my eightieth 

birthday and quietly commemorating the eightieth 

year of Jacqueline’s birth. In my teens, I had so 

admired her focus, self-assurance and commitment 

to her music in a competitive world. In my early 

twenties, watching Jacqueline’s confidence and 

single-mindedness, as a young female cellist was 

formative in my own development as a young 

woman sculptor. My days of carrying my cello to 

orchestras is long past, but I still think of Jackie 

when moving heavy sculpture to exhibitions and 

remember the film of her swinging along the 

street carrying her cello, travelling to international 

concerts by train and plane with her instrument 

on its own seat beside her. I am reminded of my 

teenage years, sitting on the bus with my cello next 

to me, causing people to joke, “Who’s your friend?” 

I wondered if this ever happened to Jacqueline. 

Finally, as I sit at my computer in my studio, 

finishing these ‘Personal Reflections’, a last 

serendipitous moment completes the circle as a 

BBC Promenade Concert live from the Royal Albert 

Hall broadcasts a performance of the Elgar Cello 

Concerto. To my delight the announcer mentions 

Jacqueline du Pré, who sixty years ago made that 

concerto her own. 

Glynis Owen FRSS 

Glynis Owen is a sculptor and printmaker who 

works from her studio in Hampstead, London. She 

is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors and a 

member of the Printmakers Council. An author of 

books on the techniques of sculpture, she is also a 

consultant and designer of awards. Her work has 

been commissioned and widely exhibited and is 

held in both public and private collections in the 

UK, US, Europe and China. 


Florence’s daughters 

at the Innocenti 

A new restoration project at 

Europe’s earliest foundling hospital 


The cobalt blue and white roundels by Andrea della Robbia, which feature 

on the loggia of Brunelleschi’s Ospedale degli Innocenti – now home to 

the Innocenti Museum and Institute – depict babies who remain ‘forever 

young’, thanks to the glazed terracotta technique the della Robbias 

perfected to weather the elements, in this case, over six centuries of sun 

and rain. Each one of these ten putti crafted in 1487 is different – like real 

babies are – and the way they squirm out of their swaddling clothes is 

realistic too, suggesting different phases of development. Yet as a symbol 

of Europe’s earliest foundling hospital, these sweet ‘realistic’ babes fall 

short in one little-known but tremendously significant detail: most of 

them should actually be girls. 

In Florence in 1419, the year of the hospital’s commission, daughters 

were an expense, not a source of income, and this fact remained true 

until the early 1900s. Girls would leave home at marriageable age, and 

the dowry wealth they subtracted from their original household’s purse 

often took decades to pinch together. Their brothers could excel in a 

passed-down profession, even achieve renown based on some talent 

they were born with, but girls were barred from nearly all of society’s 

productive sectors, which explains why most of the Innocenti’s gettatelli, 

‘little throwaways’, were female, even in the case of legitimate children. 

The ‘rich’ children came with bits of jewellery and carefully cut pendants. 

The ‘poor’ children arrived with a tied ribbon or a shred of shiny fabric, 

halved buttons or even jewellery in cheaper metals. These tokens were 

the first-ever ‘identity cards’, and potentially allowed parents to reclaim 

the child someday, by presenting their token’s ‘other half’. Beyond the 

practicalities and in the people’s minds, they were quasi-magical talismans 

thought to guarantee their child’s protection, and hopefully, survival. 

Minute religious images were a favourite, as were baubles laced with 

certain kinds of beads or stones – like fragments of coral, well-known for 

warding off the evil eye. From the late 1800s onwards, with the advent of 

photography, some of the children were given folded paper ‘tokens’, yet 

these pictures torn in two, in most cases, were not family photographs. 

They were printed advertisements, apparently hoarded by mothers who 

thought their picture lucky or lovely. 

Beyond the babies given up as a consequence of utter poverty, an untold 

number of the Innocenti’s wards were master-servant babies, or those 

born of foreign house slaves – as rumours claim da Vinci was. Alternatively, 

they belonged to what the hospital called ‘gravide occulte’, the hidden 

Left: Façade of the Istituto degli Innocenti, courtesy of the Istituto degli Innocenti 

Above: Recognition token hosted at the Innocenti’s archive, ph. Marco Lanza, detail, courtesy of the Istituto degli Innocenti 


Above: Recognition token left with one of the Innocenti’s children, ph. Marco Lanza, courtesy of the Istituto degli Innocenti 



pregnant – the disgraced unwed mothers of any 

social extraction, both rich and poor. It was an 

‘ospedale’ for this very reason, because the term 

originally designated a hospitality-based charity, 

not a place to treat the sick. 

The hospital’s first ward was a baby they 

called Agata et Smeralda. She was taken in on 

Saint Agatha’s day – Friday, February 5, 1445 – 

and given a surname reminiscent of the green 

gem symbolising hope. The last child left there 

anonymously was Laudata Chiusuri. She was 

also named by the Ospedale, with a first name 

that means ‘Praised’ and a surname recalling 

the word chiusura, or closure. It was June 30, 

1875, the night before child abandonment was 

officially proclaimed a crime. Babies left after that 

date went through a newly instituted office and 

paper documents replaced tokens, when it came 

to determining a child’s identity, if reclaimed. All 

the same, parents continued to uphold the token 

tradition well until the mid-twentieth century. 

