Restoration Conversations magazine

Restoration 

Conversations 

ISSUE 4, WINTER 2023 

WOMEN’S STORIES: TODAY AND THROUGH THE CENTURIES 

Winter 2023 • Restoration Conversations 1

Publisher 

Calliope Arts Foundation 

London, UK 

Managing Editor 

Linda Falcone 

Contributing Editor 

Margie MacKinnon 

Design 

Fiona Richards 

FPE Media Ltd 

Video maker for RC broadcasts 

Francesco Cacchiani 

Bunker Film 

www.calliopearts.org 

@calliopearts_restoration 

Calliope Arts 

2 Restoration Conversations • Winter 2023

From the Editor 

Today’s women, featured in this issue of Restoration Conversations, have done 

their share of searching, and that may well be the reason they find themselves 

pictured between these pages. Violinist Ruth Palmer and scholar Claudia Tobin 

seek – through their research and performance – to bring female composers and 

poetic-minded ‘freedom fighters’ to the fore. In her new book Women at Work 

from 1900 to Now, author and curator Flavia Frigeri leaves no field of female 

achievement unexplored. Conservator Eugenia Di Rocco strives to safeguard the 

Wulz sisters’ iconic images from Alinari Foundation for Photography – because 

photography can vanish, if not painstakingly protected, and English painter Cecily 

Brown seeks to translate the silent tribulations of a third-century saint into a 

language called ‘colour’ at Florence’s Museo Novecento. 

These women, and others found herein, perform, safeguard, uncover and share the 

achievements of their historic counterparts: Ethyl Smyth’s The March of Women, 

Lavinia Fontana’s Queen of Sheba, Maryla Lednicka-Szczytt’s Black Angel. Their 

stories are more relevant than ever. So, there’s reason to celebrate in the new year, 

not least because Artemisia’s censored allegory has her legs back (digitally) and is 

using them to get to her Genoa show come 2024! 

Fondly, 

Linda Falcone 

Managing Editor, Restoration Conversations 


GRAZIE MILLE 

As the conversation around women’s achievements grows, we have more 

and more people to thank with every issue of the magazine. Not that we are 

complaining! It is wonderful to see this community expanding. Massive thanks to 

the people whose words fill these pages: 

Virtuosic violinist Ruth Palmer; curator, academic and author Claudia Tobin; Director 

of the Alinari Phototography Foundation Claudia Baroncini; members of the 5,000 

Negatives team Eugenia Di Rocco and Pamela Ferrari; National Gallery (London) 

curator Priyesh Mistry; Museo Novecento’s artistic director and curator Sergio Risaliti; 

National Gallery of Ireland’s curator Aoife Brady and conservator Maria Canavan; art 

historian and dean emerita of the National Gallery (Washington) Elizabeth Cropper; 

Towards Modernity co-curator Ilaria Sgarbozzo; Consuelo Lollobrigida, professor 

and art historian; the Opificio delle pietre dure’s senior paper conservator, Simona 

Calza; and Costantino D’Orazio, art historian and curator of Artemisia Gentileschi, 

Courage and Passion at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa. 

Thank you to all who enthusiastically participated in the ‘Palace Women’ project 

as artisans, photographers, tour guides, educators and otherwise, with special 

mention to institutional partners the British Institute in Florence and Il Palmerino 

Cultural Association, as well as co-sponsors Alice Vogler and Donna Malin. 

With the exhibition Artemisia in the Museum of Michelangelo drawing to a close, 

we would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to ‘Artemisia UpClose’ co-sponsor 

Christian Levett and to Casa Buonarroti’s Museum Director Alessandro Cecchi 

and Foundation President Cristina Acidini. Grazie mille also to designer Massimo 

Chimenti and his team at Culturanuova for creating the perfect showpiece for our 

‘Artemisia UpClose’ project. We are delighted that part of this exhibition will carry 

on in Genoa. 


CONTENTS WINTER 2023 

MUSIC AND A VOICE 

6 Close Encounters 

14 The Words We’d Like to Meet 

20 Notable Women 

24 You Oughta Be In Pictures 

AT WORK IN HISTORY 

32 Palace Women Find Common Ground 

36 5,000 Negatives 

42 Time Travel at Florence’s Opificio 

48 The Big Reveal 

54 Three Wishes 

58 Mission Accomplished 

FORERUNNERS PRESS FORWARD 

62 Trailblazer, Rule Breaker 

68 The Star of the Show 

74 Courage and Passion 

WOMEN INSPIRED 

80 The Colour is Brown 

86 The Painting in the Dining Room 

92 Women at Work 

98 Two New Books 


Close 

Encounters 

A conversation with violinist Ruth Palmer 

Let’s begin at the end. The last work in the 

programme for ‘Scoring Suffrage’, a recital 

of music by women composers held at 

the Lyceum in Florence in September, 

was ‘Piece for Ruth’, by Venezuelan 

pianist and composer Gabriela Montero. 

The ‘Ruth’ in question is Ruth Palmer, 

the acclaimed violinist, and one half of 

‘Scoring Suffrage’s’ creative team, with 

whom I was now having a coffee at the 

Hayward Gallery on London’s South 

Bank. I asked her if any one of the pieces 

in the recital was more challenging than 

the others. “They all have their own 

challenges in different ways,” she said. 

For example, “the Montero has one tricky 

bit, but it was written for me, so I can 

do what I want with it.” Had she known 

that Montero was going to write it for 

her? “I asked her to write it for me,” she 

replied, and proceeded to recount the 

improbable story of their initial meeting. 

“I used to live not far from here on 

Fleet Street,” Ruth recalled. “One day, 

as I was crossing the road to go to the 

stationer’s, I was hit by a scooter that 

sent me literally flying horizontally 

over the bus lane.” The scooter driver, 

Richard, had been in a terrible hurry to 

get somewhere and had filtered down 

the wrong side of the road. Luckily, Ruth 

was fine but for a few scratches. As it 

happened, a police officer had witnessed 

the accident and asked if she wanted 

to press charges. Ruth declined, saying 

she wouldn’t press charges so long as 


Richard agreed to come to her next Wigmore 

Hall recital. And even though he didn’t attend the 

recital, the two stayed in touch. 

Some two years later, Richard’s brother Sam 

wrote to Ruth, hoping to speak to her about a 

project he had been thinking about. He had 

seen In Search of the Messiah, a film in which 

Ruth starred as a violinist seeking out the world’s 

most prestigious violins, which had aired on arts 

networks throughout the world. “He was quite 

excited about it,” explained Ruth, “and wanted to 

discuss some ideas he had for his own project.” 

Ruth told Sam the conversation would have to 

wait, as she was on her way to visit her cousin in 

Lexington, Massachusetts. 

No problem, Sam replied. As it happens, I am 

going to Lexington myself. “And it turned out 

that he was living with Gabriela Montero around 

the corner from my cousin. So, I met her in her 

kitchen eating pumpkin pie. We got talking and 

eventually I said, ‘Will you write me a piece?’ She 

agreed, and we played it together a year later, in 

New York.” 

Earlier that morning, Ruth and I met to check 

out a venue for a reprise of ‘Scoring Suffrage’ 

in London. Our destination was the 1901 Arts 

Club, a rehearsal and performance space created 

by philanthropist, conductor and violinist Joji 

Hattori. (As a young violinist Ruth won a Hattori 

Foundation prize which, in a further coincidence, 

was presented to her by the person who had 

recommended the 1901 Arts Club to me – a friend 

I met while we were both walking our dogs on 

Hampstead Heath.) The club occupies a lovingly 

restored schoolmaster’s residence in a street of 

small Victorian terraced houses and is decorated 

Above: Ruth Palmer in ‘Scoring 

Suffrage’ at Florence’s Lyceum. 

Photo by Marco Berni 


Below: Ruth Palmer and 

pianist Alessio Enea in ‘Scoring 

Suffrage’ at Florence’s Lyceum. 


in the style of a European Salon. Its intimate 

size and salon-like atmosphere seem ideal for 

the nineteenth and early twentieth-century 

repertoire of ‘Scoring Suffrage’. Ruth had brought 

her violin with her and set about testing the 

space’s acoustics. We were soon rolling up two 

rugs on the original wooden floor and pulling 

back a heavy curtain behind the grand piano. 

After another sound check, Ruth seemed satisfied 

with the result, although the improvement in 

resonance was lost on my untrained ears. 

‘Scoring Suffrage’ was conceived not solely as 

a musical event, rather, it is a weaving together 

of the music, literature and personal stories of 

women whose lives and careers overlapped 

with women’s suffrage movements in Europe. 

Through the narration of letters, poetry and other 

writings, Ruth’s partner in this project, curator and 

academic Dr Claudia Tobin (see feature on p. 14), 

provides the context in which woman composers 

were working and creating the soundtrack that 

accompanied women’s growing political and 

expressive freedom. The third member of the 

team was London-based pianist Alessio Enea, 

who accompanied Ruth in the performance. 

On this day in the Hayward’s cafe, we would 

talk about the works of the six female composers 

featured in ‘Scoring Suffrage’: Fanny Mendelssohn 

(1805-1847), Clara Schumann (1819-1896), Ethel 

Smyth (1858-1944), Lili Boulanger (1893-1918), 

Florence Price (1887-1953) and Gabriela Montero 

(b. 1970). A single male composer, Maurice Ravel 

(1875-1937), made it on to the programme by virtue 

of the significance of two women to his work. 

The first piece in the programme was Fanny 

Mendelssohn’s ‘Adagio’, composed when she was 

just 18. Fanny is said to have excelled as a composer 

of short musical forms. This is not surprising 

given that, unlike her brother, the composer Felix 

Mendelssohn who travelled throughout Europe 


From left to right: 

Top row: Fanny Mendelssohn, 1842, 

by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim and 

Lithograph of Clara Schumann, 1839, 

by Andreas Staub 

Middle row: Ethel Smyth and her dog, 

Marco, 1891 and Henri Manuel’s Portrait 

of Lili Boulanger, originally published in 

Comœdia illustré, 1913 

Bottom row: Florence Price and 

Gabriela Montero 


Above: Processing 

suffragettes, c. 1908, World’s 

Graphic Press Limited, 36-38 

Whitefriars Street, Fleet Street, 

London. ‘Women’s Social and 

Political Union’ teams draw the 

carriage of released prisoners 

away from Holloway, LSE 

Library. Source: Wikimedia 

Commons 

with his orchestral compositions, Fanny was 

expected to stay home playing salon concerts. 

“Fanny was allowed to play the piano, as long 

as it supported her brother and made her more 

attractive as a marriage prospect. Teaching the 

piano was also an acceptable occupation for 

women, at a time when most professions were 

closed to women,” notes Ruth. Fanny’s ‘Adagio’ 

“is tricky to get right. It’s a delicate balance of a 

slightly naïve, sweet and pleasant [melody] with a 

[calming] meditation, and to try and find exactly 

the right tempo to let it be a dream, and to open 

with it, is difficult.” 

Fanny Mendelssohn’s near contemporary, Clara 

Schumann, had much greater freedom to travel, 

performing in concerts throughout Europe as 

a highly celebrated pianist. From childhood to 

middle age, she produced a good body of work but, 

following the early death in 1856 of her husband, 

the composer Robert Schumann, Clara largely gave 

up composing, leaving a legacy of just 23 published 

works. In preparing to perform Clara Schumann’s 

‘Three Romances’ Ruth found that “it took a lot of 

personal energy to discover the depth in it. But I 

had played the same piece for another recital in 

France in May, and I worked quite a lot on it then,” 

adding, “it has been a year where I’ve begun to play 

more women’s repertoire.” 

Although she is now recognised as an important 

composer of the Romantic era, Schumann herself 

seemed to have absorbed the prevailing view that 

women did not have the ‘genius’ to create great 

music. “I once believed that I possessed creative 

talent,” she claimed, “but I have given up this idea; 

a woman must not desire to compose – there has 

never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect 

to be the one?” No doubt Clara would have been 

able to put more energy into her composing if 

she did not have eight children to provide for 

and a husband whose health was precarious. As 

Ruth comments, “When it comes to women, the 

perception of competence is always the issue. 

Not just in music, but everywhere. And it’s not 

just men, women can be just as sexist without 

realising it.” 

The work of English composer Ethel Smyth 

(see feature on p.14) was new to Ruth. “Her ‘Violin 

Sonata’ required the most preparation because 


Left: Winnaretta Singer’s selfportrait, 

c.1885, Foundation 

Singer-Polignac, Paris. 

Source: Wikimedia Commons 

it is thirty minutes long. It also has a significant 

emotional content because there is a discussion 

in it – it is more like an essay than a short soliloquy. 

And there’s a lot to get together with the piano 

as well, the score is complicated.” Ruth continues, 

“As a musician, what I am always looking for is 

a musical challenge, regardless of who wrote it. 

I was really glad to get to know Smyth’s sonata, 

because it is an interesting piece of music that I 

can include in any programme or any situation.” 

Lili Boulanger’s ‘D’un matin de printemps’ was a 

piece that Ruth learned during the pandemic but 

had not performed. “It is the one that surprised 

me. The difficulty arises from the fact that it is so 

short – it’s there and then suddenly … it’s gone!” 

Sadly, this could also describe its composer’s life. 

A child prodigy, Lili Boulanger was the first female 

winner of the Prix de Rome composition prize 

in 1913. Between 1911 and 1918 she composed 

some two dozen works but, having suffered with 

chronic ill health throughout her life, she died at 

just 24 years of age. 

For Florence Price’s ‘Fantasie in G minor’ 

(see feature on p.20), Ruth referred to ‘Roots’, 

a recording of Black US classical music by the 

young American violinist Randall Goosby.. “He 

plays it beautifully,” she says. “When I came to 

play it, I couldn’t make sense of it at first. But 

when you put it together with the poetry of 

Georgia Douglas Johnson, it suddenly comes 

alive. When you contextualise it, it sort of pops.” 

French composer Maurice Ravel snuck on 

to the programme in part because his career 

owes a huge debt to Winnaretta Singer, the 

sewing machine heiress, who was one of the 

most passionate supporters of his work. From 

1905 until 1931, Ravel performed and sometimes 

premiered his works in her salon. For ‘Scoring 

Suffrage’ Ruth performed Ravel’s ‘Tzigane’, which 

she describes as “an amazing piece.” It was both 

inspired by and dedicated to British-Hungarian 

violinist Jelly D’Aranyi who was one of the few 

celebrated women in the male-dominated world 

of classical violinists of the time. ‘Tzigane’ was 

just one of many pieces written especially for her. 

In 1922, and at the height of his career, Maurice 

Ravel met d’Aranyi in London at a private concert 

where she and Hans Kindler performed Ravel’s 


Top: Riverside view of Florence on opening 

night. Photo by Marco Berni 

Above Jelly d’Aranyi in 1923. 


Right: Ruth Palmer testing acoustics at the 

1901 Arts Club in London, 

-Calliope Arts Archive 

‘Duo sonate’. Ravel persuaded d’Aranyi to stay 

on and play what were then popular Romani 

melodies for him, which she did well into the 

early hours of the morning. He was so taken with 

her performance that he promised to compose a 

concert piece for her and wrote “you have inspired 

me to write a short piece of diabolical difficulty, 

conjuring up the Hungary of my dreams. Since it 

will be for violin, why don’t I call it Tzigane?” The 

piece is indeed a challenge for the violinist and 

demands to be played by throwing caution to the 

wind. Ruth was certainly up to the task, showing 

off the range of her instrument as well as her 

own virtuosity. 

