Restoration Conversations magazine- Summer 2022

Restoration 

Conversations 

ISSUE 1, SUMMER 2022 

WOMEN’S STORIES: TODAY AND THROUGH THE CENTURIES 

Summer 2022 • Restoration Conversations 1

Publisher 

Calliope Arts Ltd 

London, UK 

Editor 

Linda Falcone 

Contributing Editor 

Margie MacKinnon 

Design 

FPE Media Ltd 

www.calliopearts.org 

2 Restoration Conversations • Summer 2022

From the Editor 

We begin what Italians call ‘the beautiful season’ with our first-ever edition of Restoration 

Conversations, the magazine. Issue One – Summer 2022 – is filled with photography, 

much like our year has been, and it is interview-heavy, as I hope the publication will often 

be, because conversation, more than anything else I know, brings new thought, that emerges from 

the very fact of having to express it. How many times, in life, have we caught ourselves saying, ‘This 

is occurring to me only now, as we speak’. The world of curators, artists, makers, and photographers 

is not a static place, one quickly learns, and conversation – an idea shared with utmost immediacy 

– is often the starting point of something lasting. 

When Margie MacKinnon and Wayne McArdle approached me one year ago, almost to the day, with 

the thought of founding Calliope Arts, they asked if I’d consider collaborating with them. My first 

recommendation was this: ‘We’ll need a magazine’. 

Why is that exactly? Because women – in the past and today – so often forget to document their 

achievements – in both words and pictures – and I do believe that someday, someone in search 

of their roots will want to know about the wonderful things that can happen in Florence, London 

and further afield, when committed people come together to discuss, explore and convey women’s 

perspectives in varied fields of expression. 

This issue spotlights the organisation’s new partnerships and projects, and captures a glimpse 

of the events, people and creative endeavours that have occupied our first year – from inside 

the classroom with ‘A Century of Women in the Arts: 1866-1966’, to the museum spotlight with 

‘Fotografe!’, there is much to discover within these pages. 

We are delighted to begin this issue with ‘the sun in our minds’ – to borrow the analogy so 

skilfully rendered through the lens of Federica Belli, one of the ten photographers on show at 

Forte Belvedere and Villa Bardini this summer, along with their pioneering counterparts from the 

fascinating Alinari Archive. Furthermore, in closing, I’d like to draw your attention to this issue’s 

final article, which spotlights Iris Origo’s titanic efforts to transform La Foce. It has a title that can 

easily double as my wish for Calliope Arts, this magazine, and all of its readers: may we prosper 

and grow, and, above all, may we stand united in this ‘Labour of Love’. 

Fondly, 

Linda Falcone 

Editor, Restoration Conversations 


CONTENTS 

SUMMER 2022 

EXHIBITIONS TO VIEW AND REMEMBER 

6 Three Women 

Knight, Pollard and Maier at MK Gallery 

16 Laura Knight and her Icons 

A conversaton with art historian Sacha Llewellyn 

22 Going Anywhere 

New Women behind the Camera 

28 Masters of the Genre 

Female artists ‘pause time’ at the Colnaghi Gallery 

34 Oltrano Gaze 

A dialogue in every medium 

WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHERS 

40 Why ‘Women’ Photographers? 

Margie MacKinnon tells the Backstory 

46 Exhibition Makers 

Co-curator Emanuela Sesti speaks on ‘Fotografe!’ 

52 Philospophy and Photography 

Quotes from co-curator Walter Guadagnini 

56 Spotlight on Photographer Federica Belli 

Deciphering the cover photo 

A CENTURY OF WOMEN 

60 A Century of Women in the Arts 

62 Ten Women with Words or Pictures 

70 All Our Yesterdays 

Natalia Ginzburg 

74 A Labour of Love 

Iris Origo and the Transformation of La Foce 


Three Women 

Knight, Pollard and Maier at MK Gallery 

Calliope Arts’ first Restoration 

Conversation of 2022 focussed 

on the MK Gallery’s monographic 

exhibition of works by 20th century 

British artist, Laura Knight (1877–1970). 

For those who may be wondering, ‘MK’ 

stands for Milton Keynes. Located 

some 55 miles northwest of central 

London, it was – until last month – a 

town of 230,000 souls. However, to 

mark the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, 

Milton Keynes has now been granted 

the status of ‘City’, no doubt partly in 

recognition of its cultural dynamism. 

Milton Keynes was given the 

designation of New Town in 1967, part 

of a third wave of towns planned by 

the central government to relocate 

populations in poor or bombed-out 

housing (mostly from London) following 

the Second World War. The MK Theatre 

and Art Gallery first opened in 1999. 

Twenty years later, the Gallery was 

extended and re-modelled to include an 

art-house cinema. A space that buzzes 

with activity, it hosts conferences, 

workshops, children’s events and other 

community outreach programmes. 

‘Laura Knight: A Panoramic View’ 

was one of the first post-lockdown 

exhibitions held at MK Gallery, and the 

first of a series of three shows focussing 

on women artists. The second, on 

display until 29 May, was devoted to 

the multi-faceted art of British artist 

and photographer Ingrid Pollard (b. 

1953). The final exhibition in the series 

will be a retrospective of the works of 

American photographer Vivian Maier 

(1926–2009). 


Left: Laura Knight, The Cornish Coast, 1917, 

National Museum Wales 

Right, top: Laura Knight, Lubov Tchernicheva, 

1921. Private collection 

Right, bottom: Laura Knight, Chloe, 1926. 

Private Collection. 

LAURA KNIGHT 

The Laura Knight exhibition was 

the largest exhibition of the artist’s 

works since 1965, bringing together 

over 160 of her paintings, drawings, 

books and ceramics. It covered all of 

the important genres that comprise 

Knight’s prodigious catalogue – 

including scenes of domestic life in 

the fishing community of Staithes, 

Yorkshire, landscapes of Newlyn in 

Cornwall and, later, the Malvern Hills. 

Her love of behind-the-scenes grittiness 

was evident in her studies of the ballet, 

theatre and the circus. Her aptitude 

for portraiture was revealed in her 

earliest drawings, completed while still 

a student (the youngest ever admitted) 

at Nottingham Art College, as well as in 

her paintings of the Roma people she 

befriended at Epsom Race Course and 

the Black hospital staff she encountered 

on a trip with her husband to Baltimore. 

She was adept at portraying the female 

nude; this was a subject that remained 

very important to her, having been 

denied the opportunity as a student to 

take part in life drawing classes. 

A large portion of the exhibition 

was given over to Knight’s paintings 

of women at work, commissioned by 

the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. 

Also on display were her sketches and 

paintings from the Nuremberg trials – 

a commission she sought at almost 70 

years of age. 


Laura Knight observed the world 

around her and chronicled it with realism 

and dynamism. She was one of the 

most famous and popular artists of her 

day. Contemporary audiences, whether 

re-visiting her work or viewing it for 

the first time, discovered a resonance 

in her depictions of marginalised 

communities and women at work – as 

performers, seamstresses or mechanics 

– and in scenes that recalled a country 

at war. As the exhibition came to a close, 

its curator, Fay Blanchard, was delighted 

to announce that ‘Laura Knight’ had 

become the most popular exhibition in 

MK Gallery’s history. 

Top, right: Laura Knight, Ella Ardelty on the High Trapeze, 

Undated. Private collection. 

Top , left: Laura Knight, Unfinished Portrait Vijayalakshmi 

Pandit, Undated. Royal Academy of Arts, London

Top left: Ingrid Pollard, Contenders (detail), 1995, Courtesy of the artist 

Top right: Ingrid Pollard, Self Evident (detail), 1992, courtesy of the artist. 

Above: Ingrid Pollard, Pastoral Interlude , 1987, 

Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 

INGRID POLLARD 

Following on from the success of the 

Laura Knight exhibition, the second 

show in MK Gallery’s series on women 

artists has already enjoyed one of the 

highest accolades in the British art world. 

Soon after ‘Ingrid Pollard, Carbon Slowly 

Turning’ was installed, it was announced 

that Ingrid Pollard’s exhibition had 

been shortlisted for the Turner Prize, 

a prestigious annual prize awarded 

to a British artist for an outstanding 

exhibition in contemporary art. 

As curator Gilane Tawadros explains, 

“Pollard is renowned for using portrait 

and landscape photography to question 

our relationship with the natural world 

and to interrogate social constructs 

such as Britishness, race, sexuality 

and identity. The title - Carbon Slowly 

Turning - invites us to reflect on 

geological time in relation to human 

time. A number of Pollard’s works reflect 

on the cyclical nature of history and 

human experience, where everything 

is subject to change, sometimes over 

hundreds of thousands of years, at other 

times in the blink of an eye.” 

Pollard’s work is the antithesis of 

Knight’s: it is complex, confrontational, 

thought-provoking and, sometimes, 

disturbing. As well as photography 

and video, the works include ceramics, 

collage and sculpture, complete with 

sound effects that grow increasingly 

menacing as the viewer nears the 

end of the exhibition to discover the 



final installation, ‘Bow Down and Very 

Low’, described by Hettie Judah in The 

Guardian as “a trio of kinetic sculptures, 

two of which (a pair of bending, scraping 

metal saws, and a body of knotted ship’s 

rope) appear to genuflect, and the third 

of which impotently swings a baseball 

bat. Behind them is a row of lenticular 

prints of a little Black girl in a white 

1940s dress, trapped forever as she bobs 

in and out of a curtsy.” 