A new project, called ‘Florence’s Daughters at 

the Innocenti’, sponsored by donors Connie and 

Doug Clark and Margie MacKinnon and Wayne 

McArdle, strives to protect, preserve and raise 

awareness on women’s history at the Innocenti 

Institute, starting with its female ‘Innocents’. 

Centred on the restoration and digitalisation of 

100 tokens belonging to girls, its focus period is 

the end of the nineteenth-century onwards, in 

order to safeguard and study a portion of the 

archive in need of rediscovery. A partnership 

between the Innocenti Institute, Museum and 

Archives and the Calliope Arts Foundation, the 

project’s 100 tiny restorations will be executed 

by Florence-based conservator Rossella Lari, 

under the directorship of Antonella Schena 

and Scientific director Arabella Natalini with 

the archivist Lucia Ricciardi. This project, which 

began in October 2024, will end with a pop-up 

exhibition at the Museo degli Innocenti, in the 

autumn of 2025. 

Until the morning after baby Laudata’s 

nighttime arrival, parents gave up their children 

through a grated iron window, with openings 

large enough for a baby to fit, which was installed 

in the mid-1400s. A baby could be left, without 

anyone there to spy on who was doing the 

leaving. Interestingly, the size of the grate’s holes 

was reduced in the late 1700s, to prevent parents 


Left: A storage box with recognition tokens, ph. Guido Cozzi; Above: Tokens left with the Innocenti’s children, photos George Tatge. 

Photos on pp. 72-73 are courtesy of the Istituto degli Innocenti 

from squeezing older children through, because 

by 1767, the Innocenti had 3,000 mouths to feed, 

in addition to more than 1,000 new babies left at 

the ospedale that slump year. 

Laudata’s case is recorded in all possible 

detail, as are those of every child the hospital 

ever cared for – girl or boy. “After the doorbell 

rang, she was placed in the Manger Scene, with 

the diagonal half of a brass medal depicting the 

Most Holy Conception”, the archivist wrote in 

the big book ‘Affairs of the Creatures. Laudata 

came with a note that read, “Brought child, been 

baptised.” What they found inside her swaddling 

clothes was similar to the ‘tokens’ left with all of 

the Innocents, and the institutes archives hosts 

over 40,000 of them. 

The babies were collected by the Innocenti’s 

house nannies – often girls who had grown up 

at the hospital, or unwed mothers taken in to 

breastfeed their own babies along with those of 

others. As a sign of welcome, the new arrivals 

were placed in a cradle between polychrome 

terracotta statues of Saints Mary and Joseph, to 

be looked upon lovingly, as if they were the Baby 

Jesus himself. Then the children were fed, washed, 

and recorded in the book called Balie e bambini 

(Nannies and Children) and baptised as soon as 

possible, to spare them from spending eternity in 

Limbo, a guaranteed fate if Death came for a child 

before she was christened. 

Birth and death often stood side by side in 

the years following the hospital’s founding, as 

Renaissance Florence faced a fifty-percent child 

mortality rate. Some died shortly after birth, but 

most after weaning – as solid food was scarce 

or contaminated, especially for the poorest of 

children. For hundreds of years, the Innocenti 

sought a solution by sending its wards to the 

Tuscan countryside until the age of six, to get fed 

and strong, and to achieve this end, they put the 

children’s often poverty-stricken host families on 

their payroll. 

We know more about the women in these 

families than one might imagine. The Innocenti 

Archives are among the most precious and 

complete in Florence, and the children’s arrival 

and subsequent lives, are not the only ones worth 

documenting. In its ledgers for Balie e bambini 

and Affari per creature there are details of the 

women who breastfed, cared for and mothered 

their wards over the course of centuries, and this 

precious documentation makes these archives – 

tokens and all – one of the earliest repositories 

of women’s social history in Italy and the world. 

Stay tuned for more on ‘Florence’s Daughters 

at the Innocenti’, in next issue of Restoration 

Conversations and in an upcoming issue of The 

Curators’ Quaderno. 

LINDA FALCONE 


Vasari ...and 

milestone women 

Female membership and the AADFI 

Until the mid-sixteenth century, professional painters in Florence 

were lumped into the Physicians and Spice Makers Guild because, 

in the thinking of the time, artists were akin to apothecaries. 

Mixing paint involved handling any number of reactive elements, 

like white lead, yellow ochre and umber earths, to name a few. 

In the early 1560s, Italy’s first art historian Giorgio Vasari, a 

prolific court artist, convinced Cosimo I and company that 

professional artists did not need a separate guild, but a proper 

academy, dedicated to the Art of Design, because drawing is 

the foundational skill underpinning all painting, sculpture and 

architecture. His intentions were both practical and philosophical, 

and the academy would be a place of training and fellowship. It 

would regulate commissions for up-and-coming artists and even 

serve as a tribunal of sorts, when debts arose – as they always 

did – between merchants supplying pigments more valuable than 

gold, and painters who needed lapis lazuli to make the blue of 

their next Madonna’s cloak. 