Winnaretta Singer enjoyed introducing her 

friends to each other and starting cultural 

collaborations across the arts. For Ruth, “the 

opportunity to collaborate with Claudia was 

probably the biggest draw on this project. 

Claudia is so knowledgeable, and she has an 

artistic character that allows her to connect the 

dots in a way that is instinctual. When I suggested 

pieces from the repertoire, she was able to find 

the connections among the various writers and 

poets and activists at the time. There was an 


organic process to the way we found the links 

together. I learned that I could discover things as 

well. So that was fun.” The enjoyment that Claudia 

and Ruth experienced working in partnership on 

‘Scoring Suffrage’ recalls the final words of ‘The 

March of Women’, the suffrage anthem written by 

Cicely Hamilton and composed by Ethel Smyth: 

March, march, many as one 

Shoulder to Shoulder and friend to friend. 

MARGIE MACKINNON 

‘Scoring Suffrage’ was performed as part of the 

‘Palace Women’ programme organised by The 

British Institute of Florence, Il Palmerino Cultural 

Association and Calliope Arts This project is made 

possible thanks to the support of Enjoy, Respect 

and Feel Florence, funded by Italy’s Ministry 

of Tourism, the Fund for Development and 

Cohesion, the Municipality of Florence and Feel 

Florence. Special thanks to donors Alice Vogler, 

Donna Malin, Margie MacKinnon and 

Wayne McArdle. 

Described as ‘the most distinctive violinist 

of her generation’ (The Independent), 

violinist Ruth Palmer is praised for her 

‘intensity’ and ‘poetic grandeur’ (The 

Guardian). 

Her Direct-to-Disc LP of Bach is available 

on Berliner Meister Schallplatten. Earlier 

recordings’ critical acclaim includes 

‘impeccable astringent Bartók and warm, 

profound Bach’ (The Observer), while her 

Shostakovich recording won a Classical 

BRIT. 

She’s performed with James Ehnes, 

Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, Yutaka 

Sado, Carlo Rizzi, BBC Philharmonic, 

and at the British Embassy’s British 

Week in Havana, and for King Charles 

III (then Prince of Wales) and Queen 

Elizabeth II. She’s appeared on radio and 

television internationally. When Ruth 

collaborated with Rambert and Sydney 

Dance Companies, ‘it was sometimes 

a struggle to concentrate on the dance 

when the violinist was so compelling’ 

(Sunday Telegraph). 


Above: Scholar Claudia Tobin performs ‘Scoring Suffrage’ in Florence. 


Right: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s portrait of his sister Christina, 1866, 

private collection. Source: Wikiart 


The Words We’d 

Like to Meet 

Scholar Claudia Tobin on ‘Scoring Suffrage’ 

CChristina Rossetti, Constance Smedley, Ethel Smyth, Vernon Lee, 

Cicely Hamilton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emmeline Pankhurst, 

Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akmatova are just some of the 

women writers and social reformers forming part of Florence’s 

“Scoring Suffrage” performance. This brief conversation with 

British scholar Claudia Tobin will send you to the book shelf, 

to re-read ‘old friends’ or to reach for new voices you’ve never 

heard before. Amidst plays, poems, novellas, essays and letters, 

Claudia’s interview is an invitation to seek out the words of 

nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women. Their hopes, 

whether shattered or still shining bright, are awaiting discovery 

– in their own words. 

Were all the women featured social activists? 

The starting point for the Florence performance was the suffrage 

moment, but I think it’s important to note that these women are 

united by an extraordinary commitment to their art and the 

causes they supported, but they didn’t share the same political 

persuasions, and that message – even by itself – is relevant to 

today’s world. They were all ‘fighting spirits’ and they fought for 

suffrage or the right to express themselves, but they do not belong 

to one side of the political spectrum or a single political party, 

which became clear as our research unfolded. Christina Rossetti 

(1830-1894), for instance, was devoted to poetry – to the point 

that she didn’t marry to pursue it. She was religiously devout and 

supported humanitarian causes, striving to follow the Florence 

Nightingale model, and her poems are full of redemptive female 


Left: Cover of Vernon Lee’s 

The Ballet of The Nations. 

1915 edition, from the library of 

Il Palmerino Cultural Association. 

Above: Constance Smedley, 

undated. 


Right: The Ballet of The Nations 

performed at Il Palmerino Cultural 

Association, 2019. 

Source: Il Palmerino Archive 

figures, but she was not in favour of votes for 

women, although she does concede that “mothers 

would make good members of Parliament”. 

Tell us about a highlight from ‘Scoring 

Suffrage’ that combines spoken word and 

music. 

In the performance, we explore the figure of 

the wanderer, the gypsy. So, we looked at the 

archetypal artist, the wandering minstrel – a 

figure of freedom and free movement - in a 

few different works of poetry and music. As a 

complement to Maurice Ravel’s ‘Tzigane’, I read 

Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s ‘Our Sweet 

Companions – Sharing Your Bunk and Your 

Bed’. She was an exile, and suffered greatly in 

early twentieth-century Russia, and was deeply 

influenced by Pushkin’s narrative poem ‘The 

Gypsy’. 

Another piece I’d like to include in the future, 

on this same theme, is The Minstrel, which 

Constance Smedley collaborated on, in 1915, 

with her husband Maxwell Armfield. It features 

a wandering musician, in a country destroyed 

by war. Both Smedley and Armfield were 

committed pacifists, and in that same period, 

they set up experimental theatre companies 

in London, providing body-movement scripts. 

They had a vision of really strict choreography 

in their productions, for which Smedley 

provides drawings, envisioning them as a 

rhythmic structure. 


From your description, Smedley’s experience 

sounds akin to that of Vernon Lee, also a pacifist, 

interested in aesthetics and the psychological 

implications of physical expression. 

Yes, their interests are very much related. Smedley 

and Lee shared the pacifist outlook – in the 

First World War. [Armfield wrote the introduction 

to Lee’s satirical play, The Ballet of the Nations, 

published in 1915, before The Minstrel.] Lee, 

Smedley’s circle, Virginia Woolf’s circle were well 

travelled. They had friends in Belgium, Germany, 

France and England. The nations were at war but 

they wanted their friendships to remain. In reality, 

Lee’s loss of popularity as an author is often said 

to be linked to the letters she wrote to friends 

advocating peace. 

‘Scoring Suffrage’ includes snippets of 

letters and essays by women, in addition 

to their poetry. How did these women’s 

correspondence contribute to their quest for 

freedom of expression? 

Ethyl Smyth and Vernon Lee became friends and 

ended up dedicating work to each other. Lee 

dedicated the play Ariadne in Mantua to Smyth, 

thanking her for her work and begging her for 

music. They were what Smyth called ‘female 

labourers in the field of art’ and they moved in 

the same circles. 

Their correspondence crossed to America 

too, to involve another figure Charlotte Perkins 

Gilman – a friend of Smyth’s. She was an American 

suffragette and writer who wrote political verse 



and songs for suffrage. Perkins Gilman cofounded 

The Women’s Peace Party, in 1915. Her 

novella The Yellow Wallpaper is haunting and 

vividly told. It speaks of a woman on the brink 

of madness, prescribed bed rest by her husband. 

She is not allowed to work and is held prisoner in 

her room, watching the peeling yellow wallpaper. 

In the programme, we cite a letter she wrote to 

Vernon Lee, thanking her for helping to spread 

the ideas she felt were important… not that they 

always agreed. They didn’t, because these women 

were complex figures. 

As an author and exhibition curator, you’ve 

often worked with the mixing of various 

media. How did this play out in the time 

period studied as part of the ‘Scoring 

Suffrage’ grant? 

There are instances in which music inspires 

words, and other cases in which words give way 

to silence, that then becomes sound or music. 

Virginia Woolf’s relationship with music is one 

interesting case study. In the late Nineteenth 

Century, many artists were interested in the 

intermingling of the senses, and started exploring 

fields like Synaesthesia. Kandinsky claimed to 

‘hear colours’, and French artist Sonia Delaney 

discusses the issue at length as well. The idea 

of [the brain processing information through 

unrelated senses] leads to the discussion of 

where one art form ends and the other begins. In 

this very fruitful period – in the late nineteenth 

and early twentieth century – there was the 

idea that music had the power to offer a sense 

of companionship. It was an invisible presence, 

a powerful voice… which reminds me of Russian 

poet Anna Akhmatova, who personified music as 

female, in her poem titled ‘Music’. I’m interested 

in where the different art forms begin and end 

and where they fuel and inspire other media, 

and it’s clear that music and poetry are natural 

companions and have been for a long time. 

Left, clockwise from top left: Vernon Lee by John Singer Sargent, 1881; Anna Akhmatova by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, 

1922; Ethyl Smyth by John Singer Sargent, 1901; Charlotte Perkins Gilman by Frances Benjamin Johnston, c. 1900. 



Notable Women 

AComposers Florence Price and Ethel Smyth 

A supermoon illuminated the sky over the Arno as 

the music of women composers filled Florence’s 

Lyceum Club for the inauguration of ‘Palace 

Women – Oltrarno and Beyond’. Serendipity? 

Perhaps, but there is no doubt that the presence 

of this symbol of female energy added to the 

sense that ‘Scoring Suffrage’ (as the recital was 

called) was an exceptional event. Below, we take a 

closer look at two of the composers whose work 

featured in the recital. 

Near contemporaries from opposite sides 

of the Atlantic, Florence Price (1887-1953) and 

Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), fought against prejudice 

to have their compositions recognised and 

performed. The body of work they left behind is 

testament to their talent and perseverance. 

Portrait of Florence Price 

Looking at the Camera, 

undated, Papers Addendum 

(MC 988a). Special Collections, 

University of Arkansas 

Libraries, Fayetteville 

FLORENCE PRICE 

Florence Beatrice Smith was born into a 

prominent family in the Black community of 

Little Rock, Arkansas. Her mother was a talented 

singer and pianist who quickly recognised her 

daughter’s musical gifts and sent Florence to 

Boston to study at the New England Conservatory. 

In addition to excelling at her piano and organ 

studies, she took private lessons in composition 

with the school’s director. That Florence 

encountered discrimination along the way is 

evidenced by the fact that, in her final year at the 

Conservatory, she falsely registered as a Mexican 

resident in an effort to avoid harassment from 

segregationist Southern white students, not an 

unusual occurrence for students of colour. In 

fact, Florence’s background included a mixture 

of French, Indian, Spanish and African American 

ancestry, and she would draw from this “racial 

melting pot” in composing her music. 

Florence returned to Little Rock after 

graduation and married Thomas Price, an upand-coming 

lawyer. When racial tensions in the 

city later erupted in violence, the couple, with 

their two young daughters, joined the Great 

Migration of Blacks fleeing northward, eventually 

settling in Chicago. Florence continued to study 

composition, publishing four pieces for piano 

in 1928. When her marriage ended in divorce in 

1931, she supported her family by working as an 

organist for silent film screenings and composing 

jingles for radio advertisements. 

Her ‘break’ came when she won the 1932 

Rodman Wanamaker Award, a competition for 

Black composers, with her entry ‘Symphony 

No 1 in E minor,’ which was performed by the 

Chicago Symphony Orchestra as part of the 

World’s Fair in 1933. The Chicago Daily News’ 

music critic described it as “a faultless work 

… that speaks its own message with restraint 

and yet with passion … worthy of a place in the 

regular symphonic repertoire.” 


In explaining how Price went from relative 

obscurity to being showcased by a major 

orchestra, pianist and music historian Dr 

Samantha Ege notes that, “there’s this idea that 

this all-white, all-male orchestra just sort of 

magically took an interest in Price’s music, but 

actually it was Maude Roberts George working 

behind the scenes, supporting Price in getting the 

score finished and making sure the world could 

hear it.” Ege explains that both Price and George 

were part of an active network of Black women, 

many with conservatory training, who supported 

a growing musical community during the 1920s 

and 1930s. George’s support for Price extended to 

personally underwriting the cost of the Chicago 

Symphony performance. 

Even as she tirelessly composed new pieces, 

Price continued formal studies in harmony, 

orchestration and composition at the Chicago 

Musical College and the University of Chicago. 

Her music was performed by at least nine 

major orchestras, and her vocal and instrumental 

chamber music and piano compositions were 

sung by some of the great soloists of her day 

– including Marian Anderson who famously 

performed Price’s arrangement of a spiritual on 

the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, when 

she was barred on racial grounds from appearing 

in Washington’s Constitution Hall. Price also 

taught piano and mentored young composers. 

While she succeeded in publishing some of her 

scores, most were still in manuscript form at the 

time of her death. 

Price’s compositions clearly reflect the influence 

of her classical training. For those familiar with 

this repertoire, echoes of Brahms, Liszt and 

Chopin are evident in her work. Musicologists 

cite Dvorak’s ‘New World Symphony’ as the 

primary model for her first symphony. But what 

sets her compositions apart is the way in which 

she integrated musical idioms from outside the 

traditional orchestral world. In particular, she 

drew on the African American soundscape of 

church spirituals, plantation and folk songs with 

which she would have been familiar from her 

Southern childhood. Written descriptions cannot 

hope to capture the emotion of this music and 

encountering it for the first time is a pleasure that 

awaits the uninitiated. Ege, who has recorded 

many of Price’s pieces, says, “I wanted to recreate 

for the listener that sense of wonder I had when 

I first heard the music … It was a real invitation 

to listen … to enter this world with her … and I 

think it’s the way she treats African folk songs 

with such respect and sensitivity …” Ege adds that 

Price would have been aware that touring groups 

in the late Nineteenth Century had made the 

Negro spiritual an art form. Music that had once 

been denigrated because of its origins was seen 

in a new light in the concert hall. 

In 1943, Price wrote a letter to Serge Koussevitzky, 

the conductor of the highly regarded Boston 

Symphony Orchestra, hoping to encourage him 

to read some of her scores. Explaining her style, 

she told him, “I believe I can truthfully say that I 

understand the real Negro music. In some of my 

work I make use of this idiom undiluted. Again, 

at other times it merely flavors my themes. I 

have an unwavering and compelling faith that a 

national music very beautiful and very American 

can come from the melting pot just as the nation 

itself has done.” Unfortunately, Koussevitzky was 

not interested in programming any of her work. 

Price’s ‘Fantasie No. 1 in G minor’, which was 

performed as part of ‘Scoring Suffrage’, is a 

wonderful example of her ability to seamlessly 

insert recognisable African American themes 

into the highly structured form of classical 

European concert music. It is one of four 

‘Fantasies’, which at one time had been 

presumed lost. Fortunately for music lovers, in 

2009, a cache of dozens of boxes containing 

the composer’s letters and manuscripts was 

discovered in a long-neglected house in Illinois 

that had been Price’s summer refuge. That 

discovery heralded a renaissance in Price’s work 

and a renewed interest in performances and 

recordings of her extensive catalogue. Her “very 

beautiful and very American” music deserves to 

be heard by a much wider audience. 


English composer and 

suffragette Ethel Smyth 

(1858-1944). Image from 

the United States Library 

of Congress’s Prints and 

Photographs division 

ETHEL SMYTH 

Her Majesty’s Prison Holloway is perhaps London’s 

most famous institution for women. In March 1912, 

it was the venue for an exceptional performance 

of the Suffragette anthem ‘The March of Women’. 