In short, ‘Carbon Slowly Turning’ is 

an immersive experience that defies 

easy explanation and leaves a lasting 

impression. 

Left: Ingrid Pollard, There Was Much Interruption 

(detail), 2015, Courtesy of the artist. 

Right, top: Ingrid Pollard, The Valentine Days #1 , 

1891/2017, Courtesy of Ingrid Pollard 

Right: Ingrid Pollard, Parabiosis, 

Government Art Collection 


VIVIAN MAIER 

Enigmatic photographer Vivian Maier is the subject 

of MK Gallery’s third exhibition in the series, which 

will run from 11 June to 25 September 2022. 

In 2007, while looking for historical photos of 

Chicago, local historian John Maloof stumbled 

upon a huge photographic cache whose author 

was unknown. Further investigation revealed 

that this collection of over 100,000 negatives 

represented 40 years of work by Vivian Maier, a 

woman who had been employed as a nanny by 

numerous families in the city. Like a latter-day 

Mary Poppins, Vivian had taken the children she 

looked after on journeys to different parts of the 

city – some glamorous, some less so. She took 

her camera everywhere she went and recorded 

the people and scenes she encountered. Many 

of the negatives were un-developed, and her 

work was never publicly shown. By the time the 

extent and distinctive quality of her work were 

discovered, Vivian had died. 


Left: Vivian Maier, Self-portrait, New York, 1953 

When asked once what she did for a living, 

Maier replied, “I’m some kind of a spy.” Like 

other good street photographers, she blended 

into her surroundings without attracting too 

much attention. She had a gift for noticing 

little gestures, the details of a hat, the emotion 

of a situation; she captured childhood 

innocence and intimate encounters. Her 

photographs reflect compassion, humour and a 

Clockwise from top left: Vivian Maier, September 18, 1962; 

Vivian Maier, New York, July 27, 1954; 

Vivian Maier, New York, December 2, 1954; 

Vivian Maier, Self-Portrait, not dated 

All images Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY. 


Above: Vivian Maier, Self-portrait, not dated 

Right: Vivian Maier, New York, 1954 

Both images Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY. 


ecognition of the universality of the 

human condition. Apparently selftaught, 

her work is comparable to that of 

the professional photographers of her 

generation. And years before the ‘selfie’ 

became ubiquitous, she experimented 

with self-portraits that show her image 

reflected in mirrors, shop front windows 

and shadows. 

‘Vivian Maier: Anthology’ promises 

to be a worthy successor to the Laura 

Knight and Ingrid Pollard exhibitions. 

“MK Gallery is delighted to have 

shown a yearlong presentation of solo 

exhibitions by three, very different, 

female artists,” says MK’s Head of 

Exhibitions, Fay Blanchard. “From 

remembering the historic achievements 

of Laura Knight, blazing the trail for 

women in the artworld, to Ingrid Pollard’s 

long-overdue recognition for being at 

the forefront of British contemporary 

art with the Turner Prize nomination, the 

audience response to these exhibitions 

has been extraordinary. We can’t wait 

to introduce them this summer to the 

work of Vivian Maier.” 

Bravo to MK Gallery for shining a 

spotlight on these three incredible 

artists. RC 



Laura Knight 

and her icons 

A conversation with 

art historian Sacha 

Llewellyn 

Though Laura Knight (1877-1970) would 

depict performing artists for the whole of 

her life, posterity would best remember 

her for her War Artists’ Advisory Committee 

commissions, where she recorded women’s vital 

role in the war effort. “No praise is too high for 

their staunchness,” Knight would say of those 

she depicted. These women, like the protagonist 

of Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring, would 

become icons in their own right, whose fame 

sometimes surpassed that of Knight herself. 

“Described by the Sunday Times in 1950 as ‘an 

adventurous woman who instinctively forced her 

way to the place where things were happening’, 

Laura Knight was noted as an artist who sought 

out very public subjects, and not just those 

traditionally associated with women’s art,” writes 

art historian Sacha Llewellyn, guest of our first 

‘Restoration Conversation’ broadcast in 2022. 

Here’s Sacha’s take on some of Knight’s most 

dynamic subjects, gleaned from the transcript of 

her live interview. 

PLACING BETS ON WORKING WOMEN 

Knight travelled all over Britain to factories, 

workshops and airfields because she wanted 

to witness, first hand, the incredible work that 

women were doing to help with the war effort. 

She set up her paints on workbenches and, in her 

autobiography, she describes how she was often 

showered with sparks from the machines; she 


endured these situations of great danger, noise 

and claustrophobia, but she relished being at the 

heart of the action. 

She recounts arriving in one factory and 

hearing that there were bets on the factory floor… 

that she wouldn’t last out the day. In fact, she 

lasted six weeks and everybody lost their money. 

The artist depicts women working with barrage 

balloons which Knight called ‘colossal silver 

toads’. On the right, you see a woman in a role of 

authority, which would have been unseen before 

the war. Knight is depicting every type of woman. 

One the artist’s most well-known pictures 

portrays worker Ruby Loftus operating the most 

dangerous machine used in the production of 

armaments – one false move, and it could turn out 

very ugly. Knight exhibited the work at the Royal 

Academy in 1943 and it was immediately voted 

‘Picture of the year’. The next day, it appeared in 

over eight British newspapers as an illustration of 

women in the war effort, and it was reproduced, 

subsequently, as a poster for factories up and 

down the country. In one vignette, Ruby Loftus 

explained how Laura Knight had spent the whole 

day drawing sketches of her and then finally 

choose her favourite - ‘the one with the most go’, 

she said. 

Paintings by Laura Knight at 

the Imperial War Museums 

Previous page: A Balloon site, 

Coventry 1943 

Above: Ruby Loftus Screwing 

a Breech-ring, 

Right: Laura Knight, The 

Nuremburg Trial, 1946. 

Overleaf: A Dressing Room 

at Drury Lane, 1951 

The Atkinson, Lord Street, 

Southport 




NUREMBURG, ‘A STEP TOO FAR’ 

At the end of World War II, Knight approached the 

War Advisory Committee, and asked if someone 

would be documenting Nuremberg; when she 

learned that no one had been tasked with the 

assignment, she got herself a commission for 

one picture of the famous proceedings. Knight 

was approaching her seventieth birthday, and she 

got on an aeroplane for the first time in her life 

and went to Nuremberg where she spent three 

months observing these trials. 

She was given a broadcasting box above 

the courtroom and she said she felt incredibly 

at home because it felt to her like a box at the 

theatre. At the same time, she said, ‘I can never 

forget the agony that would seize me as an 

onlooker alone in that box’. She made numerous 

charcoal drawings of all the main protagonists, 

including Hermann Goering who she said kept 

looking up at her. 

Part of the scene in the finished work is painted 

in the manner of a courtroom sketch, faithful 

to a genre of drawing used to memorialize 

proceedings. Then, suddenly, she departs from 

her usual realist style, as the mahogany pews 

give way to this extraordinary melodramatic 

landscape inspired by the bomb-devastated city 

of Nuremberg. Amongst the rubble, the naked 

bodies are heaped, one upon each other, which 

almost spill back into the courtroom. 

The War Advisory Committee was very 

confused when they saw the final painting and 

Knight had to write them to justify this aspect 

of it. She wrote that the scenes of destruction 

had to appear, for without them, it would not 

be Nuremberg. The death of millions and utter 

devastation uncovered during the trial are the 

sole topic of conversation, she said, wherever 

one goes, whatever one is doing. They thought 

she had gone a step too far and couldn’t really 

understand it. I think that must have been a 

terrible source of sorrow for her because she 

wanted the painting to be her magnus opus. 

OFF-STAGE ACCESS 

Beyond wartime workers, Knight was very 

interested in showing the professionalism of 

performers, and the magic world of the stage. 

Yet, she often focussed on intimate moments 

of preparation and the transformation from 

fact to fiction. She managed to get behind the 

scenes – backstage at the ballet and West End 

theatres, even at the circus, gaining a kind of 

privileged access to these arenas. While there, 

she developed an extraordinary sense of 

kinship with the female performers, and I think 

it’s because she so admired their dedication to 

their art, which mirrored her own dedication. The 

Dressing Room at Drury Lane is a prime example 

because it shows two ballerinas. One is putting 

her makeup on and the other is looking towards 

us with a sense of exhaustion and awareness. 

These scenes give us, the viewer, unique access 

to the process. RC 

Sacha Llewellyn, a Paris-based 

feminist art historian, studied 

History of Art at the Courtauld 

Institute of Art. In addition to 

co-founding Liss Llewellyn 

in 1991, she has worked 

internationally as a curator 

and author, and was the recipient of the William 

MB Berger Prize for British Art History in 2017. This 

episode of the ‘Restoration Conversations’ was 

organised by Calliope Arts, in partnership with 

the Royal Drawing School in London and Milton 

Keynes’ MK Gallery, in celebration of the artist’s 

retrospective show, ‘Laura Knight, A panoramic 

view’, curated by Fay Blanchard and Anthony 

Spira. Sacha’s essay, ‘Dame Laura’s One-Man 

Show’can be found in the exhibition catalogue. 


Going anywhere 

New Women behind the Camera 

An Interview with Andrea Nelson 

In the 1930s, after a photo shoot in New York’s 

‘skid-row’ Bowery District, photographer 

Berenice Abbott was confronted with the 

comment, ‘Nice girls don’t go down on the 

Bowery’. Her answer? ‘Well, I’m not a nice girl. I’m 

a photographer. I go anywhere.’ 