Right: Florence’s Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, ph. Valeria Raniolo 


Surely, the city that had produced Michelangelo 

‘Il Divino’, could recognise that artists were not 

to be like artisans in that era – skilful in hand 

and poor in book-learning. They needed to 

be educated in the big myths and to become 

literate in the Western world’s great symbols 

and religious stories. An artist, in Vasari’s view, 

was not made to adorn walls, but to decorate 

the spirit with life’s most lofty ideals. Why 

should they not have a college akin to those 

frequented by men of law or letters and become 

academicians in their own right? 

The institution Vasari conceived with this 

perspective in mind, has not closed its doors for 

more than four and a half centuries. Its current 

iteration, the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno 

di Firenze (AADFI), is not to be confused with its 

‘spin-off’ institutions, Florence’s fine arts academy, 

or the well-loved museum whose tribuna hosts 

Michelangelo’s David, both called ‘l’Accademia’. 

Those came later, as Vasari’s dream took flight, and 

artists did indeed grow into their ‘philosophical’ 

shoes, as men with a vocation to reflect and 

interpret the work of their Creator, into a language 

that even the poor could understand: colour. 

Women came into the picture, fifty three years 

later, when Artemisia broke onto the Florence 

scene with her Allegory of Inclination, and on 

July 19, 1616, she became the first female painter 

to be admitted into the AADFI’s ranks, as per 

the institution’s registry, now at the Florence 

State Archives. Her milestone membership was 

brief. She paid her enrolment fee, but no other 

dues, and was tried several times in the AADFI’s 


Above: Nicoletta Fontani restoring Violante Siries Cerroti’s Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi work for Advancing Women Artists, ph. Linda Falcone 


Captions 


Captions 

tribunal for outstanding debt with suppliers. In 

the first instance, she received a pardon from 

Grand Duke Cosimo II himself. Yet, Artemisia’s 

gratitude towards her benefactor was apparently 

short-lived, because in 1620, she fled Florence on 

a galloping horse, in part, to escape the fact that 

Cosimo II had paid her an advance on paintings 

she never planned to produce. 

Some fifty female artists would follow her 

lead – with membership, not debt – from the 

seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, 

according to an essay written by Paola Maresca, 

in the AADFI’s volume commemorating its 450 

years of uninterrupted history. In the eighteenth 

century, several names stand out among the rest, 

as the ‘stars’ of new research and exhibition in 

recent years. Agnese Dolci Baci, whose precious 

notebooks attest to her vital role in her famous 

father’s workshop, was matriculated in 1706. 

Other widely recognised painters within the 

Florentine context include miniaturist and 

pastel artist Maddalena Baldacci Gozzi (1732), 

Angelica Kauffmann (1762) – who became a 

founding member of England’s Royal Academy 

six years later – Florence-born English painter 

Maria Hadfield Cosway (1778), and Florentine 

copyist and portrait artist Irene Parenti Duclos 

(1783) – all women whose self-portraits form part 

of the Uffizi Galleries’ self-portrait collection. 

Royal and aristocratic women also appear in 

the AADFI’s annals in the second half of the 

century, as patrons and learned women, not as 

painters, sculptors, engravers or draftswomen. 

Such instances include the matriculation of 


Far Left: Violante Ferroni, 1756, Saint John of God heals 

plague victims, ph. Ottaviano Caruso 

Left: Violante Ferroni, 1756, Saint John of God gives bread 

to the poor, ph. Ottaviano Caruso 

These paintings were restored in 2020 by Advancing 

Women Artists, Robert Lehman Foundation, Robert Wood 

Johnson Foundation, ‘The Mud Angels meet the Art Angels’ 

with Florida State University Florence and Lion’s Fountain, 

Rauch Foundation 

Catherine II of Russia, called ‘the Great’ (1767), 

Maria Antonia Bourbon, Princess of Parma (1795), 

and Luisa of Stolberg-Gedern, Countess of 

Albany (1796). 

Two names stand out in this century – or 

two women with the same first name: Violante. 

Violante Siriès Cerroti, known as La Signora Pittrice 

(see p. 80) first appeared on the international 

‘mind screen’ in 2015, when the Florence-based 

American organisation Advancing Women Artists 

(AWA) started restoration of her large-scale 

altarpiece (c. 1767), at the Church of Santa Maria 

Maddalena dei Pazzi, damaged in Florence’s 1966 

flood. Larger than most devotional paintings in 

Florence, Siriès Cerroti’s masterwork depicts the 

Virgin Mary holding Baby Jesus for a Florentine 

saint to see – Santa Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, 

to whom the church where the painting lives is 

dedicated. The two pious women seem frozen in 

time, and the painting’s movement comes from its 

‘crowd’. There are angels all around. 