The chorus was sung by inmates marching in the 

quadrangle, while the anthem’s composer, Ethel 

Smyth, leaned out of her prison cell window to 

conduct them with her toothbrush. Smyth had 

been arrested two months earlier, along with her 

friend Emmeline Pankhurst, for throwing stones 

at the houses of politicians who opposed votes 

for women. Smyth herself took credit for teaching 

Pankhurst how to throw stones and practiced with 

her by aiming stones at trees near the home of a 

fellow activist. At the age of 52, Smyth had joined 

the Women’s Social and Political Union, founded 

by Pankhurst in 1903, to campaign for women’s 

suffrage. She took two years out from her musical 

career, by then well-established, to devote herself 

to the cause. This was typical of the passion and 

fearlessness with which Smyth approached every 

aspect of her life. 

Her determination not to be bound by social 

convention was apparent early on. Born in 1858 

into a well-to-do family in Victorian England – a 

time when it was unseemly for women of her class 

to have their own profession – Smyth overcame 

her father’s objections to her unshakeable desire 

to study music by locking herself in her room and 

refusing to eat or leave it until he relented. She 

was admitted to the Leipzig Conservatory in 1887 

and met some of the most renowned composers 

of the day, including Johannes Brahms, Clara 

Schumann, Antonin Dvorak and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. 

The latter would eventually recognise Smyth as 

“one of the few women composers whom one 

can seriously consider to be achieving something 

valuable in the field of musical creation.” 

Tchaikovsky’s backhanded compliment typifies 

the prejudice faced by female composers. Her 

work was not evaluated on its own merits but as 

that of a “woman composer”. While some critics 

praised the “masculinity” of her more powerful 

compositions, others complained that her work 

was lacking in the feminine charm to be expected 

of woman, whatever her other accomplishments. 

Following her formal education, Smyth 

travelled throughout Europe, mainly in Germany 

and Italy, refining her style, falling in and out of 

love and cultivating friendships with patrons, 

musicians and other intellectuals who were part 

of the artistic milieu of the time. She returned 

to London in 1889 where she composed works 

ranging from choral arrangements and chamber 

music to orchestral pieces and operas. Her 

first of six operas, ‘Fantasio’, debuted in 1898 in 

Weimar, Germany. Despite the insidious prejudice 

against women as composers, Smyth was able 

to get many of her works performed, thanks to a 

combination of talent, support from conductors 

such as Sir Thomas Beecham, and her own 

formidable ambition. 

Smyth’s ‘Sonata for Violin and Piano in A 

minor’, composed in 1887 and dedicated to her 

friend, Lili Wach, the daughter of composer Felix 


Mendelssohn, was the centrepiece of ‘Scoring 

Suffrage’. A review of its first performance in 1887 

praised the musicians while declaring that the 

work itself lacked originality and was a slavish 

copy of Brahms, a critique that Smyth dismissed 

in her memoir Impressions that Remained saying, 

“A listen to the piece will prove just how wrong 

the reviewers were!” When violinist Ruth Palmer 

(see feature on p. 6) first looked at Smyth’s violin 

sonata, she thought, “There’s so much Brahms 

here. Where’s the Smyth? But when you get to 

know it, you realise, actually, she’s got so much 

personal power and narrative in that piece. 

She is not Brahms at all. It’s just that that is the 

vernacular that she was speaking in because 

that’s what was going on in Europe at the time. 

But she brings her own voice to the music and 

she says something original with it.” 

In 1912, Smyth began to lose her hearing, 

eventually giving up composing as a result. She 

turned from music to writing, completing ten 

mostly autobiographical volumes. In them, she 

writes openly about her love affairs, many with 

famous women, including Emmeline Pankhurst, 

writers Virginia Woolf and Edith Somerville, and 

the heiress Winnaretta Singer. Her only male 

lover is said to have been Henry Brewster, the 

librettist of some of her operas, with whom she 

had a lifelong friendship. It is disappointing (if 

not surprising) to discover that, according to 

biographer Dr Leah Broad, Smyth held bigoted 

opinions about race, subscribing to the belief in 

white English superiority, despite having faced 

prejudice throughout her life because of her 

gender and sexuality. In this, she went along with 

views that were prevalent at the time. 

Yet there is no denying Smyth’s many 

accomplishments. She was the first woman to 

have an opera (‘The Forest’) staged at the New 

York Metropolitan Opera, in 1903. In 1922, She 

was named Dame Commander of the Order of 

the British Empire, the first female composer 

(and possibly the only one with a criminal 

record!) to be given the title of Dame. She was 

the first woman to receive an honorary degree 

in music from Oxford University, in 1926. More 

recently, Smyth was the first woman composer to 

have an opera staged at Glyndebourne, in 2022. 

Their production of Smyth’s 1906 magnum opus, 

‘The Wreckers’, attracted rapturous reviews (and 

favourable comparisons to Benjamin Britten’s 

‘Peter Grimes’) for the staging and for the work 

itself, with the Financial Times critic claiming, 

“there is no English opera written before or after 

‘The Wreckers’ that can match Smyth’s openhearted, 

unapologetic, no-holds-barred passion.” 

Smyth’s final major work, a choral symphony 

called ‘The Prison’ was first performed in 1930 but 

only recorded 90 years later. That recording, by 

Chandos, won a Grammy in 2021. 

Among her many accolades, I like to think 

that Dame Ethel would have been particularly 

‘chuffed’ to have been given a seat at Judy 

Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974-79). In this groundbreaking 

installation artwork, a triangular table 

with place settings for 39 significant women 

from history and myth, Smyth finds herself in the 

company of Sojourner Truth, Georgia O’Keefe, 

Artemisia Gentileschi and her dear friend, 

Virginia Woolf, among others. Representing her 

work as both a composer and a champion of 

women’s rights, Smyth’s place setting includes 

musical motifs such as a plate in the form of 

a grand piano, a treble clef incorporating her 

initials and a metronome. On the runner, a tweed 

suit has been laid out, as if being tailored. This 

is a reference to Smyth’s preference for dressing 

in a ‘masculine’ style, and, perhaps, to her wish 

to be considered as worthy a composer as any 

of her male counterparts. 

Passionate composer, radical activist, prolific 

writer and non-conforming lover of women (and 

at least one man), Dame Ethel Smyth would be 

a fascinating guest at any fantasy dinner party. 




“You oughta be 

in pictures” 

Banca d’Italia showcases 75 years of women in art 

Towards Modernity [Verso la Modernità] is a survey show that encompasses 

75 years of shifting culture. All but six of its works are painted by male 

artists who echo the winds of social change affecting female representation 

in art. From the iconic mother figure, to the ‘new nude’ and the burgeoning 

‘modern woman’, this show at Florence’s Banca d’Italia, on via dell’Oriolo, 

is open for free guided tours through on-line appointment, until 10 March 

2024. Curated by Ilaria Sgarbozza and Anna Villari, the exhibition 

displays paintings and sculpture that reflected and shaped the female 

experience in Italy from 1871 to the mid-1900s... 


Angel of the Hearth? 

The stairwell of the Banca d’Italia building is 

impressive to say the least – an imposing 

upward-moving swirl of marble that rises 

slowly, like the triumphant notes of an Italian 

march for unification. The Black Angel at the 

foot of the stairs stands out as a small but 

striking contrast to this otherwise stone-white 

world. “We chose to begin the Towards 

Modernity exhibition with this wonderful 

example of the Ritorno all’ordine movement,” 

says exhibition co-curator Anna Villari. “By the 

1920s, artists in Italy were already responding to 

what they considered the destruction of 

figurative art by the avant-garde currents, 

and were calling for a return to the human 

figure, which was cleaner and sharper than in 

previous decades, as with The Black Angel.” 

In 1922, Polish sculptor Maryla Lednicka- 

Szczytt – who eventually made her living 

carving decorative figureheads for the bow of 

cruise ships – debuted in Paris during the city’s 

heyday, and while there, she worked 

with designer Adrienne Gorska, whose more 

famous sister is Tamara de Lempicka. 

Following Lednicka-Szczytt’s move to Italy and 

her solo exhibition in Milan, in 1926, she was 

highly acclaimed by critics and collectors. The 

Black Angel was purchased by entrepreneur 

Riccardo Gualino, whose enviable collection was 

later acquired by the Banca d’Italia. 

Lednicka-Szczytt’s sculpture is thought to be 

a nod to the ballet Les Sylphides, which was 

performed in 1909 by Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, 

featuring Chopin’s music. While in Italy, the 

artist frequented the ‘Novecento Group’, brought 

together by art critic Margherita Sarfatti, one of 

Mussolini’s lovers. A supporter of the Fascist 

Regime, Sarfatti was a friend to artists seeking 

what she called “modern classicism”. [Incidentally, 

Sarfatti – as a woman of Jewish ancestry – was 

later a victim of Mussolini’s 1939 Racial Laws and 

forced to flee to the United States. Her passage 

out of Italy was not blocked by government 

officials]. Despite Maryla Lednicka-Szczytt’s 

popularity between the two world wars, the 

sculptor met a regrettable end. After fruitlessly 

pursuing her art in New York in the early 1940s, 

she sank into poverty and oblivion. Unable to 


Opposite page: Maryla Lednicka-Szczytt, 1922. 

The Black Angel, 

Banca d’Italia Collection, Florence 

Above, left: Monumental staircase at Banca 

d’Italia on via dell’Oriolo 

Above, right and Left: Stairwell with The Black 

Angel. 

Photos courtesy of Florence’s Banca d’Italia 


Below, left: Silvestro Lega’s 

Maternity (1881-82) 

Below, right: Luciano Ricchetti’s 

Two Little Mothers (c. 1940) 

maintain her previous success, Lednicka-Szczytt 

committed suicide in 1947. Lednicka-Szczytt’s 

authorship of The Black Angel – which for 

decades was as overlooked as the artist herself 

– was rediscovered in 2013 by scholar Gioia Mori, 

after being incorrectly attributed to De Lempicka 

in the 1990s. 

Mothers and matrons 

The show’s more traditional section ‘Domestic 

Dimensions’ starts with a lovely 1881 work called 

Maternity. Salvatore Lega portrays his sister-inlaw 

and nephew, drawing on one of Western Art’s 

most iconic themes: mother and child. Although 

the lady pictured has all the traditional sweetness 

of a Madonna, the discreet movement of her 

hand, as she re-fastens her collar post breastfeeding, 

brings the work into the modern realm 

of discrete realism. 

Le due mammine, authored by Luciano 

Ricchetti in 1940, is interesting from a historical 

perspective. Its protagonist looks like an ancient 

Roman matrona in modern garb, holding a wellfed 

infant on her lap. This matron and child 

share the scene with a much younger little 

mamma – as the painting’s title suggests – who 

is sitting in the lower left corner, caring for her 

baby doll. Ricchetti’s painting is best read in 

the context of the Battle for Births [1925-1938], 

a propaganda-based operation and economic 

incentives campaign spearheaded by Mussolini, 

which strove to increase Italy’s population 

from 40 million, in 1927 to 60 million by 1950. 

A nation, to be strong, needed many men; and 

women could participate in Italy’s new-fangled 

imperial expansionism by bringing many souls 

into the world. 


Not far away, is another matronly figure, this 

time with no child in tow. Ardengo Soffici’s Water 

Girl, an imposing and very successful painting, 

fits well into the Ritorno all’ordine movement. “In 

this period, there was also a return to depicting 

Italic or Etruscan women. Artists focused on Italy’s 

peasant culture and its attachment to the land,” 

Vallari explains. “Even the ceramic wares and the 

jug in this painting highlight Italian traditions, 

albeit in a modern way.” 

In this section we also find the exhibition’s 

‘posterchild’, A Girl Sewing. Villari admits 

that the decision to make this 1927 oil the show’s 

keynote image sparked debate. Was the picture too 

traditional? In the end, they went with it. Leonetta 

Pieraccini Cecchi’s delightful, faceless rendition 

can be compared to Vanessa Bell’s Portrait of 

Virginia Wolf. Pieraccini Cecchi was an artist and 

tongue-in-cheek writer whose published diaries 

immortalised the top intellectuals of her day – 

she was even married to one, Emilio Cecchi. 

Starting in 1902, Pierracini Cecchi studied with 

iconic Macchiaioli painter and Accademia di Belli 

Arti professor Giovanni Fattori – just as women 

were starting to unbar the academy’s doors. 

“Fattori taught freedom,” Villari says. That is 

precisely why the anti-academy master was 

relegated to teaching the Women’s Section, which 

was seen as a punishment – by administrators, 

not necessarily by Fattori himself. In A Girl 

Sewing, viewers can revel in the figure’s bare feet 

– women had conquered the domestic sphere 

many centuries earlier, but finally, they were 

allowed to feel at home there. 

Above: Installation shot of 

Towards Modernity. Banca 

d’Italia Collection, Florence. 

Photos courtesy of Florence’s 

Banca d’Italia 


Left: Felice Casorati’s Clelia (1937) and Marisa 

Mori’s Study of a Nude (1928). 

Below: Nella Marchesini’s Sleeping Woman 

(c. 1920) 

The nudes in the room 

It is impossible to explore art by women in 

twentieth-century Italy without wandering 

through Felice Casorati’s somewhat eerie 

moonscape. His desexualised, almost robotic 

nude on show evidences a huge change from 

more traditional portrayals of female nudes in 

Italy. This 1937 canvas is displayed in comparison 

with a softer but still modern nude, created in 1928, 

by his former student Marisa Mori, a Florentine 

painter best known for her ‘art affairs’ with shortlived 

Futurism and its second iteration Areal 

Painting – in a world where flight was new and 

speed a path to follow. Casorati’s Scuola Libera 

di Pittura in Turin – set up in 1927, largely thanks 

to Gualino’s funding – was quite the opposite 

of speed, however. In the exhibition catalogue, 

Sgarbozza describes Casorati’s work, “His cold, 

suspended atmospheres in elementary and 

geometrical settings, along with his intellectual 

rigour, present a modernity that is a far cry from 

the changeability of the Impressionists and the 

dynamism of the Futurists.” In person, 

Anna points to what is arguably the most 

exciting nude in the room. It is by Nella 

Marchesini – Casorati’s first pupil, who was 

eventually asked to manage the school for a 

period, along with fellow-artist Lalla Romano. 

Displayed on a table at eye-level, Marchesini’s 

bold nude, from 1928, was a practice piece. “She 

was exercising her hand,” Villari explains, 

“She painted on both sides, because she was 

saving on materials. The nude on the front recalls 

Mantegna’s Dead Christ [in Milan’s Pinacoteca 

di Brera] and the woman on the verso is a nod 


Above and right: Woman Sitting on the Ground 

(1928). Banca d’Italia Collection, Florence. 

Photos courtesy of Florence’s Banca d’Italia 

to Giorgione’s Tempest.” Interestingly, the flipside 

is painted upside-down and made more 

easily viewable thanks to a large mirror set on 

the table. It makes for a simple but ingenious 

solution, in a show where, overall, the works fit 

well in their space. 

Marchesini achieved considerable acclaim at 

the Venice Biennale and Rome’s Quadriennale 

during her time and, like many women painters 

of her day, she modelled for other artists. In the 

words of her painter friend Enrico Paulucci, “She 

looks like she just stepped out of a Piero della 

Francesca panel”. As far as her own reflections 

on life and painting are concerned, Marchesini 

writes, “Art is the polar star, one of constant 

devotion, defended from the burdens of everyday 

life, and in harmony with our lives’ affections.” 