The opportunity to explore with a camera in tow 

enabled early twentieth-century women to access 

new freedoms. ‘What makes the ‘new woman’?’ 

was the guiding question our ‘Restoration 

Conversation’ organised in response to the ‘New 

Woman Behind the Camera’ exhibition, on show 

at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, 

last autumn. 

The event, co-organised by Calliope Arts and 

The Florentine, saw exhibition curator Andrea 

Nelson in conversation with presenter Linda 

Falcone and revealed a time of intense change as a 

group of 120-plus women created photographs of 

calm and drama. From the 1920s to the 1950s, they 

carved their professional careers, whether on the 

front-line in wartime or inside the fashion-studio: 

from surrealist self-portraits to the depiction of 

collective events that changed history. 

Here are Andrea’s word-pictures to shed light 

on a few exhibition highpoints: 

NEWLY OPENED DOORS 

“If we focus on the modern period, the 1920s and 

1930s, we start seeing more women starting to 

run their own studio businesses and taking their 

place behind the camera. We begin to know 

their names and they started signing their work. 

There was a great history of women’s studio 

photographers in cities like London, Vienna 

and Berlin and, in part, it was because they had 

the opportunity to attend schools. For example, 

in Germany, women were not allowed into the 

fine art academies until 19171919, but they were 

able to apply and enter a photography school. 

Photography was more accessible than some of 

the other fine arts. Initially, women were learning 

it as a more technical trade. It was a way to earn 

a livelihood.” 

IN THE STUDIO 

“The studio was an important pathway for women 

to enter the field of photography. The idea that 

they were well-suited for this type of photography 

is something that stretches back to the field’s very 

beginnings. Women were, of course, involved in 

studio photography from its earliest days – 1839 

onward, but they were often behind the scenes. 



They were the ones hand-colouring prints. They 

were mounting prints and retouching negatives. 

Oftentimes, we don’t know much about them, and 

their names were not recorded in history. 

One American example is photographer, 

Florestine Perot Collins, who was working in New 

Orleans where she ran a very successful studio from 

1920 to 1949. We see a portrait of her, as she models 

herself, as an independent ‘new woman’. She’s 

wearing fashionable clothes; she’s got a bejewelled 

clip in her hair; she’s sporting a short bobbed cut: 

it’s telling potential clients that she’s really modern… 

that she’s forward thinking and independent.” 


Previous page: Homai Vyarawalla photographing 

Ganesh Chaturthi at Chowpatty Beach, Bombay, 1930s, 

Photographer unknown, Alkazi Collection of Photography 

Far left: Homai Vyarawalla, The Victoria Terminus, Bombay, 

1940s, Alkazi Collection of Photography 

Left: Florestine Perrault Collins, Mae Fuller Keller, 1920s, 

Dr Arthé A. Anthony collection 

Below: Olive Cotton, Teacup Ballet, 1935, 

The Sir Elton John Photography Collection 

MODERNIST FLAIR 

“Homai Vyarawalla’s wonderful modernist 

expression can be seen in the way she has 

composed this photograph. How she is framing 

the picture is very avant-garde. In the very back 

of the picture space is the Victoria Terminus, 

a famous train station in the colonial British 

architectural style that pulls from Indian tradition. 

It’s usually shown as a grand spectacle of a 

building but Vyarawalla pushes it to the back and 

is much more interested in the space in front of 

the train station. What’s framing our vision is a 

carriage – most likely a horse-drawn carriage 

(which are also called ‘victorias’) and then we see, 

in the middle-ground, a man pushing a cart. A 

tourist bus is off in the distance and there are 

people in the plaza maybe going to the train 

station. This play and practice of camera vision 

is wonderful. Vyarawalla said that she didn’t 

think she was doing anything special by being a 

woman photographer. It only occurred to her 50 

years later, when ‘everyone started making a big 

deal about it’.” 


Above: Dorothea Lange, Japanese-American owned 

grocery store, Oakland, California, 1942, 

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 

Right: Genevieve Naylor, São Januário Trolley, 1940s, 

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 


BEYOND LIMITS 

“Dorothea Lange was hired in 1942 to work for 

what was called the War Relocation Authority. Her 

assignment was to document some of the 125,000 

people of Japanese ancestry in the US who were 

forced to leave their homes and businesses and 

to relocate to camps, after the Japanese attacked 

Pearl Harbour in 1941. Lane was uneasy about the 

assignment from the get-go and was looking for 

ways to tell the whole story. She wanted to show 

the Japanese people in their settings, in their 

homes, to focus on what their livelihoods were 

and what they were being forced to give up. 

In the show, we have her photograph of a 

Japanese-American-owned grocery store in 

Oakland, California, whose owner, Mr. Matsuda, 

placed a large sign on the façade: ‘I am an 

American’. He put it up on December 8, 1941, 

so the day after Pearl Harbour. Lange was very 

consciously pushing the limits of the assignment. 

She also worked for Life magazine, to photograph 

at the Heart Mountain [internment camp], but her 

photographs were considered ‘too sympathetic’ 

and were not published.” 

CITY CONSTRUCT? 

The ‘New woman’ faced a time of extreme political 

shifts and we see a number of women, oftentimes 

Jewish women fleeing the rise of Fascism, 

particularly in Germany. Hildegard Rosenthal was 

Swiss, but her husband was Jewish, so the couple 

fled Germany where she had set up a successful 

studio. They ended up settling in Brazil, and 

Rosenthal’s oeuvre has some 3,000 works from 

the period. Rosenthal was hired by the City of 

San Paulo’s municipal administration to portray 

the city as an up-and-coming metropolis on the 

edge of modernity. 

A single photograph can really impart a sense 

of the city. In Ladeira Porto Geral, rua 25 de Março 

(São Paulo 1940) There are three executives 

conversing on the right side and they’re next to 

a store that sells precision clothing, and then we 

see the action, or the interaction, that’s happening 

around the fruit vendor’s cart. 

Then, there a wonderful young woman, whose 

at the centre of the image, eating a slice of 

watermelon but really looking directly out at us… 

she’s looking directly at the photographer. She 

happens to be Rosenthal’s assistant, so they have 

a connection, and what seems like a completely 

spontaneous capturing of the city street is 

somewhat constructed. Photographers are using 

their eye and their camera, to give us a frame and 

a point of view. RC 



Masters of the Genre 

Female artists ‘pause time’ at the Colnaghi Gallery 

‘ Forbidden Fruit’ is the suggestive name of 

an exhibition of rare and unpublished still 

lifes by female Old Masters now on display 

at London’s Colnaghi Gallery. With luscious fruits 

on the verge of over-ripening, meticulously 

rendered insects crawling and flying across the 

canvases, and voluptuous bouquets spilling out of 

gleaming vases, these works are a feast for all the 

senses. The gallery, a leading dealer in Old Master 

paintings, founded in 1760, has assembled the 

works from private collections around the world, 

paying homage to the women who excelled in 

this most demanding of genres. 

Still life of flowers in a glass vase by Italian 

painter Giovanna Garzoni (1600–1670) combines 

tulips, daffodils, ferns and other specimens in a 

transparent glass vase that reflects a window; 

that reflection is, in turn, reflected in another 

part of the vase. Garzoni’s painting is at once a 

harmonious composition and a showcase for her 

skill at scientific illustration. The exhibition text 

recalls that, “this beautiful floral still life is noted 

in a 1690 record of the dowry of Margarita Rothier 

on the occasion of her marriage, and Margarita’s 

name is inscribed at the upper margin of this 

sheet of vellum.” Garzoni’s use of vellum as a base 

for her works gives them a distinctive luminosity 

in comparison to the darker backgrounds of the 

other paintings in the show. 

Mannerist artist Fede Galizia’s (c.1578–c.1630) Still 

life with apples, pears, figs and melon overflows 

with lush fruit which seem to spill off the canvas 

while a tiny fly with diaphanous wings in the lower 

corner hints at their ripeness. Galizia’s Still life 

of peaches, pears and figs with butterflies and a 

bumblebee suggests the influence of Caravaggio 

with a single light source dramatically bisecting 

the painting diagonally into two halves. 

Though known as far back as classical Roman 

times, still life emerged as an independent genre 

during the Renaissance, and had its heyday in 

the so-called ‘Dutch Golden Age’. Capturing a 

moment of ‘paused time’ these paintings featured 

collections of inanimate objects from flowers 

and fruit to porcelain vases, musical instruments 

and skulls, as well as animals and insects. Painted 

with precise realism, the works required technical 

virtuosity, with special attention given to texture 

and the reflective qualities of glass and ceramics. 

It was a genre at which women were particularly 

adept and for which they were justly celebrated. 

The works were often allegories representing 

the fleetingness of life, decay and, ultimately, 

death. Each element had its own symbolism: a 

lighted candle might represent the passing of 

time; a lemon, with its bright exterior but sour 

taste, might stand for the deceptive allure of 

earthly beauty; while shells would be intended to 

evoke Saint James, the patron saint of pilgrims. 

The compositions often combined flowers from 

different countries and even different continents 

in one vase. Vertiginous arrangements that 

appealed to the eye would have struggled to stay 

upright in real life. 