Violante Siriès Cerroti gifted her self-portrait to 

the new Uffizi Gallery, instituted in 1770, and she is 

registered as the first woman granted permission 

to copy the Old Masters in its hallowed halls. Her 

career was largely promoted by her father Louis 

Siriès, who became an esteemed court artisan 

for Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici, and, later, the 

director of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, the 

Medici’s precious stones workshop. Violante was 

matriculated into the AADFI in 1733. 

Just three years later, in 1736, Florentine painter 

Violante Ferroni achieved membership at the age 

of 16. A little known but highly respected colourist, 

Ferroni trained with Giovanni Domenico Ferretti, 

and AWA and partners’ linked to the Order of 

Saint John of God, at the ancient hospital of San 

Giovanni di Dio, was executed in 2020, ‘under 

lockdown’ by conservators Marina Vincenti and 

Liz Wicks, as Florence’s centre stood empty for 

months, eerily quiet without the buzz of foreign 

travel. In 2020, the paintings were successfully 

restored and installed in their niches above the 

grand staircase of the building once home to 

Amerigo Vespucci’s ancestors, which served as a 

hospital to treat plague victims. Due to pandemic 

measures and Italy’s ban on public meetings in 

the spring of 2020, the organisation was unable to 

hold an inauguration of the newly restored works, 

before its definitive closure in July of 2020. 

The still-pending public inauguration of 

Ferroni’s restored masterworks at San Giovanni 

di Dio, and the restoration (now in progress) of 

three more devotional works by Siriès Cerroti 

at the Certosa di Firenze monastery, including 

a rare Reading Madonna, are the raison d’être 

of the much-awaited project ‘VIOLANTE: 

Accademia Women’, conceived and financed 

by the AWA Legacy Fund, in partnership with 

Syracuse University Florence and the AADFI. The 

importance of AADFI membership for the careers 

of these two artists has yet to be studied in depth, 

but their devotional works easily fit the canons 

of Vasari’s philosophy. In their world, paintings 

were an instrument of private devotion or public 

worship – where colour or quiet scenes inspire 

viewers to explore their inner landscape, where 

greater sights await the travelling soul. 

LINDA FALCONE 

For more on the project ‘VIOLANTE: 

Accademia Women’, running from September 

2024 to May 2025, see p. 74. 


Art detectives for 

Violante 

AWA Legacy Fund sees dream unfold 


Certosa di Firenze, ph. Olga Makarova 


Undisturbed silence has characterised the 

vast Certosa di Galluzzo charterhouse, 

since its construction in 1341, as home 

of the Carthusian monks. Now a base 

for the San Leolino community, its grand cloister 

defies all description, and its artworks, including 

five lunettes painted by Pontormo in the early 

1520s, will bring even the non-religious to a 

quietness akin to prayer, thanks to their silent 

beauty. The artwork displayed in this fortress-like 

structure, made strong by contemplation not 

weaponry, could represent lifetimes of labour for 

a team of endlessly patient conservators. 

Marina Vincenti and Elizabeth Wicks, the 

two restorers with whom I visited the Certosa 

last winter, with complex manager Father 

Bernardo Artusi as guide, were looking for the 

one woman in the place – eighteenth-century 

painter Violante Series Cerroti – whose Reading 

Madonna is displayed above the altar, in what 

may well be the smallest chapel on the premises, 

right off the prior’s tiny bedroom. Despite its 

dire need for restoration the Cappella del priore 

is a pastel-hued Rococo gem. In the scene of the 

Siriès Cerroti altarpiece, a sweet Madonna has 

placed her daily sewing aside, and is praying 

over a large prayer book in Hebrew script. The 

painting is an ode to daily work and devotion, 

but as modern women, we cannot help but revel 

in the message between the lines: its protagonist 

is a literate woman seeking knowledge, 

independently. 

In oval niches on either side of the altar are two 

female saints: Agnes with a lamb and Catherine 

with her martyr’s wheel, works also attributed to 

Siriès Cerroti, due to stylistic similarities with her 

confirmed oeuvre. These delightful, delicately 

bejewelled depictions of pious women recall the 

‘realm’ women have always accessed, no matter 

the era, that of sacrifice. The restoration of all 

three paintings is the diamond point of a new 

project, organised by the AWA Legacy Fund called 

‘Violante: Accademia Women’. It was almost four 

years in the making, and its ‘backstory’ is one 

of carefully planned partnerships, which gave 

rise to an all-woman team of ‘art detectives’ and 

documentarians, committed to safeguarding 

‘forgotten’ art and bringing new research to light. 

Before Advancing Women Artists (AWA) closed 

its doors in July 2020, with 70 restored artworks 

by women to its credit, AWA’s board of Trustees 

began the search for its final project, to be rolled 

out post closure, via what they called the AWA 

Legacy Fund. “We wanted a project that would 

reflect the organisation’s values, rooted in a 

Florentine institution that lies at the heart of the 

city’s history from the female perspective,” says 

AWW Legacy Director, Margie MacKinnon, to 

describe the guiding goals of the seven-women 

team, whose support made this legacy project 

possible, namely, Connie Clark, Pam Fortune, 

Nancy Gallagher, Nancy Hunt, Donna Malin and 

Alice Vogler, as well as MacKinnon herself. 