LINDA FALCONE 


‘Palace Women’ 

Find Common Ground 

Photographers and Crafters Tribute 

Historic Women in Tuscany 


What does Eleonora Toledo, a Spanish-born 

WDuchess with eleven children, have in common 

Wwith an ex-patriot poet who called her sole son 

W‘Pen’, a name referencing the instrument both 

WBrownings loved best? What does Cosimo I’s 

Wfavourite daughter, Isabella – who until very 

Wrecently was thought to have been murdered in 

Wbed by her jealous husband – have in common 

with Elizabeth Brewster Hildebrand, who lived 

and painted in idyllic San Francesco di Paola, 

some five centuries later? What common ground 

is shared by seventeenth-century French Princess 

Cristina di Lorena – who built a paradise of sorts 

at Villa La Petraia – and British writer and pacifist 

Vernon Lee, who sought to escape an outbreak 

of cholera, at the turn of the last century, by 

settling at Il Palmerino, the country house where 

the ‘Palace Women’ exhibition was featured in the 

autumn of 2023? 

This small-scale show, forming part of the 

‘Palace Women’ programme, organised by the 

British Institute of Florence, Calliope Arts and 

Il Palmerino, was imagined for this Florentine 

colonica once frequented by the twentiethcentury’s 

sharpest minds, including Oscar Wilde, 

Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf. The show 

featured photographs and handmade objects by 

modern-day crafters inspired by the female icons 

who lived and worked in the monumental venues 

of Cerreto Guidi, Villa La Petraia, Villa La Quiete, 

San Francesco di Paola, Palazzo Pitti and Poggio 

Imperiale. 

Palace Women’s ‘common ground’ is that all of 

the historic women featured were ‘creators of 

culture’, in a world where moveable property – 

not necessarily property itself – formed part of 

women’s realm of power. Grand Duchess Vittoria 

della Rovere is one of the most significant 

examples. A Medici by birth and by marriage, 

she was betrothed while still in the cradle, as 

heir to the coveted Duchy of Urbino. However, in 

an easily anticipated twist of history, Ferdinando 

II’s marriage to the twelve-year-old girl did not 

enable her land to be annexed to the Tuscan 

Opposite page: Medici Villa La Petraia by Carmen Cardellicchio. 

Above: Workshop Students by Viola Parretti 


Below, from left to right: Negar 

Azhar Azari by Olga Makarova; 

Kirstie Mathieson by Valentina 

Bellini; Brenda Luize Roepke 

by Carmen Cardellicchio, Ayako 

Nakamori by Valentina Bellini. 

All photos courtesy of Gruppo 

Fotografico Il Cupolone and 

Calliope Arts Archive 

Grand Duchy. Before the cousins tied the knot, 

Vittoria’s properties were swooped up by the Papal 

powers, because a girl heir made manoeuvring of 

this sort easy. But the young Vittoria did keep her 

‘moveable properties’, which included pictures by 

Titian and Rafael, now at the Pitti Palace. Perhaps 

posterity is lucky that her marriage ended up being 

unhappy, because the ‘separate life’ she led from 

her paedophilic husband engendered one of the 

earliest ‘colonies’ devoted to women’s creativity, up 

at Poggio Imperiale. While there, Vittoria sought out 

talented women in the fields of painting, literature, 

embroidery, music and more. In a word, she 

provided women painters, poets and composers 

with training, as well as the commissions they 

needed to build their own legacies. 

Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici, raised by her 

grandmother Vittoria, was also a final heir – this 

time of the Medici clan. The value of moveable 

property and the need to carve out one’s place in 

the future were two of her grandmother’s most 

valuable lessons. As an adult, Anna Maria Luisa 

conceived and signed the famous ‘Family Pact’, 

which barred Medici property from ever leaving 

Florence, independent of the ruling families that 

took over the territory through the centuries. 

For this genius gesture, locals and travellers are 

eternally grateful. Florence is Florence thanks to 

her foresight. 

Considering how objects of cultural value were 

paramount to these women’s stories, was it not 

fitting to conceive grants for artisans using their 

palazzi as a starting point? Three grants were 

awarded to members of Florence’s international 

artisans’ community for this purpose. The ‘Intreccio 

Creativo’ collective combined wood, cord, fabric, 

grès and watercolour woodblock prints to create 

an installation called Tablescape, worthy of 

Elizabeth Browning’s guests at Casa Guidi; Negar 

Azhar Azari, a Florentine artist of Persian descent, 

created a ring and pendant inspired by the many 

windows of Poggio Imperiale’s façade. Brenda 

Luize Roepke designed jewellery fit for Cristina di 

Lorena, in white gold and diamonds. Our student 

grant project, which funded hands-on workshops 

at the Liceo Artistico Statale di Porta Romana e 

Sesto Fiorentino, took inspiration from the figure 

of Eleonora di Toledo, as students designed 

‘wallpaper’ for the Grand Duchess’s chambers, reinventing 

the pomegranate motif embroidered 

on several of Eleonora’s most memorable gowns. 

Another noteworthy part of the ‘Palace 

Women’ programme involved a grant awarded 

to the amateur photography association Gruppo 


Fotografico Il Cupolone, whereby thirteen women 

photographers spent a month visiting key villas 

and palaces whose identity is closely linked to 

women’s history. For instance, photographers 

Daniela Giampa and Sabina Bernacchini were 

commissioned to immortalise scenes from the 

former convent of San Francesco di Paola, where 

German sculptor Adolf Von Hildebrand educated 

his five daughters (and one son) in an early version 

of what we’d now call ‘home schooling’. Of course, 

most non-villa homes do not have the likes of 

Richard and Cosima Wagner to supper, invite Clara 

Schumann or Henry James for tea, or befriend 

the likes of Helen Gladstone, the British Prime 

Minister’s daughter. Von Hildebrand’s daughters 

made the most of their unique education and 

were artistically inclined: Irene Georgii Hildebrand 

became a sculptor, whilst Eva and Lisl (Elizabeth 

Hildebrand Brewster) were painters. 

Photographer Paola Curradi captured corners 

of Villa La Quiete, where Anna Maria Luisa de’ 

Medici chose to live towards the end of her life, as 

part of the Montalve Community, a laic sisterhood, 

and one of the earliest examples of non-ordained 

communities for educated women. Their Ricordi, 

or log books, date from the congregation’s 

founding in 1650 to the late 1980s and represent a 

‘quiet’ but extremely important page in women’s 

history. These volumes contain intimate snippets 

of life from Medici family visits, including stories 

of Anna Maria Luisa playing innocent jokes on 

the Montalve sisters. According to one note, she 

brings them chocolate – a New World delicacy, 

the likes of which they had likely never seen. 

The stories ‘brought back’ by the project’s 

photographers are far too numerous to explore 

here, but each picture they authored has its own 

story to tell – from Curradi’s Red-walled Pharmacy 

at Villa La Quiete, to Bernacchini’s Deep-blue 

Bedroom, where Rosa Vercellana, King Vittorio 

Emanuele II’s ‘middle-class’ morganatic wife, slept 

at La Petraia,. The project ‘Palace Women’, and the 

pictures it engendered, are like seeds for future 

conversations on the women of Tuscany and how 

their legacy takes root and blooms in our own 

lives today. 

LINDA FALCONE 

The ‘Palace Women’ project was made possible 

with the generous support of Alice Vogler, Donna 

Malin, Margie MacKinnon and Wayne McArdle, 

with the support of the Municipality of Florence, 

‘Enjoy Respect and Feel Florence’, the FCS and 

Italy’s Ministry of Culture. 


“5,000 Negatives” 

Safeguarding the Wulz sisters’ legacy at FAF 

Above: The digitalisation process of ‘5,000 Negatives’ at Art Defender, October 2023 


Like many women artists of centuries 

past, the Wulz sisters, Wanda (1903-1984) 

and Marion (1905-1993), followed in their 

grandfather and fathers’ footsteps (photographers 

Giuseppe and Carlo Wulz, respectively). Both girls 

showed precocious talent behind the camera 

lens, at a time when photography was still largely 

considered a craft, not an art form in its own 

right. Often represented as twins, Wanda and 

Marion were Carlo’s models from the cradle 

onwards. When his photo-ready babies grew 

into intriguing young women, Wanda and Marion 

became two of Carlo’s Three Graces. To say the 

sisters were photogenic is an understatement. 

In their household, photography was a game, a 

constant switching of costumes and scenes, and 

they had several ‘life-changing’ opportunities to 

stand behind the camera rather than in front of it. 

Wanda is celebrated as a top exponent of 

futurist photography, for her experimental flair 

and daring overlays, like the ultra-famous Cat and 

I. Marion, who has become a centre of attention 

only recently, was interested in photo reportage, 

capturing historic WWII liberation scenes from 

the window of the Wulzs’ flat, in the manner of 

Elizabeth Browning and Casa Guidi Windows. 

Although Marion produced photography rather 

than poetry, her historical images were poetic, 

in their own way. When the sisters took over the 

family’s successful photography studio in Trieste 

in 1928, they continued the family’s portraiture 

business, adding to an exceptional archive that 

features top figures of their day, from celebrity 

athletes and entertainers, to nobility and top 

exponents of fashion and culture. 

October 2023 marked the start of a new 

collaborative project called ‘5,000 Negatives’, 

aimed at safeguarding the sisters’ legacy, through 

the creation of an inventory and the restoration, 

digitalisation and improved archive accessibility 

of the Wulz Photographic Studio Archive of 

Trieste, a treasure trove of negatives, prints and 

archival documentation acquired by Fondazione 

Alinari per la Fotografia (FAF) in 1986. This project, 

developed by FAF, is made possible thanks to a 

grant from Fondazione CR Firenze and Calliope 

Arts Foundation. 

In a recent interview, FAF Director Claudia 

Baroncini shares the project’s raison d’être. 

“Photographic archives need to be digitised, in 

order to preserve captured images, which are 

extremely fragile. We need to remember that 

images can actually disappear. They can vanish! 

Our ambition is to preserve them forever. On 

another level, digitalisation is important because 

it allows for accessibility. Let’s face it, negatives 

are not immediately understandable. They 

are not readable the way prints are. So on the 

one hand, digitalisation allows us to faithfully 

reproduce an object – in this case ‘a negative’ – 

using technology. 

But enjoyment is also a critical factor when it 

comes to preserving culture. Therefore, during 

the digitalisation process, we transform the 

negative into its positive image – otherwise, all 

you would see of the collection are ‘little black 

stamps’. Cultural preservation is not just about 

preserving an object, it involves making that 

object available to the public – and not just to a 

circle of specialists. This transferral respects and 

reflects the negatives’ original use. Historically, 

the purpose of a negative was to be printed in 

the positive. Analysis and sharing of the positives 

we acquire is phase two of this project.” 

Spring / Summer 2023 • Restoration Conversations 37

Coincidently, an all-woman team is involved 

in this multi-faceted endeavour and Restoration 

Conversations had the opportunity to talk with 

two of its players, in addition to Dr Baroncini. For 

several months, Pamela Ferrari, head of digital 

acquisitions at the Florence-based company 

Centrica, set up ‘shop’ at Art Defender, a vast, 

high-security art vault in Calenzano, where a 

plethora of Florence museums and institutions, 

including FAF, hold their most precious instorage 

works. Ferrari describes her work in 

lay terms, “We created a photographic set up 

on site, fitted with a 100-megapixel camera to 

acquire 5,200 Wulz negatives, through retroillumination 

using a lit panel.” 

Right. The reasoning behind the project and 

the basics of its execution sounded simple 

enough so far. We were ready to speak with 

photography restorer Eugenia Di Rocco, and 

zero in on what she and the ‘5,000 negatives’ 

team have learned about the Wulz’s process. 

Aboe: Wanda and Marion Wulz photographed as children by their father Carlo 

We know the Wulz sisters – particularly 

Wanda – frequently manipulated negatives 

to achieve ‘futuristic effects’ like movement, 

or used overlay with very successful 

results. Were the Wulzs pioneers as far as 

image editing is concerned? 

Eugenia di Rocco: The Wulz sisters worked 

largely with portraiture and heavily modified 

their photographs in the post-production phase. 

They were not the only photographers to do so, 

of course. For the whole of the 1900’s, prior to the 

advent of digital equipment, dry-plate negatives 

were altered by adding varnishes, temperas 

and graphite. The Wulzs would add or subtract 

elements to and from their images, applying cutout 

silhouettes in black or red paper to areas 

they wanted to cover. They would also ‘make 


up’ their sitters, so to speak, with a preparatory 

varnish, using either a greasy coloured impasto 

or a transparent solution. They would improve 

people’s skin, in tone and smoothness, by using 

these colouring agents, which addressed the 

negatives’ colour contrasts. Another option was 

for them to use a yellow, red or orange filter, on the 

negatives’ glass side. The sisters often marked up 

their negatives with a soft pencil – to cancel out 

wrinkles, improve a person’s profile, or eliminate 

puffy cheeks, baggy eyes or a double chin. Today, 

we use Photoshop digitally, but they did their work 

in the dark room. All of this intervention aimed to 

improve the ‘positive’ and make their clients happy. 

Could you describe what the negatives look 

like and tell us more about the kinds of 

materials the Wulz sisters used? 

EDR: In this restoration, we had to be very 

careful. To the non-expert eye, the patina on the 

Wulzs’ negatives could be confused with a dirt 

layer. Again, through analysis, we learned how 

they developed a masking system for purposes 

of contrast, on the glass support side. Most of 

the collection’s objects are dry-plate negatives, 

which differ from an earlier technique, namely 

the collodion wet-plate process. With dry-plate 

negatives image is created using gelatine and 

silver salts on glass. Dry-plate negatives are 

Above, left: Wanda and 

Marion Wulz pictured with a 

friend while leafing through a 

book (c. 1920), photo by Carlo 

Wulz 

Top right: Wanda Wulz, 

Marion Wulz and Bianca 

Baldussi as the Three Graces 

(c.1920), photo by Carlo Wulz 

Above, right: Portrait of 

Wanda Wulz at the mirror 

(c. 1950), photo by Marion 

Wulz 

All photos © Archivi Alinari, 

Florence 


larger than film negatives, which came later. They 

are typically postcard size, and the Wulz sisters 

used three sizes [9 x 12 cm, 10 x 15 cm and 13 x 

18]. These plates were industrially produced and 

sold in standard dimensions. The technique’s 

heyday was from 1880 to 1950, but it continued 

to be used until the 1970’s. Despite being heavy, 

inconvenient and fragile, photographers were 

slow to give up the dry-plate technique because 

of the high quality images it rendered. 

Can you tell us about the restoration 

process? How do the Wulzs’ materials affect 

your work today? 

EDR: I restored the collection’s broken negatives 

by reassembling their glass plates, worked on 

those that were bent – to correct image distortion 

– and revisited negatives that had been poorly 

restored in the past. Fortunately, the Wulz Archive 

is in good condition, so most of my work involved 

cleaning. Because of their patinas, it was mostly 

a ‘dry clean’ using soft brushes, controlled air jets 

and microfiber cloth. All the products we use, 

including the paper in which the dry plates are 

packed and stored, have to be verified as being 

compatible with photographic materials. I have 

a degree in Mathematics and Physical Sciences, 

but my training is mostly chemical. Photographic 

restoration is largely a question of chemistry. 