Previous page: Rachel Ruysch, Bouquet of flowers in a glass vase 

on a marble table, 1748 

Above: Fede Galizia, Still Life of Peaches, Pears and Figs with 

Butterlies and a Bumblebee. Oil on panel 

Right, top: Iphigénie Decau, Née Milet-Moreau, Still Life of Fruit in 

a basket on a stone ledge c. 1815. Oil on canvas 

Right, bottom: Fede Galizia, Still Life of Apples, Pears, 

Cucumbers, Figs and a Melon, c. 1625 - 1630. Oil on panel 


No exhibition of still lifes would be complete 

without the inclusion of Dutch master Rachel 

Ruysch (1664–1750). Here she is represented by 

Bouquet of flowers in a glass vase on a marble 

table, the last known work of her career, painted 

in 1748. This is a simple composition, compared 

to Ruysch’s more elaborate works that can be 

found in museums and collections throughout 

the world, but her mastery remains evident. 

The exhibition text records that, “this painting 

demonstrates the remarkable high quality to 

which Ruysch was still painting in old age. In 

addition to signing and dating the still life at 

lower right, the artist inscribed her age of 84 in 

the same location.” 

Other artists included in the exhibition are 

Clara Peeters, Louise Moillon, Iphigenie Decaux, 

Ursula Maddalena Caccia, Josefa de Obidos and 

Elisabetta Marchioni. 



Of particular interest is a small painting by 

Florentine artist Caterina Angela Pierozzi, signed 

and dated 1677. This exquisite miniature – the 

artist’s only known work – is not a still life but a 

depiction of The Annunciation inspired by the 

painting of the Annunciation by Fra Bartolomeo in 

the Basilica of Santissima Annunziata in Florence. 

Pierozzi was known to have worked for the Medici 

Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere, a great patron 

of female artists. Surrounded by a border of roses, 

tulips and lilies, the work reflects the Medici 

preoccupation with botanical illustrations. It is not 

known whether the unusual gold frame is original 

to the painting, but one can imagine it having 

been fashioned in a goldsmith’s shop on the Ponte 

Vecchio overlooking the Arno River. RC 

Opposite: Giovanna Garzoni, Still life of flowers in 

a glass vase c. 1640-1650. Tempera on vellum with 

traces of black pencil 

Above: Caterina Angela Pierozzi, The Annunciation 

Miniature, 1677. Tempera and gold leaf on vellum 

Forbidden Fruit: Female Still Life will be on 

display until June 24 at Colnaghi Gallery, London. 


The Oltrarno Gaze 2020 

A dialogue in every medium 

There are times in life when one is lucky 

enough to see the birth of things, and to 

have the privilege of witnessing an idea 

quickly grow from a pretty premise to a fullfledged 

project – one that is born, raised, and 

flying the coop after a few months’ time. ‘Oltrarno 

Gaze 2022’ denotes a series of events, exhibitions 

and educational grant programmes for women 

artists and artisans in Florence’s beloved artisans’ 

district and beyond, that can best be summed up 

as ‘a collective call to make things’. This invitation, 

launched in Florence and the world in February 

2022, under the auspices of The British Institute 

of Florence and Cultural Association Il Palmerino, 

was made possible by the AWA Legacy Fund, and 

its guiding question to artisans and artists of 

today was simple: What do you want to say to 

female greats of the past? 

In the artisan district, in the ateliers of 

bookbinders, leatherworkers, goldsmiths, 

ceramicists and textile workers, answers were 

expressed in every medium: from dyed suede 

to handmade parchment, white gold, sapphire, 

and fired earthenware. US artisan Joy Franklin 

produced a North Star pendant, a nod to Artemisia 

Gentileschi’s compass in the artist’s Allegory 

of Inclination at Casa Buonarroti, Stephanie 

Lehmann’s crimson bag with handcrafted flowers 

is a celebration of Elisabeth Chaplin’s 1920s 

Self-portrait on display at the Pitti Palace, just a 

block or two from her studio in the heart of the 

Oltrarno. Margherita Martino de Norante traced 

Greta Garbo’s lips dozens of times with a 3D 

pen, and her innovative jewelry making process 

is a tongue-in-cheek ‘conversation’ with urbanminded 

Titina Maselli, a precursor to Pop Art. 

Their works, immortalized in a documentary 

short by Russian filmmaker Olga Makarova 

spotlights an issue also worth taking about: the 

international pull of a district like the Oltrarno. 

Margherita De Martino Norante, a Florentine 

artisan who shares studio space with creatives 

from all over the world, shared an interesting 

perspective on the international nature of the 

‘Oltrarno Gaze 2022”, which brought together 

more than 45 participating artists, photographers 

Olga Makarova, Joy Franklin’s 

Northstar, 2021 

Olga Makarova, 

Garbo lips, 2021 

Irene Pini, Chaplin’s red, 2021 


Spring 2022 • Restoration Summer 2022 Conversations • Restoration Conversations 35 35

Above: Valentina Bellini, In Amalia Ciardi Duprè’s studio, 2021 

Right: Alessandra Barucchieri, Il Palmerino in March, 2021 


and artisans – more than half of whom were non- 

Florentines with strong ties to the city’s traditions. 

“International exchange is very Florentine and 

always has been”, says De Martino Norante. “In 

the time of the Medici, the dynasty brought artists 

from all over the world to Florence, because what 

we now consider ‘Florentine history’ was actually 

nothing more than a call for the best. The Medici 

wanted the very best artists to work in their court 

and gardens, it didn’t matter whether they were 

from Northern Europe or ‘foreign’ lands like Siena 

and Rome. Florence’s magnet-nature is not new. 

Florence is Florence because of the international 

element, not in spite of it. Artists and artisans 

work best in an environment of exchange.” 

‘Exchange’ was also a key word up at the 

exhibition space at Il Palmerino. In May and 

June, the villa and gardens that once hosted 

the cultural salon of British author Vernon Lee, 

became the venue of ‘Bridges’ a contemporary 

art show that brought together nine 

international women artists from Italy, Britain, 

Brazil, the US and France. “They used to say you 

could speak about any subject, in any language, 

in Vernon Lee’s salon, and all points of view 

were entertained,” says art historian Monica 

Shenouda, of the villa that welcomed the likes 

of Oscar Wilde, Edith Warton and John Singer 

Sargent, as well as Italy’s top minds of the day, 

including Mario Praz and Enrico Nencioni. 

The ‘Bridges’ exhibition which brought book 

art to the hillside venue was proof, that every 

language – even artistic languages – continues 

to be welcome, and understood there today. 



Left, top: Alessandra 

Barucchieri, Lydia Chapman at 

work, 2021 

Left: Francesca Cluney, Rea 

Stavropoulos in the studio, 

2021 

Above: Antonella Tomassi, 

Kirstie Mathieson at the 

wheel, 2021 

But the best news comes last: five months 

ago, fourteen women photographers, from 

the award-winning photography association 

Gruppo Fotografico Il Cupolone, were tasked 

with immortalising the ‘Oltrarno Gaze 2022’ 

programme, because ‘memory’, not just making, 

is another of the project’s guiding values. 

The fruits of their labours were exhibited 

in June at Florence’s new riverside venue 

for contemporary creativity, Sotto al British’. 

Additionally, these photographs form the 

backbone of a new photographic book, Florence 

in the Making, published by the Florentine Press, 

which includes highlights from 21 interviews 

conducted by Linda Falcone. 

This multi-pronged program made for a packed 

half-year, and Calliope Arts, as the project’s 

communications partner, celebrates the initiative 

for the conversations it has triggered, no matter 

the medium, the language, the generation or 

the century with which we most identify. That 

conversation is destined to continue. RC 


Why ‘Women’ 

Photographers? 

Calliope Arts’ Margie MacKinnon tells 

the ‘backstory’ 

I 

first came across the name ‘Alinari’ on a family 

visit to Florence almost ten years ago. Looking 

for a change of pace from the more crowded 

Renaissance monuments, we decided to visit the 

Museum of Photography, which was then located 

in the ancient Spedale delle Leopoldine in Piazza 

Santa Maria Novella, now home to the Museo 

Novecento. As a showcase for the archives of 

the Fratelli Alinari studio, founded in 1852, the 

Museum offered a window onto Florence’s more 

recent history. 

The museum proved to be a welcome respite 

from the fourteenth century, and a fascinating 

encounter in its own right. The exhibition of 

vintage prints, negatives and daguerreotypes 

from the Alinari studio’s vast collection evoked 

a sepia-toned Florence from the mid-nineteenth 

century to the early 1900s, and the display 

of cameras, lenses, and other photographic 

paraphernalia and equipment illustrated how 

much the technical aspects of photography had 

evolved over the years. At the time, it did not 

occur to me to wonder if any of the images we 

were looking at had been created by women 

photographers and, if I had stopped to think 

about it, I would probably have assumed that 

most, if not all, of the photographers represented 

were men. 

I have since learned not only that women (in 

this case, mainly middle and upper class Western 

women) began using cameras from the moment 

they were invented, but also that photography 

is a medium that has always been relatively 

accessible to women – unlike the traditional fine 

arts of painting and sculpture. The timing of the 

advent of photography – in the mid-1800s – was 

favourable to women, coinciding with a gradual 

expansion of women’s freedom to become more 

active in the public sphere, and an increasing 

desire for independence. In the 1900s, the two 

world wars thrust women into more roles that 

were previously the exclusive domain of men. 

It also helped that the training required to 

become a photographer was flexible – with no 

need for a long apprenticeship. While some 

women, such as Wanda and Marion Wulz, had 

the opportunity to learn the necessary technical 

skills in studios or on vocational programs, the 

possibilities of the camera could be self-taught – 

discovered by trial and error, without any formal 

instruction. The camera itself was portable enough 

to take anywhere, and one could set up a darkroom 

in a spare closet or, as Julia Margaret Cameron did, 

in a chicken coop at the end of the garden. 