“Syracuse University in Florence was our first 

choice as ‘the project’s godmother’,” explains 

Alice Vogler, former AWA Secretary and Director. 

“Back in 2005, Syracuse University in Florence 

(SUF) published a book on Johnathan Nelson’s 

research into Renaissance painter Plautilla Nelli, 

underwritten by Jane Fortune, founder of AWA, 

and following her support of the restoration of 

Nelli’s Lamentation with Saints at the San Marco 

Museum. The rescue of that painting started 

Jane’s quest to restore more art by women, a 

journey we all came to share,” says Vogler. “We 

wanted our legacy project to involve university 

internship opportunities as well, to inspire 

students to explore art by women, so it is like 

coming ‘full circle’.” 

For the project’s Florentine partner AWA 

board members also intended to seek out an 

institution relevant to women artists through 

the ages. There is only one institution whose 

history forms part of the experience of every 

professional female artist in Florence. Only one 

institution consistently guaranteed them the 

prestige they would need to make their way in 

the world as money-earning painters and gave 


Top, left: Violante Siriès Cerrroti’s Saint Catherine with a martyr’s wheel and above, right: Saint Agnes with a lamb 

Above: Restorer Marina Vincenti at work at Certosa di Firenze, photos © Olga Makarova 


Above: Elizabeth Wicks safeguarding Violante’s work prior to transport, ph. Olga Makarova 

them the ‘stamp’ of approval that allowed their 

names – if not their artwork – to survive through 

the centuries, and that is Florence’s Accademia 

delle Arti del Disegno, AADFI (see p. 74). 

With the partners on board, it was decided 

that the project content would be restorationbased, 

and include a grant for research and 

video documentation, as well as occasions for 

the public to see the art. “Artist Violante Siriès 

Cerroti, and her Reading Madonna fit the bill. 

AWA Legacy Research Grant awardee is 

scholar Giulia Coco, curator at the much-loved 

Accademia Museum. “My research will centre 

on Violante Siriès Cerroti, as a woman traveller 

and artist, who succeeded – via international 

experiences in France and Austria – in 

broadening the horizons of Florentine women in 

the arts, beyond the Medici court, in which she 

herself trained under Giovanna Fratellini. Very 

well integrated in the artistic and aristocratic 

circles of Florence, she was well known and 

sought after by international travellers and 

artists in Tuscany,” Coco says. 

“In 1733, at the age of just 24, Siriès Cerroti was 

elected to the AADFI,” the curator continues. 

“Certainly, this prestigious nomination, was, in 

part, obtained thanks to personal and family 

ties, but it was also a sign of encouragement 


for a figure who contributed greatly to the 

‘emancipation’ of women’s painting, beyond 

portraiture – the genre early women artists 

most often practiced. Above all, as a female 

artist, Siriès Cerroti was endowed with a sense 

of autonomy and independence, values she 

was able to convey, through teaching, to a new 

generation of women painters such as Maria 

Hadfield Cosway and Anna Piattoli Bacherini.” 

The project’s research and restoration elements 

began their operative phase in September 2024, 

and are scheduled for presentation at Certosa 

di Galuzzo in June 2025, following tours for the 

general public and a half-day seminar focused 

on new discoveries linked to Siriès Cerroti and 

Violante Ferroni, the last artist whose works 

AWA restored back in 2020 (see p. 78 for more). 

While Dr Coco follows new leads, filmmaker 

Olga Makarova will document each phase of this 

three-pronged restoration, from removal to reinstallation. 

This project brings together a team 

of talented and creative women from the present, 

and sets them ‘on the trail’ of two women artists 

deserving further study. The team feel hopeful 

about the discoveries that are sure to come to 

the fore. Newly restored paintings, and everemerging 

cultural horizons, for women from 

multiple eras – that’s what it’s all about. 


With Every Clue 

You Pursue 

Art sleuth and artisan Poiret Masse searches 

for Violante Siries Cerroti’s ‘voice’ 

F 

Florence’s Tuscan Capuchin Museum was the brainchild 

of Father Atanasio Andreini (d. 2013), who, in the 1990s, 

began compiling objects and artwork from closing 

Tuscan monasteries and curating their restoration. Eight 

hundred of the most representative items in this collection 

found a home – either on display or in storage – in the 

eighteenth-century loggia above the vault of the Church 

of San Francesco a Montughi, which officially became a 

wunderkammer museum in 2018. 

The museum’s current director Friar Francesco Mori 

reached out to Florence-based writer, potter and part-time 

art sleuth Poiret Masse, after reading the book The Lady Who 

Paints (Pacini Editore, 2016), which features Masse’s seminal 

research on eighteenth-century artist Violante Siriès Cerroti. 

Did she know that the Capuchins had a signed Saint Francis 

by Violante, he wondered, and would she like to see it? As 

author of one of the most often cited essays on the artist, 

Poiret’s “conversation with Violante” is still happening today, 

through archive hunting and auction haunting. This new 

Capuchin clue provides Restoration Conversations the 

opportunity to learn more about Poiret’s continued quest. 