Opposite page: Trieste: Yugoslavian tank with 

some partisans in Via Dante (2 May 1945), photo 

by Marion Wulz © Archivi Alinari, Florence 

Left: First procession dedicated to Corpus Christi 

after the war, in Trieste. The photograph, taken 

from above, frames the intersection of Via 

Dante and Corso Italia (20 June 1946), photo 

by Marion Wulz; Marion and Wanda Wulz with 

Bianca Baldussi (c. 1920), photo by Carlo Wulz 

All photos © Archivi Alinari, Florence 

Why did you decide to become a photography 

conservator? 

EDR: I have always been interested in photographic 

manipulation of the negative and in the manual 

skills involved. Despite its inherent science, this 

is a very emotional job, and I find it very exciting, 

independent of the importance attributed to 

a certain photographer. Pictures are a window 

onto the past, and whoever found themselves 

behind a camera lens was actually ‘there’, living 

that moment. That person’s presence can be felt, 

along with the image they are recording. I am 

very happy when I work. Of course, there are 

times when fear or doubt edges its way into my 

mind, but I have a team to turn to – from those in 

the dark room with me, to the experts working to 

acquire the image digitally, and even the scholars 

and administrators at Fondazione Alinari per la 

Fotografia. Photographs are dear to people. They 

encapsulate our affections and our history. They 

bear witness to our experiences, and all those 

factors are what make this project pure joy. 

LINDA FALCONE 


Time travel at 

Florence’s Opificio 

Artist Maria Luisa Raggi and the restoration of art on paper 

Above: Senior paper conservator Simona Calza and Linda Falcone watch the restoration process 

The Opificio delle Pietre Dure is a fortress 

palace that now protects nothing but 

artwork. Its conservators restore canvas 

and panel paintings, polychrome wood statuary, 

photography and art objects in paper, parchment 

and leather. I have visited its paintings section 

on several occasions over the past 15 years, and 

never leave without remembering what intrepid 

Zen warriors conservators are. Who else has the 

guts to give new gold to Giotto? A body like me 

would get goose bumps about it, but in their 

world, the only hair that stands on end is that of 

their wild boar brushes. I’ve seen them remove 

the weight of the 1966 flood from Vasari’s Last 

Supper and watched them restore Da Vinci’s 

Adoration of the Magi, while laying belly-down on 

a mattress suspended above the work, to better 

reach its mid-section. In their space, a Jackson 

Pollock is made to wait its turn alongside the likes 

of Beato Angelico, because even Action Painting 

has to turn passive prior to Opificio healing. 


Above: A Maria Luisa Raggi 

tempera from the Museo Civico 

di Prato, under restoration 

The mission in mind, for our June 13 Restoration 

Conversations broadcast on site, had little to do 

with grand religious themes or the greatest alltime 

revolution in painting. We were there, in 

search of a woman artist who created miniatures 

on paper, and I was fresh from a phone call with 

Roman art historian and university professor 

Consuelo Lollobrigida, who provided generous 

clues to understanding Maria Luisa [Luigia] Raggi 

(1742-1813). Since 2016, the Opificio has restored 

36 works by Raggi, of the over 80 attributed 

to her – including many by Consuelo – who 

chanced upon several works she recognised 

as Raggi’s at an antique dealer’s. Thanks to that 

fortuitous encounter, Raggi met her champion, 

and Consuelo published the artist’s seminal 

monograph, Maria Luigia Raggi. Il Capriccio 

Paesaggistico tra Arcadia e Grand Tour, in 2012. 

The artist once noted as ‘eighteenth-century 

landscape artist’, in a number of institutional 

collections, now has a name and a story. 

Consuelo recounts the vicissitudes of this 

Genovese nun who escaped from her convent 

to live in Rome with a sympathetic uncle, where 

she spent several years painting scenes strewn 

with ruins for Grand Tour travellers. It is likely she 

worked in a tiny workshop in vicolo Cacciabove, 

near Palazzo Raggi, and that her upper-echelon 

uncle Ferdinando’s generous gifts to the local 

parish dissuaded its priest from reporting her 

presence in the neighbourhood, when conducting 

the annual ‘census of souls’ required of him by 

the Catholic church. 

“Maria Luisa Raggi is a simple figure, at first 

glance,” Lollobrigida says, “She repeatedly paints 

a series of similar landscapes and capprici, 

for the whole of her career, reproducing the 

landscape as she saw it. These joy-filled scenes 

are brimming with life, but they also express her 

spiritual perspectives; they are works of light and 

illustrate the quest for freedom – even mental 

freedom. Through her landscapes, this cloistered 


Top: A pentimento by Il Volteranno from a Roberto 

Longhi Foundation drawing 

Above: Leticia Montalbano and Alessia Bianchi examine 

drawings under restoration 

Turchine nun – who, in her youth, was forced into 

one of the strictest cloistered orders of all time – 

travels through the ‘open spaces’ of her dreams. 

To use a term from modern-day psychology, Maria 

Luisa Raggi’s artworks were a form evasion.” 

It was with those words in mind that the RC 

crew alit upon the Opificio delle Pietre Dure. 

Once a Medici workshop for inlaid semi-precious 

stone work or mosaico fiorentino, the Opificio 

was founded in 1588 by Grand Duke Ferdinando I. 

It took on the mantel of its modern-day vocation, 

as one of the top three restoration laboratories in 

the world, after being used as an ‘emergency room 

for art victims’ of the 1966 flood, as desperate city 

administrators sought out a large space in which 

to collect and protect the over 14,000 artworks 

damaged by 600,000 tons of rubble and mud that 

invaded the city, with the Arno’s historic flooding 

on November 4. The flood was like no siege the 

city had ever seen. 

Today, the Opificio, which operates under the 

Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage, is also 

a Higher Education Research Centre whose 

programme lasts five years. Headed by director 

and senior conservator Letizia Montalbano, it 

also involves a year-and-a-half thesis project, 

post course. Three of Montalbano’s five student 

restorers were on site for the broadcast – all 


of them young women, with wise hands and 

daunting problems to solve. 

We are led through their workstations by 

senior paper conservator Simona Calza and, on 

some level, it is an exercise in time travel. One 

student, Sabrina, grinds yellow pigment into 

egg yolks, according to a fourteenth-century 

recipe by painter Cennino Cennini, because she 

needs to recreate a binding agent similar to the 

one used on the tempera work she is restoring, 

which once served as a stone mosaic pattern for 

a wardrobe door. Her peer Alessia is conducting 

microscopic analysis – alongside Dr Montalbano. 

They examine charcoal, red-chalk and ink 

preparatory drawings by renowned fresco artist 

Baldassarre Franceschini, from the Church of 

Santissima Annunziata and Fondazione Roberto 

Longhi. The artist’s acidic, iron-based ink is eating 

holes through the 370-year-old paper. Therein lies 

Alessia’s dilemma. 

Nearby, a third student restorer, Giorgia, is 

grappling with a spine-less codex from the early 

Above: Mixing pigments for the restoration of a 

Florentine mosaic pattern at the Opificio delle 

Pietre Dure (below) 


Above: A post-grad student 

restores codex from 

Florence’s National Library 

1300s, in parchment – the support used for writing 

in Europe before the arrival of paper. Parchment, 

you’ll remember, is made from animal skin, not 

plant fibres, hence its recognisable thickness. 

“She is unsure whether these pages were 

made from a lamb or an adult sheep, but its fur 

follicles are still visible, despite the parchment’s 

smoothness,” Calza explains. “We chose to show 

you these choir-book pages which contain Laude, 

or sung praises, honouring history’s holy women. 

This codex is from Florence’s National Library 

and was once part of Santa Spirito’s collection,” 

Calza adds. “Rather than in Latin, it was written 

in ‘the vulgar tongue’, since it was produced not 

long after Dante made his revolutionary decision 

to write his Divina Commedia in the volgare [the 

Florentine dialect that later became the national 

language of Italy.]” 

During our journey through the centuries, this 

all-woman team of experts and students have one 

challenge in common: paper and parchment are 

among the most delicate artworks ever produced. 


Their extreme reactivity is culprit. Temperature 

changes, humidity and the lack of a ground layer, 

as with painting, makes organic paper highly 

susceptible to cupping and cracking. 

Finally, we reach Maria Luisa Raggi’s 21 

temperas from the Museo Civico di Prato, set out 

on a high table. Their attributions are new, from 

2012. The growing number of Raggi attributions 

is largely thanks to Lollobrigida’s copious 

research. “The grand tour was fashionable in 

Raggi’s time and noble persons at the time would 

start their Grand Tour of the Mediterranean in 

Rome, before travelling further, even as far as the 

northern shores of Africa,” Calza explains. “They 

would immerse themselves in the landscape of 

Rome, fascinated by its wealth of ruins. Using 

very immediate brush stokes, Raggi was able 

to create a sense of gentleness, but also reality, 

because this is probably how people lived at 

the time, merging with nature, which was very 

‘Arcadian’, in that they depict that idyllic world 

known as ‘Arcadia’, that painters and poets 

sought to recreate in their works.” 

It is useful to note that Raggi was painting during 

the onset of the Industrial Revolution, followed 

by the French Revolution, when ancient ways of 

life began to give way to the modern world. Her 

luminous tempera works are reminiscent of an 

era that was no more, even at the time she was 

painting it. “Raggi depicts pastoral and bathing 

scenes and landscapes reminiscent of the Latin 

poets,” Calza notes. “They capture everyday 

life and the passing of seasons. Her figures are 

working the land, basking in the summer sun, 

or busy with the harvest. She paints an ancient 

Roman soldier gazing a pond, a peasant leaning 

on his staff, a woman bitten by a snake – who 

appears to be dancing, but is actually running. 

In the distance, her scenes continue down 

meandering roads, and the more we look, the 

more we find new stories to tell.” 

For me, Raggi’s whimsical scenes exude a degree 

of whimsy and delight that defies their size. But 

for everyone, I believe Calza’s last comment is 

indicative of the whole Opificio experience: the 

more we look, the more we find stories to tell – 

new and old. No matter their age these art-based 

tales and the works they engendered are forever 

striving to stand the tests of time. 

LINDA FALCONE 

Above: Postgrad student 

Sabrina mixes pigment 

All photos by Bunker Film, 

Calliope Arts Archive 


Above: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Inclination, after restoration, Casa Buonarroti Museum, ph. O. Caruso; Digital reconstruction via scientific research, ph M. 

Chimenti and Culturanuova, from a photo by O. Caruso 


The Big Reveal 

Florence exhibition Artemisia in the Museum of Michelangelo 

Artemisia’s nude Allegory of Inclination was revealed after a year-long 

restoration, in the show Artemisia in the Museum of Michelangelo at Florence’s 

Casa Buonarroti. This international endeavour was designed to spotlight the 

painter’s prolific Florentine period and the iconic women-on-canvas that gave 

Artemisia her start. A 400-year-old fingerprint, a newly visible bellybutton, the 

original contours of Artemisia Gentileschi’s censored painting… and more. 

A VIRTUAL QUEST TO UNCOVER 

ARTEMISIA’S ORIGINAL 

Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Inclination, 

the keynote artwork at the conservationbased 

exhibition Artemisia in the Museum of 

Michelangelo (27 September to 8 January 2024) 

held at Casa Buonarroti in Florence, Italy – was 

rendered more beguiling by the censoring of 

the original nude allegorical figure, nearly 50 

years after she painted it, by order of Leonardo 

Buonarroti a descendent of Michelangelo. The 

addition of heavy swirling veils to cover the nudity 

was intended to preserve the modesty of the 

female inhabitants of the house. “The possibility 

of ‘unveiling’ this figure virtually, revealing the 

image originally painted by Artemisia turned 

an ‘ordinary’ restoration into a quest to discover 

the woman behind the veils,” explains Wayne 

McArdle, co-founder of the project’s co-sponsor 

Calliope Arts, in partnership with English art 

collector and philanthropist Christian Levett. 

THE BIG QUESTION 

Why remove the veils virtually, not physically? 

“The Artemisia UpClose project – which brought 

together Italian, American, Canadian and British 

philanthropists, curators, and conservation 

experts – was conceived knowing that the 

censoring cover-up would not be removed 

for two reasons,” explains head conservator 


Elizabeth Wicks. “First, the removal of the thick 

layers of oil paint applied by Il Volterrano less 

than five decades after the original could put 

Artemisia’s delicate glazes just underneath 

the over-paint at risk. Second, the veils were 

applied by an important late Baroque artist 

and are now part of the painting’s history. 

Restoration scientists probed the painting at 

sixteen depths, nanometer by nanometer. The 

reflectograph penetrated the upper drapery, 

and we could see Artemisia’s pentimenti – 

the places in which she changed her mind. It 

took an x-ray to see through the white lead 

pigment covering the figure’s thighs – but, in 

the end, we got it: a science-based image of 

Artemisia’s original.” 

Top: Detail during cleaning in UV Fluorescence showing dark repaints on flesh 

Above: Installation view of the exhibition 

THE REVEAL 

Research and chemical analysis allowed 

Artemisia UpClose team members to identify 

Artemisia’s pigments and painting technique. 

Conservators learned, for instance, that she was 

sparing with her precious lapis lazuli pigment. 

It was more costly than gold at the time, and 

Artemisia used very little of it on the parts of the 

blue sky which would later be covered by the 

architectural framework of the Casa Buonarroti 

gallery ceiling. Removal of centuries of grime 

and repainting revealed the figure’s navel – not 

visible previously – and on the figure’s calf, 

Wicks discovered a fingerprint dating back to 

the painting’s creation “The fingerprint was 

made when the original paint was wet, and it 

is highly likely that of Artemisia herself.” Before 

completing work on the painted surface, a full 

structural conservation of the painting was 

carried out. 

Because the painting has been displayed 

‘belly-down’ on the ceiling since its creation 


four centuries ago, the restoration involved 

consolidation of the paint layers, improving 

both the surface distortions and those of 

the canvas, the application of a double set of 

canvas strips to the perimeter of the original 

canvas and the substitution of the strainer with 

an expandable stretcher, which allowed for 

controlled tension of the canvas. 

A HEROINE AMONG HEROINES 

The Florence exhibition puts Artemisia at ‘eye 

level’, as visitors have the opportunity to see 

Artemisia’s powerful women up-close, for the 

first time. “Throughout history, artists have 

been not only the gatekeepers but also the 

creators of culture,” explains the project’s cosponsor, 

Christian Levett, a British collector and 

founder of the Femmes Artistes du Musée de 

Mougins (Spring 2024) and the Levett Collection 

house-gallery in Florence, which houses 

artworks by the leading exponents of Abstract 

Expressionism. “This was true of Artemisia in 

her day, when she began to put heroines at the 

centre of her canvases. What is special about 

Artemisia is that she continues to be a driving 

force for culture today, and this exhibition and 

restoration reveal the abilities that complement 

her iconic personality.” In Florence, Artemisia 

found herself within the social circle and 

influence of the poet Michelangelo the Younger. 

Here, she would become the first woman painter 

to be admitted to the Accademia delle Arti del 

Disegno, make the acquaintance of Galileo 

Galilei and earn commissions from the upper 

echelons of Florentine society, including Grand 

Duke Cosimo II. Particularly worthy of note 

is Artemisia’s Penitent Mary Magdalene, from 

the Palatine Gallery (Uffizi Galleries), recently 

restored at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure. 