The status of photography, as more of a 

commercial enterprise than an art form, meant 

that the male art dealers, curators and museum 

directors who controlled the art marketplace 

did not concern themselves with photography’s 

popularity with women as an occupation. Women 

photographers were able to gain financial 

independence by setting up their own studios. 



Photos from the Alinari Archive, 

Florence 

Previous page: Wanda Wulz, 

Portrait, undated 

Above, from far left: Julia 

Margaret Cameron, Portrait of 

English playwright and poet 

Henry Taylor, 1865; 

Marion Wulz, Portrait of 

Wanda Wulz in motorcycle 

gear, 1930-1932; 

Marion Wulz, Irene Camber 

after her Olympic victory in 

fencing, 1952 

Bernardine Caroline Théodora 

Hirza Lejeune, Male portrait in 

uniform, 1853 

Some, like Gertrude Fehr, opened schools 

and influenced the development of this new 

profession. 

As photography gradually became recognised 

as a fine art in itself, women photographers 

were increasingly marginalised by photographic 

institutions and the art market. With a few 

exceptions, most of the ‘big names’ that were 

featured in exhibitions and books were men. 

Many women who had achieved some early 

success were subsequently neglected. 

Amongst the earliest pioneering women 

photographers was Anna Atkins, who made the 

world’s first photobook, ‘Photographs of British 

Algae: Cyanotype Impressions’, in 1853. Atkins, a 

British botanist who created exquisite cyanotype 

images capturing the outlines of plants, produced 

just 14 copies of her handbound book, signing 

them with her initials, ‘A.A.’ Her achievement 

was almost forgotten when it was later assumed 

that this stood for ‘Anonymous Amateur’. Czech 

photographer and member of the Bauhaus, Lucia 

Moholy, produced photograms with her husband, 

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, although these were often 

attributed to him alone. Later the photographic 

archives Moholy left behind her when she fled 

to London in 1933 were published without being 

credited to her. 

These examples of previously celebrated women 

falling into obscurity were familiar to me from 

my involvement with Advancing Women Artists 

(AWA), a Florentine institution founded by U.S. 

philanthropist Jane Fortune. Over the course of 14 

years, AWA undertook the restoration of more than 

70 works of art by female artists who risked being 

erased from history. In doing so, AWA restored not 

only their paintings, sculptures and drawings, but 

also their life stories. After AWA closed its doors in 

2020, my partner Wayne McArdle and I founded 

Calliope Arts in order to continue to promote the 

achievements of women artists of all kinds by 

sponsoring restorations, exhibitions, educational 

programs and cultural initiatives. 

Calliope Arts’ first project, in 2021, was a 


‘Restoration Conversation’ focussing on the 

National Gallery of Washington’s ‘The New 

Woman Behind the Camera’ photography 

exhibition. In a live broadcast, author Linda 

Falcone (AWA’s former Director) discussed the 

exhibition with its curator, Andrea Nelson. The 

exhibition brought together a wide range of 

photos taken between the 1920s and the 1950s 

by 120 international women photographers, 

highlighting their contributions to early 

twentieth century modernism and making a 

case for the overlooked significance of their 

innovative work. 

Around the same time, I was delighted to read 

the announcement that the Fondazione Alinari 

per la Fotografia had found a new home for its 

offices and archives in the Villa Fabbricotti and 

were looking for premises for a museum. That 

their new beginning in Florence coincided with 

the birth of Calliope Arts seemed serendipitous, 

and we sought them out as a partner for a future 

collaboration. The exhibition, ‘FOTOGRAFE!’ 

presented and promoted by the Alinari Foundation 

and the Fondazione CR Firenze, in collaboration 

with the Municipality of Florence, combines two 

of the goals that underlie Calliope Arts’ mission: 

highlighting early works by women that have 

had only limited visibility and creating a dialogue 

between contemporary photographers and their 

historical counterparts. 

In addition to bringing lesser-known female 

artists to a wider audience, does a womenonly 

exhibition allow us to see that women 

photographers bring a perspective to their work 

that is unique to their gender? Is there such a 

thing as a ‘female gaze’ in a medium that relies on a 

mechanical means of creation? This question was 

put to Fiona Rogers, the newly appointed Curator 

of Women in Photography at London’s Victoria & 

Albert Museum, in an interview with the Financial 

Times. Ms Rogers responded that, while she does 

not believe that there is a “defining gender gaze, 

… there is a difference between the way a woman 

looks at the world and the way a man looks at 


Photos from the Alinari Archive, Florence 

Above: Germaine Krull, Javanese Dancer, 1930 

Right: Helene Magdalena Hofmann, Three men 

raise their hats in salute, post 1904, Alinari Archives, 

Florence 


the world, and I think that’s partially because of 

inherent unconscious biases that we’ve all had to 

experience over 2,000 years and more.” 

‘FOTOGRAFE!’ – on show in Florence at Villa 

Bardini and Forte Belvedere from June 17 to 

October 2, 2022 – celebrates the ways in which 

historic and contemporary women have been 

looking at the world through the lens of a camera 

– what they have chosen to see and how they 

have chosen to see themselves. Calliope Arts 

is delighted to support this exhibition and the 

continuing work of the Fondazione Alinari per la 

Fotografia in safeguarding its unique archive of 

work by women photographers. 

Margie MacKinnon 

President, Calliope Arts 

The exhibition is presented and promoted by 

the Alinari Foundation for Photography and the 

Fondazione CR Firenze, in collaboration with the 

Municipality of Florence. The rooms dedicated to 

the works of Wanda and Marion Wulz and Edith 

Arnaldi are sponsored by Calliope Arts. 



Exhibition Makers 

Co-curator Emanuela Sesti speaks on ‘Fotografe!’ 

READY, SET... RESEARCH 

“The archives were our starting point for this 

exhibition. Through research, we first sought 

to understand the Alinari archives, from the 

early twentieth century onwards. Initially, we 

extrapolated three photographers whose archives 

are of particular interest: Wanda and Marion 

Wulz and Edith Arnaldi. Their collections contain 

vintage prints, and a wealth of other documents, 

including negatives, that need further study. The 

Wulz archive had been worked on, manipulated, 

and even compromised, but our job has been 

to rediscover their negatives, and see which 

match our vintage prints. We are also trying to 

differentiate between the works of Wanda and 

those of Marion, as the sisters often worked in 

tandem. 

Nothing had ever been done with Edith 

Arnaldi’s archive, and there are nearly 10,000 

negatives in the collection, so you can imagine 

the job of analysing them, one photogram at 

a time, and finding which ones are the most 

significant. Simply looking at the negative is not 

enough; we’ve done a first round of digitalisation, 

so we can now see her images, as if on a loop, 

in order to scrutinise every picture properly. 

This is the first stage of a larger project, initiated 

thanks to a development grant by Calliope Arts, 

and the idea is to press forward, after displaying 

our exhibition’s sampling of photographs. 

Digitalisation is a key part of the process. The 

archive is enriched by becoming accessible.” 

A RISING STAR ON NEW HORIZONS 

“Edith Arnaldi was this show’s rediscovery, 

because her forgotten photographic oeuvre 

is being reclaimed. Arnaldi was recognised as 

an artist and illustrator, and we now know that 

she often used photography when creating her 

illustrations. In fact, this year, her art is on show at 

the Venice Biennale. Lisa Hanstein has conducted 

an interesting photographic study of Arnaldi; 

research into her negatives and handwritten notes 

suggests that her photographs from 1930 to 1934 

are particularly significant. She immortalises the 

landscape and culture of several Italian regions – 

mostly in the south – Lazio, Abruzzi and Puglia. 

Hers was an anthropological and ethnographic 

study, and her subjects were mostly women. 

Arnaldi focussed on people at work, and on 

their religious practices, as can be seen in her 

photographs of processions. Her copious archive 

suggests that she had fully-fledged projects in 

mind, but we don’t know what purpose they might 

have served, because her diaries have been lost. 

She was also a traveller, who journeyed to several 

countries in Europe, and even Northern Africa in 



Photos from the Alinari Archive, Florence 

Previous pge: Edith Arnaldi-Rosa Rosà, Water 

bearer from Ciociaria, undated 

Left: Edith Arnaldi-Rosa Rosà, Young woman from 

Ciociara, 1937 

Right, top: Wanda Wulz, “Cat+I”, 1932 

Right, bottom: Marion Wulz, Dancer Alba 

Wiegele, undated 

the early 1930s, and then to Somalia in 1950 

and 1952. We are starting to realise that she 

was a pioneering photographer in the postwar 

period, a precursor of neo-realism, and 

her work in the show is of great interest.” 

REFLECTIONS OF THE SELF 

“The Wulz sisters already enjoy a degree of 

renown, especially Wanda, due to her ties with 

the Futurist movement and the fact that her 

works received high praise from Marinetti. 

Marion preferred to stay in the shadows, but 

the two sisters worked together, and their 

constant game of creating self-portraits and 

portraits of each other makes for a fascinating 

study – a few new instances have emerged, 

and many of their photographs are on view 

in the show. Self-portraiture and portraiture 

have always been well loved among women, 

yet I don’t mean to suggest that this genre 

choice is entirely gender-based. 