Left: Saint Francis, Violante Siries Cerroti, 1765 

© Museo Cappuccini Toscani 

Restoration Conversations: The National 

Gallery of London’s ‘Saint Francis of 

Assisi’ exhibition last year emphasised the 

modernity and relevance of Saint Francis in 

today’s world. Tell us about Violante Siriès 

Cerotti’s ‘newest’ devotional work at the 

Capuchin museum. 

Poiret Masse: Violante’s Saint Francis is a fulllength, 

frontal portrait of the saint dressed in a 

humble hooded brown habit, tied at the waist 

with a knotted rope and a crucifix. His hands and 

feet bear the stigmata, and he gives the gesture 

of blessing with his right hand, while holding 

the Gospel in his left. This depiction was likely 

made for the Church of San Ludovico, in the 

Tuscan town of Montevarchi. Its high altar used 

to host a Coronation of the Virgin with Saints 

(1500-1508) by Botticelli and his workshop, which 

included an image of Saint Francis enraptured 

by this holy vision. Violante’s rendition recalls 

some of the oldest characterisations of Francis, 

which are more icon-like and without the birds 

and animals with which he appears in later 

imagery. The figure exudes gentleness and he 

appears to be making a direct appeal to the 

devotee to meditate on Franciscan compassion. 

Despite the figure’s more archaic iconography, 

Saint Francis is painted in Violante’s soft and 

gentle style. He is very sweet. When I first saw 

him, it was like meeting a friend. 



RC: What circumstances surround the 

painting’s creation and how does it compare 

to the artist’s other works? 

PM: Saint Francis is a signed and dated work, 

which provides a standard for comparison that 

will prove useful for identifying and attributing 

other works to Violante. Remarkably, the painting 

itself records the circumstances of its commission: 

it was paid for with alms by Father Felice Antonio 

Bicilotti, in 1765. Beyond recognizable details 

that bring to mind the features of Violante’s 

characters from other works – fingers, lips and 

eyes – Saint Francis displays other trademarks of 

Violante’s style: a rather mannered presentation 

of the figure, vibrant colors and a pleasing 

lightness of touch. Stylistic influences of her 

teachers can be found in her works as well; the 

impressive list includes Medici court portraitist 

and skillful pastellist Giovanna Fratellini, French 

court portraitist Hyacinthe Rigaud, celebrated 

Rococo painter François Boucher and 

Florentine artist Francesco Conti, known for his 

devotional works. This is all about hammering 

down secure attributions and using them as 

a reference. Again, to achieve this goal, it’s 

important to look at the signed and dated works 

in her oeuvre and compare them to other works 

in question. 

RC: What kinds of sources do you seek out 

when trying to piece together Violante’s 

story? 

PM: This fall, a 2020 paper by Oronzo Brunetti 

on Violante’s father-in-law led me to Francesco’s 

will in the State Archive of Rome, where Violante’s 

name appears. Francesco Cerroti, a highly 

successful stonemason from Settingano, justifies 

the exclusion of his first-born son Giuseppe 

[Violante’s husband] from further inheritance, 

citing the twelve thousand piastre given to 

Giuseppe upon his ‘emancipation’. The will also 

mentions two thousand piastre provided as a 

generous dowry for Violante, in addition to other 

gifts given to her including gioie, argenti, abiti, 

ed altro – jewellery, silverware, clothing and other 

items. The will also cites Giuseppe’s comfortable 

life conditions, compared to that of his brothers. 

The fact that Giuseppe received a great deal of 

money upon his marriage to Violante suggests 

she was quite a catch! Perhaps she was seen as 

having earning potential, since her works formed 

part of the grand ducal collection. 

RC: How did Violante go about securing 

commissions and where are they? 

PM: The picture coming into view is that Violante 

Siriès Cerroti was in the circle of entrepreneurial 

artisans to which her father Louis Siriès and fatherin-law 

belonged. They were artisans, but they 

were cleverly oriented in the business of getting 

work and creating professional opportunities. 

They were good at positioning themselves 

and giving themselves an edge in a changing 

market. Seeing Violante in that light, makes it 

easier to imagine her having the drive to paint 

and to make her way in the professional world. 

Archival evidence suggests the Sansedoni family 

of Siena were very good patrons of hers. There 

are clearly a number of paintings down that 

road. She has considerable geographical range 

– from a cloistered monastery in Pistoia to the 

estate of a British naval captain in Wales. We know 

that several of her works ended up in Britain 

via private collectors. As pieces of the mosaic 

emerge, they form a richer picture of Violante 

inserted in the circle of artists and artisans who 

embellished the period. They show an active, 

working artist who made use of her considerable 

access to patronage, finding a place in the market 

and adapting to suit a range of contexts. 

Left: The work at the Church of Santa Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi that began Poiret’s quest, The Virgin Mary Presents the Baby Jesus to Santa 

Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, restored by Advancing Women Artists in 2016, photo © Ottaviano Caruso 


Above: View of Florence’s Tuscan Capuchin Museum, 2024, ph. Fra Francesco Mori © Museo Cappuccini Toscani 

RC: What most inspires you about Violante 

Siriès Cerroti? 