Above: X-ray image of Artemisia’s Allegory of Inclination by Teobaldo Pasquali 


THE HEART OF THE EXHIBITION 

‘Artemisia in the Museum of Michelangelo’, curated 

by museum director Alessandro Cecchi and 

designed by Massimo Chimenti of Culturanuova, 

was presented in three rooms on the ground 

floor of Casa Buonarroti. “That singular Allegory 

of Inclination painted in 1616, as a commission 

from Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, 

symbolically launched a series of celebratory 

images hailing the virtues of Michelangelo 

Buonarroti – the ‘divine’ artist and poet on the 

ceiling of the Gallery in the family home is at the 

heart of this exhibition dedicated to Artemisia 

Gentileschi and her time in Florence,” explains 

Cristina Acidini, president of the Casa Buonarroti 

Foundation. “We hope Artemisia UpClose will 

represent the first in a long series for the recovery 

of the paintings in the Casa Buonarroti Gallery 

and its adjoining seventeenth-century rooms,” 

adds exhibition curator and museum director 

Alessandro Cecchi. “The Allegory of Inclination, 

Artemisia’s first recorded work commissioned in 

Florence, and the show, in general, explains how 


Above: The Gallery ceiling at Casa Buonarroti Florence, photo by Serge Domingie 

this painting fits into the iconological programme 

conceived by Michelangelo the Younger for 

the Galleria di Casa Buonarroti, with the aim of 

representing the Renaissance master’s many 

extraordinary qualities.” 

The volume in English, Artemisia UpClose (The 

Florentine Press, September 2023) which contains 

essays by world-renowned Artemisia scholars, 

including Mary D. Garrard and Elizabeth Cropper, 

will be accompanied by a series of publications in 

Italian entitled “Buonarrotiana” (2024) containing 

research by specialists on Artemisia and her 

era. “We want to make Artemisia Gentileschi a 

household name and to generate interest in 

her groundbreaking artworks. Artemisia is the 

‘gateway drug’ for early women artists,” says 

Margie MacKinnon project co-donor and cofounder 

of Calliope Arts. “Her backstory is so 

dramatic, her paintings so powerful and her 

accomplishments so impressive, people wonder, 

‘Why haven’t I heard of her before, and who are 

the other women artists I need to learn about?’” 


Three Wishes 

An Exhibition Walk-about with Elizabeth Cropper 

Ever since reading Elizabeth Cropper’s 

description for the 2020 London National 

Gallery show on Artemisia, where she 

recounts her escape from Florence on horseback 

to avoid paying the Grand Duke for pigment for 

paintings he commissioned but never received, 

I’ve wanted to meet her – the scholar, not the 

fugitive rider. Dr Cropper’s presence in Florence, 

on the occasion of Artemisia in the Museum 

of Michelangelo, provided the chance to ‘talk 

Artemisia’ on camera. Her forty years studying 

the artist, from the archives to the museum 

spotlight, made our Restoration Conversation an 

unforgettable event. 

Looking back on it now, I felt like Aladdin 

entering the Cave of Wonders. Did Cropper 

accept ‘the gig’ knowing she’d be Genie to my 

Aladdin? Of course not, but she did grant at 

least three wishes by addressing fundamental 

questions Artemisia lovers the world over have 

often wondered about. The show, which made 

Artemisia-related archives available to the public, 

gave us the opportunity to explore archival 

sources and what they meant in the artist’s life. 

. 

Why was Artemisia paid so much more than 

the other allegory painters? 

Artemisia was the first to be signed up among the 

artists doing Casa Buonarroti’s allegorical scenes 

around the gallery ceiling’s edges. She received 

the first down payment. Buonarroti the Younger 

provided each one of them with a prepared 

canvas and some ultramarine. The ledger is 

another phenomenal treasure which allows us 

to see the actual words on the page, regarding 

payments to Artemisia, which begin in 1615. It 

involves double-entry bookkeeping, so it’s filled 

on both sides. 

We have to go back to the Accademia del 

Disegno to understand the reasons behind 

this choice. All the people called to paint the 

allegories, were the ‘giovani’ of master painters, 

‘il giovane di Allori’, for instance. Artemisia is 

nobody’s ‘giovane’ at this point. When she arrives 

in Florence, she is a fully-fledged painter who 

set herself up with her own studio, inside her 

house. She successfully gets this commission 

from Buonarroti who really wants to celebrate 

and recognise her. Giovane is almost a technical 

Right: Michelangelo Buonarroti’s plan for the 

gallery ceiling, photo by Olga Makarova 



Above: Artemisia in the 

Museum of Michelangelo 

exhibition 

term in the academy, and very often the role of 

‘il giovane’ was to execute allegorical images for 

Medici festivals or city celebrations. The literal 

translation for giovane is ‘young’ – some of these 

painters were close to her age [Artemisia was 20] 

– but it also meant they were subordinate to a 

master, and she was not subordinate to a master. 

That is not just a kind of psychological or social 

statement; it has to do with how much she should 

be paid. It was only right that a painter who was 

not anybody’s giovane should earn more. 

In Michelangelo the Younger’s account books, 

he mentions sending a servant, Francesco, 

to Artemisia’s home with a small amount of 

money, which she received while still in bed, 

after delivering her new-born child. Several 

decades ago, you were the first to study 

Artemisia as a mother. What can you tell us 

about that? 

EC: Many people had read this document but 

nobody thought, ‘This must mean there is a child 

somewhere’, so I rushed off to the Baptistery 

Archives and did indeed find the child – her 

third, little Cristofano, for whom Cristofano Allori 

stood as Godfather, and then, from there, I was 

able to go backwards and forwards and find more 

children which, for me, just increased my regard 

for Artemisia, and my sense of respect for how she 

managed to really push through the challenges 

she faced. She had five children that we know of. 

I found the baptized children, but Sheila Barker, 

another scholar, went and looked in the deaths 

archive and found another one, a little girl called 

Agnola, who was buried before she was baptised. 

We think that perhaps she was called Agnola for 

Michelangelo Buonarroti, whom Artemisia refers 

to as compare or Godfather. In one beautiful 

undated letter [also in the show], she refers to him 

as “Magnifico Compare”. Godfather is an elastic 

term. It may literally mean that you stood at the 

baptismal font and held the baby, but it can also 

mean a wider range of not biological family but 

social family – someone you feel very close to 


Left: Buonarroti the Younger’s accounting book 

Photos by Mehdi Ben Temime 

and, obviously, in the absence of her own father, 

her own mother (and her husband’s not much 

help) Artemisia thinks of him as her compare.” 

Where did Artemisia get the theme for 

‘Inclination’? 

A darling sketch forming part of the Casa 

Buonarroti Archives is one of a whole series 

Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger made for 

the entire Gallery ceiling. It is fascinating to watch 

him change his mind and develop his ideas. You 

can see how many times he crosses things out. 

This isn’t a complete design, but you can see his 

handwriting where it says ‘Inclinazione’ and then, 

in different ink underneath it, he writes ‘Artemisia’. 

There’s an upside-down little stick figure with a 

star and a compass, but you can also see little 

things on the feet which are pulley-like objects 

one would use in shipping and military mechanics, 

which Buonarroti the Younger originally thought 

would be an interesting thing to put on the 

Inclination’s feet. This is one of the areas where 

I do feel their excitement with Galileo, who 

was friend and colleague to both Michelangelo 

the Younger and Artemisia. It comes into play 

because Galileo is not only deeply interested in 

magnetism, he’s also interested in mechanics and 

pulleys. In this case, these pulleys were seen as a 

mechanical ways to help the allegorical figure rise 

to the clouds. Her ascent was to be a mechanical 

process, but, visually and conceptually wasn’t a 

great idea!” 

The Big Reveal” and “Three Wishes” is adapted 

from the Artemisia UpClose Press Release and 

“Restoration Conversations with Elizabeth 

Cropper”. Both were originally released, in print 

and by broadcast, on September 27, 2023, penned 

and conducted by Linda Falcone 


Mission 

accomplished 

Courtyard snaps from the opening 

On September 27, 2023, exactly one year after Artemisia’s Allegory of Inclination was 

removed from the Gallery ceiling at Casa Buonarroti, an intimate group of project 

participants and friends celebrate the inauguration of the show Artemisia in the 

Museum of Michelangelo in Casa Buonarroti’s courtyard. 


Opposite page: ‘Artemisia UpClose’ sponsors Wayne 

McArdle, Margie MacKinnon and Christian Levett 

This page, starting clockwise from upper left: M. 

Chimenti, A. Cecchi, E. Wicks, M. MacKinnon, L. 

Falcone and W. McArdle; Conservator Elizabeth Wicks 

with finished painting; Casa Buonarroti president, 

director and curator C. Acidini, A. Cecchi and M. 

Marongiu; R-A MacKinnon and D. Salloum 



Opposite page: A happy group of friends 

celebrating the exhibition opening; Exhibition 

designer M. Chimenti discusses the show with 

sponsors, as Ruth-Ann MacKinnon and Carol 

Annett look on; FAF curator M. Sesti and CB 

curator E. Lombardi enjoy the evening; 

Upstairs in the Gallery; C. Marino moved by 

Artemisia’s Magdalene 

This page: E. Wicks, A. Vogler and C. Marino in 

the foreground; Restoration team members T. 

Pasquali and L. Conti; C. Levett and project 

coordinator L. Falcone; INO and CNR team of 

scientists, an all-woman team; FAF president 

G. Van Straten , the ADDFI’s G. Bonsanti and 

the Region’s C. Giachi standing in the 

foreground 


Above: Lavinia Fontana, c. 1575-80, The Wedding Feast at Cana . Digital Images Courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Programme 

Right: Lavinia Fontana, 1577 Self-Portrait at the Virginal . Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, Roma. Photo by Mauro Coen 


Trailblazer, 

Rule Breaker 

Lavinia Fontana at the National Gallery of Ireland 

Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614) was the first 

woman in Europe to become a professional 

painter. She grew up and painted for most 

of her life in the enlightened city of Renaissance 

Bologna, while her husband looked after the house 

and their eleven children. On a visit to Dublin 

earlier this year, Restoration Conversations had 

the pleasure of viewing the National Gallery of 

Ireland’s eye-opening exhibition of her works, in 

the company of curator Aoife Brady and restorer 

Maria Canavan, who offered their insights on the 

artist’s works, her artistic practice and the time in 

which she lived. 

One of the exciting aspects of mounting 

a major monographic exhibition is the 

opportunity to locate and bring together 

paintings from private collections, to 

advance the scholarship around the artist 

and possibly even make new attributions to 

add to her known body of work. Was this the 

case with the Fontana exhibition? 

AB: Yes. Myself and Babette Bohn, who is one of the 

leading specialists on the milieu of women artists 

of Bologna more broadly, made the attribution to 

Fontana of The Wedding Feast at Cana, a painting 

that appeared on the market in 2022. Nicholas Hall 

in New York brought it to my attention, and I saw 

it and it struck me immediately as characteristic 

of Fontana’s early style. And then I was able to 

identify some preparatory drawings by Vasari 

that Lavinia’s father also used in his own iteration 

of the Marriage Feast of Cana, which we now 

believe must have been in the family collection. 

And so, Davide Gasparotto, a good colleague of 

mine who is head of paintings at the Getty, got in 

touch about the painting. And I was able to say, 

‘Yes! I think it is [a Fontana],’ and others supported 

this, so they purchased it. 

Then, by an act of absolute serendipity, I came 

across the compositional study [for the painting] 

in Rob Smeets’ Gallery! It was so important, from 

my point of view, to have the two objects in the 

same public collection so they can be viewed 

together, because we don’t often get these kinds of 

insights into women artists’ workshop practices. 

I think any kind of serious consideration of their 

‘making’ is often overtaken by a preoccupation 

with biography. Writers focus on gender, both 

in modern and even early modern scholarship. 

Maria’s research [into Lavinia’s practice] spurred 

us on and we were able to carry the focus on 


Above: Lavinia Fontana, c.1578 

Portrait of Carlo Sigonio, 

Archivio Fotografico del Museo Civico di Modena 

Photo by Paolo Terzi 

Right: Lavinia Fontana, 

Saint Francis Receicing the Stigmata 

workshop practice through into the exhibition. 

The Getty was very kind to lend us both objects 

not long after they had accessioned them into 

their collection. So, it was very special. 

Several motifs recur in Fontana’s works. For 

example, the backgrounds of her portraits 

often include features such as window 

frames and open doorways. These can be 

seen in her Portrait of Carlo Sigonio as well 

as her own Self-portrait at the Virginal. Was 

this a device that was common to many other 

artists at that time? 

AB: This was a sort of formula that was popularised 

by artists like Giulio Romano, so it would have 

come down to Bologna via Mantua, toward the 

end of the Sixteenth Century. It is something that 

even people who are specialists in the period are 

fascinated by when it comes to Lavinia. One of 

my colleagues, Raffaella Morselli, described them 

as ‘Lavinia’s escape rooms’, which I thought was 

great. But this is a motif that people in Bologna 

were commonly including in portraiture at the 

time, and oftentimes it was just a window or some 

kind of small ancillary space in the background. 

You see it in the portrait by Prospero Fontana 

in the first room. Lavinia exploits it to a much 

higher degree, and she becomes preoccupied 

with creating convincing illusionistic space. If 

you look at many of her portraits of men, you can 

see incisions mapping out the perspective, and 

the architectural features of the doorways are all 

carefully incised. They become more elaborate, 

these sorts of corridors of rooms with mysterious 

scenes in the background. 

The Bolognese call these ‘portraits in context’ 

as they’re often of professional people with the 

tools of their trade. This creation of illusionistic 

space is sometimes known as quadratura 

painting. What you see with Lavinia is that the 


scenes happening in the background are hard 

to interpret, so they force you to look again and 

spend a little bit more time mulling over what is 

going on. 

MC: There’s a bit of humour to them. Perhaps it is 

a Northern influence. They are little genre scenes. 

AB: It may be that they relate to something 

specific to the commissioner, but we may never 

know. 

Fontana’s Saint Francis Receiving the 

Stigmata is unusual in that it is a rare 

landscape painting which differs significantly 

in style and subject-matter from her other 

works. Would it have been challenging to 

attribute this to her if not for the signature? 

AB: Definitely. Landscape is not something [she 

is known for]. Lavinia’s visual horizons were 

limited in her early career. She didn’t develop a 

very specific style at the beginning, in the same 

way that many male artists, who were able to 

travel and absorb [the natural and artistic world] 

would have. So we see her really changing quite 

dramatically throughout her career. Even looking 

at pictures that are signed, you can line them up 

beside each other and the size will range from 

large to small, the palette will noticeably be quite 

different. In the 1590’s, when her father passes 

away and she is no longer having children, she 

starts to explore new ways and exhibits a little bit 

more creative freedom. It is not a linear evolution 

in the same way we might expect from male Old 

Masters. 

MC: And you can see her levels of confidence 

fluctuating in producing certain types of painting. 

Her practice was so reliant on the portraiture 

business that, by the end, she could almost do 

it with her eyes closed. But with landscapes 

she didn’t have the same level of instruction or 

opportunity to practice. In the Queen of Sheba 


Above: First intermezzo of the 

play La Pellegrina: Harmony 

of the Spheres, from 1589 

Medici wedding, stage design 

by Bernardo Buontalenti 

Above: Lavinia Fontana, 1592 Venus and Cupid 

Réunion des Musées Métropolitains Rouen Normandie, Musée des Beaux-Arts 


(see feature on p. 66) there is a landscape in the 

background, and you can tell that she’s unsure 

where she wants to put things. She ends up 

having these repeated elements from other 

works and then the rest of it might be a bit vague. 