However, in the show, you’ll find 

contemporary photographers are drawn to it 

as well, although they seldom depict famous 

people – as was common in the 1900s. They 

look instead to the anonymous and unknown 

subject, and portraiture takes on a dimension 

linked to social research. One noteworthy 

segment of the show, in Villa Bardini, is called 

the ‘Social Portrait’ with works by Myriam 

Meloni, Arianna Arcara, and even Dorothea 

Lange, to name a few. 


Arcara is not looking for illustrious faces, 

she looks for people outside the public sphere, 

casting aside glamour shots or those linked to 

more classic cannons. Sofia Uslenghi looks at 

metamorphosis, where she is transforming, in a 

series of black and white photos, in which she 

strongly identifies with nature. The same is true 

for Belli, who spotlights nature, through a game 

she plays with the lens, where she can rediscover 

and re-find herself. 

The show takes us on a journey through 

two venues; it begins at Villa Bardini and ends 

up in Forte Belvedere. Villa Bardini starts with 

pioneering women, and that segment of the show 

goes as far as 1950. At Forte Belvedere, we see 

some shots from the 1950s and 1960s and into the 

contemporary, but that venue’s starting point is 

actually a 1970 photographic sequence by Diane 

Arbus. Her photographs are emblematic, and her 

albino sword-eater is especially noteworthy, with 

her head thrown back so that we cannot see her 

face. Like several of the photographers on show, 

she works with the human figure, and its more 

hidden side, the side we don’t always see.” RC 

Above: Sofia Uslenghi, Metamorfosis # 2, 2018 

Right: Sofia Uslenghi, ART noJECT #12, 2021 




Philosophy and photography 

Quotes from co-curator 

Walter Guadagnini 

“ Our idea was to trigger a dialogue, by 

finding contemporary photographers 

whose work displays certain affinities 

with Alinari’s historical archive. We chose ten 

women, from different movements – they are 

diverse, and so are the historic women on show. 

The contemporary artists are all ‘young’— using 

the term liberally, to mean ‘under forty’. They are 

all Italian, although they work all over the world. 

Our intent is to breathe new life into the works 

of the past, and see the works of the present 

under a different light. In ‘Women Photographers’, 

contemporary photographs are interspersed with 

historic photos and documents, so that their 

dialogue is direct, face-to-face, and hopefully, it 

will work!” 

“What is the difference between the images 

the photographers in this show produce and the 

pictures we all snap using our smart phones? 

Certainly, professional photographers have 

superior know-how and technique, but that is 

not all. The fundamental difference is attitude 

– an attitude towards photography, and the will 

to create long-term projects. You and I might 

snap a photograph of something that strikes us 

suddenly, for whatever reason. It is different with 

these photographers. They start with thought. 



Previous page: Giulia Parlato, Lizard, undated 

Far left: Giulia Parlato, In Preservation, In 

Destruction, undated 

Left: Francesca Catastini Petrus (Upsidedown), 

undated 

Photographers like Meloni create 

series that document years at a 

time. Ramistella is not looking to 

denounce – she wants to make 

us see. Parlato’s work takes us 

to places that are steeped in 

memory. They are fragments 

of the collective imagination. 

There’s perfection in what these 

photographers do, and it’s not 

merely because they control the 

image, it’s because, for them, an 

image is born from ideas... and 

once conceived, it generates new 

ideas. Their photographs are 

not necessarily more beautiful 

than ours, they just have more 

meaning.” RC 


Spotlight on photographer 

Federica Belli 

Deciphering the cover photo 

“ My photograph, The Visionary, is part of 

a series, but it’s what I call the ‘mother 

photograph’, and everything else that 

comes after that, stems from it. Usually, my photos 

are born from a problem I am trying to solve. That 

series emerged during the Covid crisis, and the 

issue at hand was: How do we keep our spirits 

up and contribute to the world in a positive 

way? It represents my quest for enlightenment 

– to keep light in the mind – and avoid feeling 

overwhelmed by situations or yielding to selfdestruction. 

That photo was like a fragment of 

effort – and effort is what enables us to grow. 

I use this method for almost all pictures. My 

point of departure is often a question that I 

consider essential. If I don’t find an answer in 

words, I try to translate the feeling into something 

visual, that can be conveyed to other people. 

These series are never pre-fabricated. They end 

once my question ends, or they stop when I stop 

feeling close to an issue. 

My quest is always one that seeks proximity 

with people either physically or on a human level. 

It’s about being purely honest. And though it may 

seem strange, sometimes to get honesty, you 

have to construct your photograph. What it gives 

people emotionally is what counts the most. That 

is where the immediacy lies –not in the time it 

took to take the photograph. The photographer’s 

vision has to be very clear and, sometimes, it’s a 

long process before you get just the right image. 

Photography is like cooking. If you were to 

invent a recipe, it would be hard to get it perfect 

on the first try. You have to do a lot of tasting... and 

most importantly, your dish has to be tasted by 

those who will ultimately eat what you prepare. 

The person seeing the photo is more important 

than the photographer. 

The photograph The Moon (Doesn’t Sleep 

Tonight), is part of a series on adolescence that 

I started when I was an adolescent! I wanted to 

photograph my counterparts, because I felt it 

would help me understand them. Adolescence is 

such a strange time. You start to become aware 

of yourself, but you also begin to realise that you 

are not really aware of the world around you. The 

girl in the picture is my cousin. We were lying 

on the beach and the sun was going down and 

we were talking about the fears that come with 

summer’s end, the fear of going back to school. 

And I noticed the sand forming in a pattern to 

match her freckles and let the moment pass 

without getting up to take the photograph. A 

little while later, because I felt so close to her at 

that moment, I asked her to wait and decided to 

record that feeling on film. We took our time with 

the picture. We waited until the light was right. 

That picture is a ‘daughter’ of that moment, made 

more precise by our wanting to get it right.” 



Above: Federica Belli, The Lens (Through Which We See 

Ourselves) 2018 

Previous page: Federica Belli, The Moon (Doesn’t Sleep 

Tonight), 2020 

Left: Federica Belli, the photographer (Mondovı̀, b. 1998) 


WHO IS ON THE BACK COVER? 

“Homesick 2 is part of a self-portrait series linked 

to the territory where my family is from: Sicily 

and Calabria,” explains photographer Sofia 

Uslenghi. “When I was 13, we moved up North, and 

years later, I found myself wanting to reconnect 

with that place in life where everyone recognises 

you and takes for granted that you’ll always be 

there. I’ve changed cities frequently, and mobility 

causes you to miss out on the chance to create 

relationships that bring together the whole family. 

Instead, you find yourself relating to people one 

on one. That series, which features the distinctive 

landscape of Calabria, offers me the opportunity, 

through photography techniques, to merge with 

my homeland, as part of the territory.” RC 


A Century of 

Women in the Arts 

Calliope Arts joins forces with the British Institute 

of Florence for a new course in the History of Art 

Starting in July this year, students at the 

British Institute of Florence will have the 

opportunity to take a course that looks at 

women’s achievements in the century following 

the birth of Italy as a nation. Developed by 

BIF’s Head of Art History, Jeremy Boudreau, and 

supported by a development grant from Calliope 

Arts, the course will focus on artists, writers, 

activists and educators who made significant 

contributions to life in the Tuscan capital. 

In the century that began with Florence’s 

short-lived stint as capital of Italy and ended 

with the devastating flood of 1966, who were the 

women that were making a name for themselves 

in the city? 

Influenced by Reform movements in Great 

Britain, France and the United States, Italy’s first 

feminist biweekly journal La Donna (Woman) 

was launched in 1868. In Italy, the emancipation 

of women, known as ‘the woman’s Risorgimento’ 

was closely linked to the unification of the Italian 

states in 1861. In this new political landscape, 

women hoped to break free of the traditional 

stereotypes to which they had been confined, and 

to play a more active role in the life of the nation. 

Italian feminists championed women’s suffrage, 

greater autonomy within marriage and reform of 

labour laws to protect women and children. 

In the century that followed, women slowly 

began to take steps towards equality and 

to acquire rights that men took for granted. 

However, it was not until after WW2 that women 

were given the right to vote in national elections 

and to be elected to government positions, and 

not until the 1970’s that laws were introduced 

regulating divorce and abortion. Even now, there 

is a gender pay gap of 11.5% in favour of men; 

and the percentage of women in the Italian 

parliament lags at around 36%. Italy, like so many 

other nations, is anchored on patriarchal legacies 

of past centuries. 

In this context, the achievements of the artists, 

writers and social activists in ‘A Century of 

Women in the Arts’ are all the more remarkable. 

At the turn of the last century, women writers 

were not highly regarded in the literary world 

and many published under male pseudonyms, 

women artists were still not permitted to attend 

life drawing classes, and other talented women 

were effectively barred from entering most 

professions. Despite many doors being closed to 

them – or perhaps because of this – the women 

covered in this course achieved success in many 

overlapping spheres. 

How was this possible? Paradoxically, Florence 

has a history of being more accommodating 


to women artists than other European cities. 

Florence’s Accademia delle Arti del Disegno 

admitted more women, and far earlier, than 

London’s Royal Academy. Similarly, the Uffizi 

Gallery gave women permission to copy works of 

the Masters within a year of its opening in 1769, a 

practice enthusiastically taken up by professional 

female painters (such as Violante Siries Cerotti), as 

well as by women on the Grand Tour. In contrast, 

women seen copying at the Louvre in Paris as late 

as 1831 were looked at askance, their presence in a 

public space raising questions about their virtue. 