PM: I confess I still don’t know Violante as I would 

like to. Our relationship began with my research 

linked to the restoration of her large-scale 

devotional painting in the sacristy of Florence’s 

Santa Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, while the canvas 

was under restoration with Advancing Women 

Artists. My first impression continues to stay with 

me: she must have had a forceful personality and 

an impressive can-do energy, but the sweetness of 

her style belies that forcefulness. I keep listening 

for her voice. Without letters or direct quotes, we 

are lacking her words, which are something I 

continue to look for. With every clue you pursue, 

you find more, and there are so many paintings 

whose stories need to be fleshed out. 

Since the publication of The Lady Who Paints, 

I have received messages from scholars all over 

Italy, who have uncovered several pieces of the 

puzzle, and her works are emerging at auction. 

A full retrieval of Violante’s oeuvre can only 

happen over time, and I can’t speak too soon. I 

certainly can’t put words in Violante’s mouth, 

but her ‘silence’ compels me to keep plugging 

along, pursuing clues. There has not been a large 

movement to study Violante’s period, which is 

still rather murky. For years, eighteenth-century 

artists were considered ‘second-tier’ in the 

Florentine perspective, and scholars are only 

beginning to turn their attention to it. I think 

placing value judgements on artwork gets us 

into trouble. The reality is that we value things 

based on how well we understand them. I find 

the words of Vietnamese monk and civil rights 

activist Thich Nhat Hanh relevant in this context. 

‘Understanding” he said, “is love’s other name.” 

LINDA FALCONE 


Left: Portrait of potter 

Poiret Masse. 

(Image: Lara Cervaroli 

© Gruppo Fotografico 

Il Cupolone) 

Potter, writer and part-time art sleuth 

Poiret Masse was born in San Francisco, 

California, and has been living in Florence, 

Italy since 2015. “I’ve always made things 

with my hands,” she says, “but find that 

my Art History and Fine Art backgrounds 

inform my ceramics practice. Researching 

eighteenth-century Florentine painter 

Violante Siriès Cerroti for Advancing 

Women Artists from 2015 to 2017, opened 

up that period in the city’s history to me, 

feeding my ceramics with curvaceous 

Baroque lines. The experience of combing 

Medici and Lorraine-era inventories 

searching for Violante’s paintings 

among their recorded artworks, objects, 

and furnishings, inspired my ceramics 

company La Guardaroba Firenze.” Poiret’s 

quest for Violante’s voice continues today, 

nine years on and counting. 



Revelations at 

Sant’Orsola 

A future museum with many past lives 

Florence-based French curator 

Morgane Lucquet Laforgue calls 

Museo Sant’Orsola “a museum in 

the making”. Part of a 17,000-squaremetre 

complex once inhabited by 

Franciscan nuns, it is scheduled for 

inauguration in 2026. The exhibitions it 

hosts ‘pre-opening’ feature newly created 

artwork at the construction-site venue, 

revealing Sant’ Orsola’s modus operandi: to 

commission contemporary site-specific art 

related to the history of the place. During 

our Restoration Conversations broadcast in 

October, Morgane introduced artworks from 

the exhibition ‘Rivelazioni’, capturing the 

essence of a complex that hosted female 

communities for nearly four centuries. 

Restoration Conversations: In the mid- 

1500s, a very famous woman was buried 

here, in the crypt of the church, Lisa 

Gherardini, alleged sitter for Leonardo’s 

most famous painting, the Mona Lisa. 

What can you tell us about her? 

Morgane Lucquet Laforgue: Lisa 

Gherardini’s daughter Marietta was here 

at the convent and became a nun, Suor 

Ludovica. Lisa’s husband was Francesco del 

Giocondo – which is why she is known in 

Italian as ‘La Gioconda’. When he died in the 

1530s, his will specified that he wanted his 

wife to join Marietta at the peaceful convent 

of Sant’Orsola, because they lived nearby. 

Lisa did spend her last years here, and we 

know she was buried here. 

Left: Juliette Minchin’s Vitrail soufflé (Blown glass window), part of Soufflé (Breath), 

an installation in the old outer church at Sant’Orsola in 2024, photo © Cinestudio Italy 


Above: Portrait of Morgane Lucquet Laforgue, photo © Cinestudio Italy 

What we will never be sure about is if Lisa 

Gherardini is actually Mona Lisa… that remains a 

bit of a mystery. 

RC: Juliette Minchin, whose preferred medium 

is wax, is looking at the convent’s Baroque 

period, although there is no real trace of it in 

the former church. Her installation near what 

used to be the main altar is called Soufflé, or 

breath. What can you tell us about it? 

MLL: Juliette explores the theatrical and the 

ephemeral. She is very interested in illusions. In 

Baroque Italy, artists took great pleasure in the 

illusion of making stone or marble look like fabric; 

it was a way of proving their mastery. Juliette does 

it with wax. 

Beyond the Baroque, she is exploring themes 

like ‘presence’ and ‘absence’, because all we have 

of Juliette’s figure is ‘a veil’. The figure has no 

body and no face; she is identified by her robes 

alone. Because she has no personal identity, and 

no individuality, she embodies all of Sant’Orsola’s 

women. 