One of the more unexpected styles in the 

exhibition is represented by Fontana’s erotic 

painting, Venus and Cupid. The model for 

Venus has been identified as Bolognese 

noblewoman Isabella Ruini. At a time when 

the Catholic Church’s Counter-Reformation 

teachings were very much in favour of 

promoting wholesome ‘family values’, how did 

Fontana get away with painting an eroticised 

version of a prominent society figure? 

AB: There was an emerging market in the late 

Sixteenth Century and Bologna was home to a 

large professional class who wanted pictures for 

their houses. Fontana and other artists responded 

to this largely with portraiture, but then they 

recognised the demand for these erotic pictures. 

And while the church could see that mythological 

painting was not really okay, they were prepared 

to tolerate it if there was an educational basis to it. 

This loophole allowed artists to create these erotic 

paintings that were thinly veiled as mythological, 

erudite subjects. It is essentially recognised by 

many modern scholars as the birth of what we 

would describe as pornography. These pictures 

were created for domestic spaces and hung 

behind curtains. [Fontana’s Venus and Cupid] is 

an allegorical portrait of a known woman, Isabella 

Ruini. In this instance, I think this is a woman 

who probably trusted Lavinia in a way that she 

wouldn’t have trusted a male artist to capture her 

image in such a salacious way. And the fact that it 

was painted by a woman would have made it all 

the more titillating. Actually, what’s funny about 

it is that most of her erotic paintings are not 

signed. So she’s not advertising the fact that she’s 

doing them. She’s relying on her close network 

of patrons [to get these commissions] but they’re 

not something she’s painting in a public way. 

The thing about Lavinia is that, from the start 

of her career, even as devout an artist as she 

was when depicting religious subject matter, 

she was also strategic, and she was recognising 

opportunities and exploiting them. From the 

beginning Prospero [her father and first teacher] 

was marketing her to the local scholars of 

Bologna. This was a class that he had connections 

with through his wife, whose family owned a 

publishing house, and because he himself was 

illustrating their treatises. Then, later on, Lavinia 

saw these elite cliques of women beginning to 

form in Bologna. Again, it is a very particular 

moment for women, and she moved her studio 

to the other side of the city, so that it intersected 

the streets that all of their palaces were on. She 

named her children after them and made them 

their godparents. So we see this pattern emerge 

that nothing happened in Lavinia’s career by 

accident. When you look at her altarpieces, you 

think, ‘Oh, my gosh, what a devout artist,’ but in 

reality she’s following the money. She’s looking 

for opportunities at every turn. 

MC: Whatever way she could pay the bills, I 

think she would be happy enough to give it a try. 


The catalogue of the exhibition, Lavinia Fontana: 

Trailblazer, Rule Breaker by Aoife Brady, Yale/ 

National Gallery of Ireland, 2023, was chosen as 

one the Best Visual Arts Books of 2023 by the 

Financial Times. 


Above: Lavinia Fontana, 1599 

The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon 

National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin 


The Star of the Show 

Lavinia Fontana’s Queen of Sheba 

The recent exhibition of works by the Bolognese 

Mannerist painter Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614) at 

the National Gallery of Ireland began and ended 

with Fontana’s largest and most ambitious work, 


(1599). The painting’s extensive restoration, 

sponsored by the Bank of America, had begun not 

long before the arrival at the Gallery of curator 

Aoife Brady, a specialist in early Italian and Spanish 

paintings. Together, those two events lit the spark 

for the highly praised monographic exhibition of 

Fontana’s works which ran from May to August 

this year. Over five rooms, Fontana’s works were 

displayed thematically, from ‘Men’ to ‘Allegory and 

Myth’, all leading to the final room showcasing 

her ‘Crowning Glory’, the monumental canvas 

inspired by the Biblical account of the legendary 

Queen’s visit to Jerusalem. 

Displaying all of Fontana’s mastery, The Visit of 

the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon has held a 

central place in the Gallery for well over a century, 

but much of its history remains a mystery. The 

subject-matter of the work is clear from its title, 

and the attribution to Fontana has never been in 

doubt. What remains unknown about the work 

is who commissioned it, who were the ‘models’ 

for its two eponymous figures, and where was 

it hiding between the time of its completion in 

1599 and the first documented mention of it in 

the late eighteenth century in an inventory of 

artworks in the Zambeccari collection in Bologna? 

Painted in oil on canvas, the work measures 252 x 

327 centimetres - approximately eight by ten feet 

– which would have made it hard to miss if it 

had been hanging in even the darkest corner of 

a palazzo. And yet there seems to have been no 

mention of it in letters, diaries or inventories for 

over a hundred years. 

It is believed the painting remained in the 

Zambeccari collection until 1859 when it was 

purchased via an intermediary by Prince 

Napoleon Bonaparte, first cousin of Napoleon 

III, and sent, most likely rolled up for transport, 

to the Palais-Royal in Paris. Its residence in the 

French capital was to prove short-lived. The 

revolutionary government known as the Paris 


Left: Detial showing the Queen from Lavinia Fontana, 1599, 


National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin 

Commune that had seized power in March 1871 

was brutally suppressed just two months later by 

the French army. During la semaine sanglante (the 

Bloody Week) of intense fighting, fire consumed 

buildings throughout Paris, including the Palais- 

Royal. Fontana’s Queen of Sheba was one of the 

few paintings that was rescued from the blaze, 

having suffered relatively minor damage. From 

Paris, the painting made its way to London where 

it was sold in 1872 by Christie’s auction house 

for £100 to the National Gallery of Ireland. Even 

at today’s equivalent of £14,000, it was an astute 

purchase, and the painting quickly became the 

centrepiece of the Gallery’s Italian collection. 

A version of the legend of the Queen’s visit to 

King Solomon, the ruler of ancient Israel who was 

thought to have reigned from 970-931 BCE, exists 

in many religious traditions. The story relates 

that when the fame of Solomon’s wisdom and 

wealth reached the distant land of what was then 

called Saba (now Yemen and Ethiopia), the queen 

decided to travel to Jerusalem to test the validity 

of these claims for herself. She is said to have 

arrived at Solomon’s court with a great retinue 

and camels bearing spices, gold and precious 

stones. On being presented to King Solomon, 

the Queen posed several thorny riddles to 

him, which he apparently answered to her 


satisfaction. In one retelling it was claimed that 

when she arrived, the Queen mistook the glass 

floor of Solomon’s throne room for water. Lifting 

her skirts to avoid getting them wet, she revealed 

her hairy legs, for which the King reprimanded 

her. (If there is any truth to this tale, it begs the 

question of how other women were managing to 

keep their legs hairless back in the days before 

razors and depilatory creams!) 

The Queen of Sheba has long been a popular 

subject in art and literature. Her visit to King 

Solomon is depicted in Lorenzo Ghiberti’s 

bronze doors to the Florence Baptistery and in 

frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli in the Campo Santo 

in Pisa. Another interpretation of the visit was 

painted by Flemish painter Lucas de Heere in 

1559, just 40 years before Fontana completed her 

work. Commissioned for the Choir of St Bavo’s 

Cathedral in Ghent, it has been conserved in situ 

ever since. References to the Queen in literature 

can be found in Boccaccio’s On Famous Women, 

Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies 

and the American short story writer O. Henry’s 

‘The Gift of the Magi’. And yet, among historians, 

the Queen’s existence is still disputed. 

The painting in the NGI’s collection has 

undergone several restorations, the first of 

which took place in London in preparation for its 

transportation to Dublin. This included repairing 

the damage done by the fire in Paris, as well as 

the construction of a new frame designed to 

facilitate the move. The painting was displayed 

in the Gallery for almost a century before any 

further interventions occurred. During this 

time, it suffered deterioration from atmospheric 

dust and grime, and the deleterious effects of 

cigar and cigarette smoke which would have 

pervaded the Gallery. A second restoration, in 

1967, was enabled by the establishment of the 

Gallery’s in-house conservation team, supported 

by the expertise of a group of restorers from 

Rome who brought with them the most up-todate 

techniques and theories combining the 

art and science of restoration. The most recent 

restoration, carried out from 2018 to 2021, much of 

it during Covid lockdowns, by conservators Maria 

Canavan and Letizia Marcattili, included “the first 

technical and scientific analysis of the painting 

and a conservation treatment that would restore 

stability to the structure and make legible the 

many indistinct details meticulously painted by 

Fontana in the sixteenth century.” 

In Fontana’s composition, the focus is on the 

figure of the Queen of Sheba, just slightly offcentre, 

to the left, and her retinue of ladies-inwaiting, 

each one a portrait of a sixteenth-century 

noblewoman, which fills up the rest of the canvas 

to the right. In the past, it had been noted that these 

women appear to have impossibly long necks, 

somehow detached from their bodies, perched 

awkwardly atop delicate lace ruffs and (allegedly) 

betraying a lack of anatomical knowledge on 


Fontana’s part. However, the technical analysis 

“demonstrates that, in fact, Fontana adjusted the 

location of the women’s heads deliberately, and 

that they were originally lower down and in a 

more natural position… In fact, there are many 

pentimenti scattered across this composition to 

suggest that she revised aspects of her painting 

numerous times.” If the models for these women 

were noblewomen of Bologna who were among 

Fontana’s patrons, she would have had a reason 

to feature them more prominently than a strictly 

accurate portrayal would allow. 

Another significant discovery revealed by the 

conservation was the inscription of a year – 1599 

– on the base of the ornate clock seemingly 

held by the third noblewoman in the Queen’s 

retinue. Like some of the other anatomical 

anomalies in the painting, the hand that holds 

the clock is bizarrely placed, making it difficult to 

say with certainty to whom it belongs. Nor is it, 

surprisingly, the sort of carefully manicured hand 

one might expect of a woman who is otherwise 

meticulously coiffed and attired. The year, 1599, 

is important in providing a precise date for the 

completion of the painting and gives credence to 

the view that the painting remained in Fontana’s 

studio when she departed for Rome in 1603. 

There are a few clues to the identification of 

the two principal figures in Fontana’s work. The 

scene is not ancient Jerusalem but a sixteenthcentury 

Italian court, with all the fabrics, furniture, 

jewellery and fashions of a contemporary 

Renaissance court. An early theory, advanced by 

art historian Luigi Lanzi, suggested that Fontana’s 

King and Queen are portraits of the Duke and 

Duchess of Mantua (then Vincenzo I Gonzaga and 

Eleonora de’ Medici). Although this theory held 

sway for two centuries, Aoife Brady presents a 

convincing argument that, in fact, the two figures 

are the then Duke and Duchess of Ferrara, Alfonso 

II d’Este and his wife, Margherita Gonzaga. “Ferrara 

was home to one of the most important humanist 

courts in the Renaissance… The union of Alfonso 

and Margherita [his third wife] formed a political 

alliance between the rival Houses of Este and 

Gonzaga and the couple became important 

patrons of art and music.” Comparisons of known 

portraits of Alfonso and Margherita to Fontana’s 

King and Queen give further weight to Brady’s 

argument. 

The ’Ferrara theory’ might also explain why 

Fontana’s work seems to have languished in 

her studio after its completion in 1599. The 

union between Margherita and Alfonso had 

been childless and, without an heir, the Duchy of 

Ferrara collapsed on the Duke’s death in 1597. As 

Brady explains, “Since the date inscribed on the 

clock suggests that she was still working on the 

painting upon Alfonso’s death, it may be that the 

person who commissioned it no longer wanted a 

large-scale representation of a court that, by the 

time Fontana completed it, had ceased to exist.” 

A jewel in the crown of the National Gallery of 

Ireland’s collection, Fontana’s Queen of Sheba is 

more dazzling than ever following the restoration 

that spawned a blockbuster exhibition and a host 

of educational, cultural and other outreach events 

centred around the artist and her work. “We were 

delighted to have the opportunity to do this 

restoration,” explains Maria Canavan, “because 

we were able to demonstrate that a single project 

like this can grow into something bigger and can 

engage people who wouldn’t ordinarily come to 

the Gallery.” 


[Quotations are from The Crowning Glory, Lavinia 

Fontana’s Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, 

National Gallery of Ireland, 2021] 


COMPARISONS AND 

CRAFTSMANSHIP 

The newly restored Queen of Sheba debuted 

at the National Gallery of Ireland’s exhibition 

Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker (2023) 

which included a number of noteworthy 

mythological paintings and portraits. Fontana 

often combined the two genres and used 

contemporary figures as models for her biblical 

and allegorical works. 

Undoubtedly, Fontana was a role model for 

Artemisia, since the Bolognese artist was hailed 

as the first professional woman painter in Italy 

to work outside a convent. We include two of 

the show’s Judith and Holofernes paintings, for 

readers to compare with the Gentileschis’ more 

Caravaggesque versions, created some fifty 

years later, on p.77. 

The artisans among our readers will want to 

take a good look at Fontana’s San Pellegrino 

work, which Count Carlo Cesare Malvasia 

described as ‘Judith illuminated by a torchlight’. 

The protagonist’s pectoral shield is laden with 

cameos and Carnelians – representing courage 

– and its central pendant bears a tiny peacock, 

the Christian symbol of Resurrection. Fontana’s 

second Judith, from Bologna, is also worth 

poring over with a crafter’s eye. The sheen of 

Fontana’s translucent robe work and delicate 

jewels almost make one forget the headless 

body in the background! 

. 

Top: Lavinia Fontana, Judith and Holofemes (c. 1595), 

Fondazione San Pellegrino 

Above: Judith Holofernes, (c. 1595-1600), Museo Davia Bargellini 


Courage and Passion 

Artemisia comes to Genoa from around the world 

Until April 2024, the Doge’s Apartments in 

Genoa’s Ducal Palace is hosting Artemisia 

Gentileschi, Courage and Passion, a 

vastly ambitious show curated by art historian 

Costantino D’Orazio, on the 400th anniversary 

of Orazio Gentileschi’s sojourn in the wealthy 

port city once known as ‘La Superba’. Those 

who have visited Artemisia in the Museum 

of Michelangelo at Casa Buonarroti will be 

tempted to take a northbound train to Liguria, 

for a ‘world tour’ of Artemisia-related works 

from Naples and Pommersfelden, to Texas and 

Beirut. It is a celebration of Artemisia’s talents, 

an exploration of her father Orazio’s influence, 

and a study of the impact both Gentileschis had 

on Counter-reformation painters. Yet, most of 

all, the exhibition acknowledges Artemisia as 

Caravaggio’s true heir. With masterful brushwork 

and dramatic story-telling, Artemisia knows how 

to ‘steal the show’ – even when it is her own. 

The canvases in Courage and Passion are 

displayed in ten sections whose titles’ key 

words are exactly that – keys. A good glimpse 

at Artemisia’s ‘Revenge’ and her ‘Threatened 

Women’ gives way to a celebratory visual 

discussion of her ‘Heroines’ and ‘Legacy’. We 

find biblical Susanna who is threatened with 

slander if she does not “lie with the elders” 

– in a scheme later exposed by the prophet 

Daniel. We see Cleopatra, who would rather slit 

her wrists than face Roman capture, and meet 

two renditions of Philistine slave Delilah who 

diminishes Samson’s strength by cutting his hair. 

Paintings featuring the deeds and misdeeds of 

history’s women were popular in Europe’s most 

enviable collections during Artemisia’s era, and 

she paints them with great narrative strength, 

and in step with market demands. 