In Florence, the ex-pat community found it easier 

to ignore the social constraints with which they 

would have felt bound in their home countries. 

Women presided over the literary and intellectual 

salons of Bellosguardo and Fiesole, where the 

emerging trends of Futurism and Modernism 

were debated. 

The women covered in the course were driven 

by talent and conviction to express themselves 

and to change the world around them to reflect 

their lives – lives that were often difficult but 

never dull. Their achievements, though underappreciated, 

are significant, and their stories are, 

by turns, fascinating, entertaining and inspiring. 

In collaboration with the British Institute of 

Florence, Calliope Arts is pleased to be restoring 

these women to their rightful place in the history 

of art in Florence. 

A preview of some of the protagonists follows, 

with a closer look at writers and social activists 

Natalia Ginzburg and Iris Origo. RC 

Above: Emma Bardini, 

Paintbox, Cerreto Guidi 

Museum 



Ten women with 

words or pictures 

From the Grand Tour to the unification of 

Italy, from the foundations of feminism, to 

the advent of the partisans, meet the women 

who forged a century of change in Florence. The 

premise of the exciting new course ‘A Century of 

Women in the Arts: 1866-1966’, organised by The 

British Institute of Florence from July 4 to July 15, 

is to explore Florence’s ‘forgotten century’ from a 

woman’s perspective. 

Created by BIF Art History head Jeremy 

Boudreau, in collaboration with Calliope Arts, the 

course allows us to celebrate two of the ‘luxuries’ 

of the 1900s. Firstly, the availability of images 

featuring artwork by women artists thanks to stillliving 

relatives and the presence of family-owned 

or institutional archives tasked with safeguarding 

these women’s legacy. Florence examples include 

the ‘Alessandro Bonsanti’ Contemporary Archive 

at the Gabinetto Vieusseux (which hosts wordand-picture 

collections by Adriana Pincherle and 

Leonetta Cecchi Pieraccini); Il Bisonte school and 

library, a treasure trove of art and information 

on co-founder Maria Luisa Guaita. Then, there 

are the Mori, Costa and Arlotta family archives, 

product of painstaking effort by these artists’ 

heirs to keep their legacy alive. 

The second reason to delight in the study of 

twentieth-century women stems from the sheer 

volume of words available, written in their own 

hand, or gleaned from speeches, interviews and 

documentaries. This is a welcome change from 

the study of early modern women where ‘words’ 

are lacking and clues must be gleaned from 

‘commission letters’ as with Giovanna Garzoni, 

‘trial books’ as with Artemisia Gentileschi, 

and even just through invoices – which allow 

scholars to see the quantity and quality of 

pigment purchased, as a clue to an artist’s creative 

process. The twentieth-century does something 

to mitigate the silence: words by women actually 

exist in great numbers – oh, the glory of it! 

Left: Elisabeth Chaplin, Double Self Portrait, 1918, 

Private collection 


A TASTE OF WHAT’S IN STORE AT THE BIF 

The five quotes and five pictures here are to whet 

the appetite, because ‘A Century of Women in the 

Arts: 1866-1966’ is destined to have its second 

run, and we look forward to being the first ones 

to share the news in the near future: ‘Back by 

popular demand’. RC 

“The flux of life is pouring its aesthetic aspect into 

your eyes, your ears - and you ignore it because 

you are looking for your canons of beauty in 

some sort of frame or glass case or tradition.” 

– Mina Loy, artist, writer and poet 

“There was nothing on any of the canvasses that 

she would have liked to hide or conceal, nor was 

she ashamed of being thus exposed through 

her work, good or bad though it might be, the 

essence, the unique flavour of days when she 

had been happily engrossed in recreating a face 

or a garment, in inventing an effective light, in 

applying an expressive glaze.” 

– Anna Banti, writer in Artemisia 

“After a short period spent in Brussels as a guest 

of a neurological institute, I returned to Turin 

on the verge of the invasion of Belgium by the 

German army, Spring 1940, to join my family. 

The two alternatives left then to us were either 

to immigrate to the United States, or to pursue 

some activity that needed neither support nor 

connection with the outside Aryan world where 

we lived. My family chose this second alternative. 

I then decided to build a small research unit at 

home and installed it in my bedroom.” 

– Rita Levi-Montalcini, neurologist, scholar and 

Nobel laureate 

“You are our future, try to be like us, but better 

than we were. Try to do what we have failed to 

do, by creating an Italy that is truly founded upon 

justice and freedom “. 

– Teresa Mattei, partisan and politician 

“I had a very varied life and met some interesting 

people. Yet, now that I have come to the ‘end 

game’, the figures that are still etched in my mind 

are those of the people to whom I have been 

united by bonds of affection. Not only are they 

the people I remember most vividly, but I realize 

that it was through them, if I learned anything 

from life. Everything about my life that has not 

been lost in the fog has passed through the filter, 

not of my mind, but of my affections.” 

-Iris Origo, writer, from Images and Shadows 


Fillide Levasti, Lunch at the Cascine, 1913. Private collection 



Left: Adriana Pincherle, Self Portrait, 1981, 

Gabinetto Scientifico Letterario G.P. Vieusseux 

Above: Flavia Arlotta Colacicchi, Still life with a box of dates, 1935, 

Alta and Francesco Colacicchi Collection 


Above: Lola Costa, Basket of pomegranates, 1972 

Right: Leonetta Pieraccini Cecchi, In the Study, 

1926, Rome, Gallery of Modern Art 



All our Yesterdays 

Natalia Ginzburg (1916–1991) 

Writer, activist, politician 

Above: Photo of Leone and Natalia Ginzburg at the Municipal Library of Pizzoli 


In 1941, the writer Natalia Ginzburg was sent 

to internal exile with her husband, Leone, by 

the Italian government, banished for their antifascist 

publications and activities. In her essay, 

‘Winter in the Abruzzi’, Ginzburg describes their 

sojourn in the remote village of Pizzoli with their 

three small children. In her trademark, deceptively 

simple style, the impressions she recorded of her 

new surroundings are spare and unflattering. 

She noted that, although some of the houses 

looked from the outside like small, elegant villas, 

on the inside “you would be astonished to find 

large dark kitchens with hams hanging from 

the ceilings, and vast, dirty, empty rooms.” The 

locals, whatever their station, wore drab clothes 

and worn-out shoes. The careworn faces of the 

women were indistinguishable to her. “Almost all 

of them had toothless mouths: exhaustion and 

a wretched diet, the unremitting overwork of 

childbirth and breastfeeding” had taken a visible 

toll. Even the weather was stark. “There are only 

two seasons in the Abruzzi: summer and winter. 

The spring is snowy and windy like the winter, 

and the autumn is hot and clear like the summer.” 

Ginzburg had been born into a family of 

left-wing intellectuals and grew up in a milieu 

of radical thinkers and writers, of culture and 

sophistication. The family apartment in Turin 

was a lively meeting place for Italian poets, 

painters and professors. With the advent of the 

war, the Ginzburgs’ circle of friends became 

active in defending the freedom of the press and 

combatting the evils of fascism. In Pizzoli, where 

she was to spend two years, Ginzburg was exiled 

from her home, her city, books, friends and what 

she described as her “real existence”. Letters with 

news of events from which she was excluded – 

marriages, deaths and everyday incidents – made 

her homesickness all the more painful. 

The family’s life in Pizzoli was stultifying. In 

winter, huddled together in the kitchen, the only 

room with a stove, Leone worked at the table 

while the children scattered their toys across the 

floor. During the afternoons, Natalia managed 

to get some writing done and, in 1942, her first 

novel, The Road to the City, was published, under 

a pseudonym, by Einaudi, the publishing house 

co-founded by Leone; she could not use her 

own name, as Italy’s new racial laws prohibited 

publications by Jews. Every evening, Natalia and 

Leone went for a walk, arm in arm, their feet 

sinking into the snow. As they passed, neighbours, 

who called Leone ‘the professor’, importuned him 

with questions, asking his views on everything 

from when the war would end to what the best 

season was for having teeth out. 

Venturing with her little ones into the white 

countryside in midwinter, the occasional person 

she met looked at the children with pity and “a 

general amazed disapproval that I should expose 

them to the cold and the snow.” For the Ginzburg 

children, who had no memory of the city, the 


72 Restoration Conversations • Summer 2022 

high point of life in Pizzoli was the village shop, 

Giro’s, which “sold a bit of everything; groceries 

and candles, postcards, shoes and oranges.” 

People often dropped by the house, usually to 

ask for favours, but sometimes to offer them. 

The dressmaker would make a special kind of 

dumpling for them. “Her red face was absorbed 

in her work and her eyes shone with a proud 

determination. She would have burnt the house 

down to make her dumplings come out a success.” 

After the fall of Mussolini, in 1943, the Ginzburgs 

left Pizzoli for Rome where Leone continued to 

edit the Resistance newspaper L’Italia Libera. In 

November that year, he was picked up and taken to 

Regina Coeli prison. Three months after his arrest, 

Leone Ginzburg died as a result of beatings and 

torture, at the hands of the German police. 

In the years after the war, Natalia Ginzburg 

raised their children, and continued her career

as a writer, producing prize-winning novels, short 

stories and essays, many of which have been 

translated into English and re-issued. She was 

the first to translate Proust into Italian; her play 

The Advertisement opened in London at the Old 

Vic in 1968 with Joan Plowright in the leading 

role. She remained politically active throughout 

her life and, in 1983, was elected to the Italian 

Parliament as an Independent. 