The nuns came for different reasons. Sending a 

daughter into a nunnery was cheaper than paying 

for a marriage dowry. If a woman was a second or 

third daughter, or if she was not considered pretty 

enough to marry, she would be sent to a convent 

like Sant’Orsola. Even with Mona Lisa – we know 

her face through Leonardo, but no one knows 

much about the woman. She, like the others, is an 

unknown religious woman. 


“Time is the actor in the work. The melting of its 

wax is like a great hourglass that changes the 

state of the work. It is a way to let the material 

express itself, to let us feel the passage of time 

and the beauty of transformation.” 

Juliette Minchin 

Above: Juliette Minchin’s 2024 work, Vigil with roots, in Sant’Orsola’s old apothecary, photo © Cinestudio Italy 


Captions

RC: In this museum-in-the-making, Minchin’s 

works are constantly transforming as well. 

Her installation Vigil with roots is displayed 

where Sant’Orsola’s apothecary nuns had 

their workshop. Her sculptural series is lit 

with real fire, which changes the work, right 

in front of the visitors’ eyes. 

MLL: Everyday, at varying times, we light 

different parts of the installation. Steel mesh lies 

beneath the coat of wax covering the panels, and 

candlewicks are embroidered into it. Juliette’s 

works continue to sculpt themselves, with the 

passing of the flame – so the action continues, 

even once the artist is finished. The stalactitelike 

dripping wax evokes the plants that used 

to be hung to dry, to create medicinal remedies. 

Wax itself was used in ancient formulas, to make 

ointments. Otherwise, they used wax to make 

bandages. During their preparation of corpses for 

burial, the nuns worked in this space to create 

perfumes, to help the soul’s passage into the 

afterlife. Even the installation, while burning, 

creates a scent that evokes this ritualistic part of 

Sant’Orsola’s past. 

RC: An artist allowing her work to change 

while she’s ‘not in the room’ sounds like a 

masterful exercise in detachment. 

MLL: Juliette has no idea how her sculptures 

are going to evolve and that’s the beauty of it 

– not having a complete grip on what you are 

creating. With Vigil with roots, the melting wax 

seems to be crying for the spirit of the nuns 

buried here. The artist is fascinated with how 

materials can pass from one state to another 

and evolve as part of a cyclic process. She 

melts down her sculptures after exhibitions 

and covers the old wax with a new batch 

– an old soul in a new body. Her works talk 

about rebirth, destruction and transition in 

Sant’Orsola. 

RC: Sant’Orsola has had many lives, and it 

will soon be re-incarnated as a museum, 

exhibition venue, and cultural centre, 

complete with artisans’ workshops, a 

literary café and even student housing. 

What can you tell us about its history and 

future? 

Left: View of Juliette Minchin’s installation Soufflé (Breath) in the 

ancient outer church at Sant’Orsola in 2024, photo © Cinestudio Italy 


Above: Artist Marta Roberti in her studio, with detail of a work from the Aure series 2024, photo © Cinestudio Italy 

MLL: At the beginning of the fourteenth century, 

it was a convent. In the nineteenth century, it 

became a tobacco manufacturing plant. After 

World War II, it was used as a refugee shelter for 

displaced families from Istria, and in the 1980s, 

there were radical plans to make it into a military 

barracks – which never happened. Sant’Orsola 

is owned by the metropolitan city of Florence, 

and the French group ARTEA won the bid for 

the building’s renovation and restructuring, to 

create a cultural hub. As far as the museum is 

concerned, we’d like to see some of the convent’s 

original artwork return, as well as continue to 

invite contemporary artists to work in dialogue 

with this space. 

RC: The dialogue you’ve created with 

‘Revelations’ also features Rome-based artist 

Marta Roberti, who created works on Chinese 

paper reminiscent of frescoes. What can you 

tell us about them? 

MLL: Marta was fascinated with the 

intimate spaces, in which the nuns lived and 

dreamed. In Roberti’s imagination, the sisters 

commissioned her to decorate their cells. 

She creates a dreamscape, where women and 

animals are engaging in a choreography of 

sorts. The women Marta depicts are almost 

like goddesses. The women who lived here 

did not live in communion with nature, so 

to dream of wilderness, was to dream of 

freedom. The women depicted are naked, but 

not in a provocative way, which is an allusion 

to freedom as well. She is imagining a world 

where harmony among beings is of paramount 

importance. In these imagined cells, patriarchy 

is not in power. 

Watch this Restoration Conversations 

broadcast at Museo Sant’Orsola, on 

YouTube: @calliopearts_restoration 


Front cover: 

Marieluise Bantel, 2022, Graceful (Würdevoll) 

Back cover: 

Vanessa Bell, 1908-09, Iceland Poppies © Estate of Vanessa Bell. All rights reserved, DACS 2024. 

CHA/P/468, Charleston, photograph © The Charleston Trust

Restoration Conversations magazine - Autumn 2024

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Restoration Conversations magazine - Autumn 2024

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