Natalia Ginzburg’s writing has been praised as 

a model of clarity, naturalness and simplicity that 

has inspired her many admirers (who include 

Maggie Nelson and Rachel Cusk) and she has 

been described as a precursor to Elena Ferrante. 

Writing about everyday events with insight and 

subtle humour, she touched on themes of great 

import – war, relationships, loss, domesticity, art; 

and while trauma informs her work, it does not 

overpower it. 

In an article in the New Yorker, Cynthia Zarin 

commented, “there is something of Beckett in 

Ginzburg’s prose; of Chekhov, whom she greatly 

admired; and of Shakespeare’s late plays, in which 

tragedy most often occurs offstage. It is one of 

life’s mysteries that what makes tragedy both 

bearable and unbearable is the same thing—that 

life goes on.” 

Looking back at their time in the Abruzzi, Natalia 

wrote, “Faced with the horror of my husband’s 

solitary death, and faced with the anguish that 

preceded it, I ask myself if this happened to us 

– to us who bought oranges at Giro’s and went 

for walks in the snow. At that time, I believed in 

a simple and happy future, rich with hopes to be 

fulfilled, with experiences and plans to share. But 

that was the best time of my life, and only now 

that it has gone from me forever – only now do 

I realise it.” RC 

Top left: Inside the Ginzburg 

house in Pizzoli 

Left: Ceiling of the Ginzburg 

house in Pizzoli 

Above: Square in front of the 

house where the Ginzburg 

family lived 

All photos by Alessandro 

Chiappanuvoli 



A Labour of Love 

Iris Origo and the transformation of La Foce 


It did not seem like a marriage made in heaven. 

The groom, Antonio Origo, was the illegitimate 

son of a cavalry officer and artist, the Marchese 

Clemente Origo, a friend of the poet and political 

adventurer Gabriele d’Annunzio. In the gossipy 

ex-pat community of Florence, Antonio was 

rumoured to be a fortune-hunter and philanderer. 

The bride, Iris Cutting, was the only child of 

Bayard Cutting, the scion of a wealthy American 

family which had made its fortune in real estate 

and railroads, and Sybil Desart, a member of the 

Anglo-Irish aristocracy. 

The wedding had been delayed for as long 

as possible by Sybil, who was dismayed that 

her prospective son-in-law was Italian, Roman 

Catholic and ten years older than her daughter. 

Eventually, in March 1924, the ceremony took place 

in what Iris’s biographer, Caroline Moorehead 

called the “extremely ugly chapel” on the family 

estate. Iris herself described the wedding guests 

as belonging to “that section of the British colony 

which looks as if it had been buried and dug up 

again for the occasion.” Sybil stayed in bed with 

a migraine. 

So far, so Henry James. But the marriage of Iris 

and Antonio did not play out like an Edwardian 

Previous page: La Foce estate 

Above: Studio photo of Iris 

Right: Iris and Antonio in the garden 


novel. Both were outsiders who wanted to leave 

Florence and its social intrigues – Antonio to pursue 

his dream of farming and Iris to “find something 

useful” to do with her life. While it had its ups and 

downs (there were numerous affairs on both sides, 

for example), the main adventure of their shared 

life was the transformation of an ancient farming 

community in the remote Tuscan countryside. 

The young couple had set out to find a place 

with enough work to fill a lifetime and found 

what they were looking for in the estate of La 

Foce which was built in the late 15th century as 

a hospice for pilgrims and merchants traveling 

on the Via Francigena, the ancient road running 

from France to Rome. The task ahead of them 

must have seemed daunting, to say the least. 

The house itself, which had not been lived in for 

several years, had no electricity, no telephone, no 

indoor plumbing and stood in 3,500 acres of the 

poorest farming land in the province of Siena. 

Iris later described the view from the house as 

a “lunar landscape, pale and inhuman”. There 

were 25 farms on the estate which had suffered 

decades of neglect; some were inaccessible by 

road, they had leaky roofs and draughty windows, 

stuffed with old rags. 


Above: The ‘lunar landscape’ of 

the Val d’Orcia 

Right: One of the old 

farmhouses 

Each tenant held his individual farm by the 

feudal system of mezzadria, according to which 

the farmer shared his produce with the proprietor 

and depended on him for equipment and capital. 

In truth, the barren, overworked soil produced 

very little, and owners were often indifferent to 

the living conditions of the tenants and their 

children, most of whom were desperately poor 

and illiterate. They were also superstitious and 

instinctively opposed to change of any kind. 

To say that this was outside of Iris’s experience 

is a massive understatement. She had lived a life 

of extreme privilege, thanks to inherited wealth 

on both sides of her family. Her father, who died 

when Iris was eight, had expressed a wish that she 

should be brought up “somewhere where she does 

not belong” in order to avoid developing a narrow 

patriotism that he feared would make her unhappy. 

Her mother decided that they would live just 

outside Florence, in Fiesole, where she acquired the 

Villa Medici, an impressive palazzo designed in 1450 

by Michelozzo for Cosimo de’ Medici. Here, Iris was 

educated by a private Classics tutor recommended 

by Bernard Berenson, and many friends of the 

family were other rich, sophisticated intellectuals. 

Antonio’s training had been in business and 

diplomacy, but he was an indifferent student at best. 

Now they would have to learn a new set of skills and 

forgo the attractions of Anglo-Florentine life. They 

were determined that together they would rebuild 

the farms and transform the bare clay fields that 

lay in the shadow of Monte Amiata into productive 

cropland. 

To his credit, Antonio threw himself 

enthusiastically into the work, slowly introducing 

modern farming techniques and a rational 

system of cultivation. Among the most urgent 

tasks were road building, modernising the farm 

buildings and raising money for equipment such 

as a tractor and combine harvester. In this he 

was aided by the fascist administration of Benito 

Mussolini which had an interest in assisting the 

backward agricultural regions of Italy – to the 

benefit of landowners - and at a cost that was, 

perhaps, overlooked in favour of the beneficial 

social changes that modernisation brought about. 

It was more difficult for Iris to adjust to her new 

life at La Foce. As a foreigner and still only twenty 



Above: Iris with children at La Foce 

Right: (top) Lunchtime; 

Bottom Getting a ride to school 

two, she did not relate as easily to the peasant 

women whose dialect and domestic rituals were 

unknown to her. She was nonplussed when the 

women walked for many hours to present her, 

the new padrona, with gifts of cheese and eggs, 

or asked her to recite prayers of intercession for 

sterile cows. 

Iris eventually found a way to be accepted 

through the children on the estate. It had always 

been intended that she and Antonio would not 

simply farm the land but would bring schooling 

and basic health care to the families living there. 

It became her project to convert the outbuildings 

next to La Foce’s main gates to classrooms, to 

assemble a library and to source benches, little 

tables and other supplies. She hired a teacher and 

provided her with a bicycle. The children from 

outlying farms were collected every morning 

by horse and cart; at mid-day they were given 

a proper lunch and then a second meal at four 

before they set off back home. As the children 

began to thrive, their mothers’ appreciation for 

the new padrona grew. Later additions included a 


small medical clinic for emergencies or childbirth, 

an apartment for the resident nurse, evening 

classes for adults and a meeting place for workers 

on the estate called Dopolavoro (after work). 

Improvements to the house, farms and school 

continued over the course of the next fifteen 

years as Mussolini’s excesses and the threat of 

war became harder to ignore. But during that 

time Iris had overseen the creation of La Foce’s 

garden, designed by Cecil Pinsent, and even 

found time to write a well-received biography of 

the poet Giacomo Leopardi. Her next book would 

be her diary, War in Val d’Orcia, in which La Foce 

and its outlying farms would play a central role 

as a safe haven for orphaned children, Italian 

partigiani and, later, Allied soldiers making their 

way back to their units in southern Italy. 

Iris Origo could have chosen a much easier 

path. There were other, less exigent properties 

that she and Antonio could have purchased, 

where they might have lived lives of leisure and 

prosperity. How much poorer they, and we, would 

be if they had. RC 


Grazie Mille 

We couldn’t be happier with all the events, broadcasts and exhibitions that 

Calliope Arts has been involved with since its launch in November 2021. 

Many people and organisations have contributed their time, expertise, artworks and 

enthusiasm to make the magic happen and we extend our heartfelt thanks to all of 

them, as well as to everyone who has tuned into our ‘Restoration Conversations’, 

read our newsletters, perused the new website and, now, read the inaugural issue of 

Restoration Conversations magazine. In particular, we would like to acknowledge: 

Giorgio van Straten, Claudia Baroncini, Emanuela Sesti and Rita Scartoni at the 

Fondazione Alinari per la Fotografia, Simon Gammell and Jeremy Boudreau at the 

British Institute of Florence, Marisa Gareffa at Sotto al British, Federica Parretti and 

Stefano Vincieri at Associazione Culturale Il Palmerino, the AWA Legacy Fund and 

Oltrarno Gaze 2022 participants, Fay Blanchard at MK Gallery, Sacha Llewellyn at 

Liss Llewellyn, Claudia Tobin at the Royal Drawing School, Andrea Nelson at the 

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Chloe Stead and Eleanor Taylor at Colnaghi 

Gallery, London, Cristina Acidini, Dr Alessandro Cecchi, Elizabeth Wicks, Christian 

Levett, Alessandro Chiappanuvoli and all our friends at La Foce, The Florentine and 

The Florentine Press.

Restoration Conversations magazine- Summer 2022

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