Perhaps the most popular heroine in the 

Gentileschis’ time is biblical Judith, who enters 

the enemy camp by feigning allegiance and 

leaves as liberator of her people, with the 

Assyrian general’s head in a basket. Exhibition 

curator Costantino D’Orazio, who has brought 

together father-daughter versions from Terni 

and the Vatican Museums, admits “I’m very proud 

of this comparison”. Restoration Conversations 

sat down with Dr D’Orazio, in December, for 

some insight on the show’s rebel spirit. 

Artemisia has received considerable 

attention in recent years, what do you feel 

you are adding to the discourse, through the 

Genoa show? 

Costantino D’Orazio: From the 1960s onwards, 

Artemisia received an ever-increasing amount 

of attention, but the lens through which she was 

seen was always aimed in one of two directions. 

There are those who contemplated Artemisia’s 

personal story and transformed her into a 

feminist icon. In contrast, other art historians 

– mostly Italian – virtually refused to see the 

Right: Artemisia Gentileschi, 1610, Susanna and the Elders 

Pommersfelden, Kunstsammlungen Graf von Schönborn 



dramatic, human side of Artemisia, preferring to 

focus solely on her artistic talent. With this show, 

I feel that, for the first time, we are merging 

both approaches, taking into consideration the 

vicissitudes of Artemisia’s life and her artistic 

merit, as we strive to understand how the two 

are intertwined. The show’s aim is to explore 

insight on her life and work, in parallel. 

Can you give us an example of how this goal 

plays out in the show? 

CD: The exhibition begins with two canvases 

representing the same subject, Susanna and the 

Elders. The first, from 1610, was painted before 

Artemisia’s rape. It’s a nude, and likely a selfportrait, 

created with the help of Artemisia’s 

father. The painting’s protagonist tries to defend 

herself, but she is unsuccessful. Nearly forty 

years later, in Naples, Artemisia takes on the 

same subject (1649). Her palette has changed 

and is more Caravaggesque. Susanna no longer 

succumbs to the violence. She is completely 

self-aware, and with a single determined 

gesture, she keeps the perpetrators at a 

distance. These two pictures alone, encapsulate 

the story of how Artemisia’s gaze, palette and 

iconography have changed. Leading up to the 

Naples picture, Artemisia had an intense career, 

she had formed her own bottega and worked 

for great courts. She has come into her own, as 

an entirely different artist. 

You have brought together numerous 

works by Artemisia, including three new 

attributions. What can you tell us about 

them? 

CD: The show hosts 50-odd works, 23 of which 

are authored by Artemisia, including three 

new attributions advanced by renowned art 

historian and Artemisia scholar Riccardo 

Lattuada, who forms part of our Scientific board. 

I believe exhibitions are places where novelties 

Top: Artemisia Gentileschi, 1610-1615, Samson and Delilah, 

private collection 

Above: Artemisia Gentileschi, 1620-1625, Samson and Delilah, 

private collection 


and new research can be studied and proposed. 

The display of these new Artemisia attributions 

also sends an important message, namely, 

that there is still a lot to discover, and I like it 

that our show has something to offer to the 

debate, as far as authorship is concerned. Two 

of new attributions – from private collections 

in England and Rome – are inspired by the 

Samson and Delilah story, while the other, from 

the Fondazione Orintia Carletti Bonucci in 

Perugia, depicts Paolo and Francesca [iconic 

lovers famously found in Dante’s Inferno]. 

If you could choose one thing you’d like the 

public to know about the exhibition, what 

would it be? 

We have a noteworthy section on Genovese 

artists, curated by Anna Orlando, in which 

we focus first on Orazio Gentileschi’s time in 

Genoa, from 1621 to 1625. His sojourn essentially 

marks the arrival of Caravaggio’s style in local 

artistic circles, influencing artists like Domenico 

Fiasella, Gioacchino Assereto and Bernardo 

Strozzi. Caravaggio himself spent a month in 

Genoa, but he met with virtually no one, and left 

no works in his wake. Instead, the art of both 

Gentileschis made its mark on the city. 

Although Artemisia never worked in Genoa, 

her paintings were collected in this financial 

capital in the seventeenth and eighteenth 

centuries, and they are a wonderful window 

onto Caravaggism for the region’s artists. 

Artemisia’s fame is precocious and powerful. 

She – not her father – is Caravaggio’s true heir. 

Artemisia is very skilful at constructing a space 

without the help of architecture. The body of 

her characters penetrate the canvas, defining 

its volume and depth. Cleopatra, from a Belgian 

collection, is a case in point. The protagonist’s 

legs almost rupture the canvas, and the volume 

of the figure’s body expresses true power. That 

is what Artemisia learned from Caravaggio. 

Top: Artemisia Gentileschi, 1640-1645, Cleopatra, 

private collection, Naples 

Above: Orazio Gentileschi, 1615-1621, Saint Cecilia Playing the Spinet and an Angel 

Umbria National Gallery, Perugia 


Left: Orazio Gentileschi, 1622 

Madonna and Sleeping Child in a Landscape 

Musei di Strada Nuova – Palazzo Rosso, Genoa 

Below: Orazio Gentileschi, c. 1620 

Portrait of a Young Woman as a Sibyl 

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 

In ‘Artemisia in her Father’s Workshop’, we 

see Artemisia, the model. She is Baby Jesus 

in Orazio Gentileschi’s Annunciation. He has 

10-year-old Artemisia pose as Saint Cecilia, 

the young patron of music. Finally, his grownup 

daughter becomes priestess and prophet 

in Portrait of a Young Woman as a Sybil. 

What can you tell us about this section? 

CD: The practice of painters using their 

daughters as models was not rare, especially for 

those who worked in the manner of Caravaggio, 

in workshops inside their homes. It was normal 

and desirable for children to pose, because they 

didn’t have to be paid, but what is unique in 

Artemisia’s case, is that she continues to be 

Orazio’s model, even after she no longer lives 

with him. He painted the Sybil portrait when 

she was already married and in Florence, for 

instance. If I were to push our conversation 

outside the bounds of art history and into the 

realm of supposition, we could say that Orazio’s 

enduring reliance on Artemisia’s face was 

indicative of his obsession for her. Many of his 

female protagonists have Artemisia’s rounded 

chin, her close-set eyes – she remains forever 

clear in his memory, and is his model, albeit, not 

literally, for the whole of his career. [Readers 

can look to Orazio’s Lot and his Daughters and 

Danaë and the Shower of Gold, at the Getty 

Museum in Los Angeles, widely considered two 

examples of this trend.] 

Artemisia often modelled for herself as well, 

and many of her painting’s protagonists 

appear to have her features. What can you 

tell us about that? 

Yes, another very common practice in her era 

was for female painters to model for themselves. 

Think of Sofonisba Anguissola, whose selfportraiture 

became a genre in its own right; 

in fact, her father sold them very successfully. 

There is some self-portraiture among male 


painters, but self-portraiture forms part of the 

oeuvre of every single known female artist. 

Women artists often depicted themselves for 

economic reasons. In Naples, Artemisia – who 

was already an established painter at the time 

– wrote to Antonio Ruffo, asking for money so 

that she could provide advance payment to five 

female models. So, self-portraiture was a form 

of training but it was also a way to avoid renting 

other people’s bodies. We also have to consider 

that, until the 1870s, women could not study 

human anatomy live. 

You have recently been working with 

Florence’s Casa Buonarroti Museum 

to bring the newly restored Allegory of 

Inclination to the Genoa show, along with 

Pitti’s Penitent Magdalene. Why have you 

decided to bring these ‘late-comers’ to 

the show, nearly three months after its 

opening? 

CD: A historic opportunity presented itself 

with the restoration of Artemisia’s Allegory of 

Inclination and its removal from the ceiling, 

thanks to ‘Artemisia UpClose’ [sponsored and 

conceived by Calliope Arts and Christian Levett, 

in collaboration with Casa Buonarroti Museum 

and Foundation]. The fact that the painting is 

not on the ceiling right now, represents an 

extraordinary opportunity. Dr Acidini, Casa 

Buonarroti Foundation President, was a huge 

supporter of the painting travelling to join 

us. We are also happy to share the ‘Artemisia 

UpClose’ restoration and the decision to 

remove the veil digitally, rather than physically 

(See p. 46). Artemisia’s Florentine period is her 

best. She paints alone, with no collaborators. 

She measures herself against exceptional 

masters and stands comparison to them. In a 

word, Artemisia’s work absorbed the Roman 

environment through her father, but, she is a 

Florentine soul. 

LINDA FALCONE 

Artemisia Gentileschi, Courage and Passion is 

promoted and organized by Arthemisia with 

Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura, the 

Municipality of Genoa, and the Region of Liguria. 

Top: Orazio Gentileschi, c. 1622, Judith and her Maidservant with Holofernes’ Head 

Vatican Museums, Vatican City 

Above: Artemisia Gentileschi, 1640-1645, Judith and Abra with Holofernes’ Head 

Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio, Terni 


The Colour is Brown 

On Tuesdays mornings, Florence’s Museo 

Novecento is a meditative place. 

Founded at the start of the Thirteenth 

Century, the complex predates the Basilica of 

Santa Maria Novella, whose glinting marble façade 

stares at the museum’s shady arcade from across 

the square. The venue, which is now a museum 

and centre for modern and contemporary art, 

was initially a hostel for pilgrims and beggars 

(dedicated to Saint Paul). Later, in 1345, it morphed 

into a fully-fledged hospital, managed by 

Franciscan tertiaries and named for Saint Francis. 

Today, I have come for a different saint, however. 

An abbot of admirable stoicism, he is pictured 

in the Temptations of Saint Anthony, to which 

ultra-acclaimed British painter Cecily Brown 

dedicated a decade of brain-space. Brown’s 30- 

work show in the Tuscan capital is the product 

of a conversation that started six years ago with 

Sergio Risaliti, the Museo Novecento’s artistic 

director – also the show’s curator – who has been 

working as culture consultant to Florence mayor 


Curator Sergio Risaliti speaks ‘Cecily’ 

at Museo Novecento 

Dario Nardella for the last ten years, “to bring 

Florence into the modern world”. 

The plan is for us to walk through Brown’s show 

together, and I await his arrival in what was once 

the structure’s cloister. Despite its contemporary 

art installations, the Museo Novecento’s space 

still has a monastery feel that the Leopoldine 

suppression of religious orders in 1870 did 

not manage to erase. Readers of Restoration 

Conversations will be interested to know that 

Pietro Leopoldo, upon claiming the space as state 

property, transformed it into a school for girls – 

aged 6 to 16 – whom the Grand Duke wished to 

see educated “in the first duties of religion and 

catechism, the rules of decency and cleanliness 

appropriate to the state of the girls, reading, 

writing, the abacus, and women’s work of knitting, 

sewing and the weaving of both ribbons and 

veils, linen and woollen cloth of all kinds and silk 

cloths wide and narrow”. 

One day, I will learn more about this space 

known, until recently, as Le Scuole Leopoldine, 

Above: Museo Novecento 

during the Jenny Saville 

exhibition 


Above: Mark Hartman 

Portrait of Cecily Brown 

Right: Cecily Brown, 2022-23 

Run Away Child, Running Wild 

because the Grand Duke’s intentions were 

upheld – more or less – until the school closed, 

just over a century later, in 1975. That is not 

today’s job, of course. Today, I am here to see 

what ‘ribbons and veils’ Brown is weaving in her 

mostly Abstract works that Risaliti traces back to 

“post-impressionism, starting with Cezanne and 

passing through late Monet and towards Abstract 

Expressionism, including Pollock and de Kooning” 

[Willem, not Elaine]. 

More soft-spoken than I anticipated, Risaliti 

surprised me, as he does most. “Despite Cecily 

Brown’s vibrancy and her exciting vitality, she is 

exceptionally rigorous,” he says, as we cross the 

threshold of the first room. Rigorous is not a word 

I expected to encapsulate a show whose title 

promises ‘a bit of a mess’: Temptations, Torments, 

Trials and Tribulations. Risaliti reads the surprise in 

my face. “I say this because she was born an artist, 

and she knows how to avoid ruining a painting. 

She throws an untold number of colours onto 

canvases that are packed with pictorial gestures 

and chromatic nuances. There’s almost an ecstasy 

involved, a delirium or fury, but the artist does not 

succumb to it – or more accurately, the painting 

does not succumb to it. Cecily is always controlled, 

and she generates a new form of perfection… To 

understand her work,” Risaliti suggests, “think of 

the evolution of classical music from Mahler and 

late Beethoven to contemporary Jazz and even the 

sounds of Led Zeppelin. What appears cacophonic 

or is perceived as a threat to harmony and 

composure is simply a new world that has never 

been seen before.” 

I’m well aware that Risaliti likes bringing new 

worlds to ‘old spaces’, so thus far, I’m following his 

discourse. He brought Jeff Koons’ stainless steel 

Pluto and Proserpina to Piazza della Signoria way 

back in 2015, and, one year later, sought to realign 

the “plates of the piazza’s scale” by installing Jan 

Fabre’s giant turtle, Searching for Utopia, not far 

from the Neptune fountain. “I wanted to offer 



Above, left: Ela Bialkowska, 

OKNO Studio, 2023. 

Sixteenth-century depiction of 

St. Anthony, after an engraving 

by Martin Schongauer 

Above, right: Cecily Brown, 

2010. The Temptation of St. 

Anthony (after Michelangelo) 

citizens a landmark, to introduce completely 

new scenery and correct the square’s imbalance,” 

Risaliti explains. “Tourists seemed to slide away 

into the void, at the corner of the Loggia de’ 

Lanzi, and Fabre’s sculpture provided a point 

of attraction, of magnetism, that prevented that 

from continuing to happen. It was a healthy 

shock for the citizenry, but, eventually, I think they 

assimilated it.” The list of Risaliti’s contemporary 

“points of attraction” is growing as Florence 

museums – from the Bardini and Forte Belvedere 

to the Museo del Opera del Duomo and Casa 

Buonarroti – open their monumental gates to 

the modern world. Risaliti brought Jenny Saville’s 

Michelangelo-inspired works to these last two 

venues in 2022, and Saville’s art proves one of 

his most deeply ingrained convictions, “Artists 

of today love, understand and have profoundly 

assimilated the great Renaissance and Italian 

traditions. Therefore, they naturally create 

connections with the past.” 

The modern artist’s fascination with the Old 

Masters lies at the core of Brown’s show as well. 

“There is this idea that from the early Twentieth 

Century onwards, when art lost its more 

figurative element and forfeited its more classical 

foundations, it somehow lost its value,” Risaliti 

explains. “In the eyes of many, Abstractionism 

was something created, more out of daring than 

from skill. Certainly, I acknowledge our debt to 

the great personalities of the past, as does Cecily, 

who contradicts traditional models of order and 

symmetry by reinventing them completely. Yet, 

she manages to produce a harmony that is equal 

to that of a Renaissance painting. In a work like 

The Aspiring Subordinate, I see the same search 

for chromatic harmony, the same forms of tension 

and movement, that you find in a Baroque work 

by Luca Giordano or Corrado Giaquinto, because 

of the exuberance and quality of her colours and 

the way she develops energy. 

A quality like ‘la perfezione’ is the product of 

a process, apparently, and Brown works on her 

paintings for several years. “Cecily goes back to her 

canvases and completes them, years later, adding 

that brushstroke of blue or white, or this squiggle 

and that slash mark,” the show’s curator says. “One 

day, she told me, ‘I have a painting brain’. It means 

she does not think about herself divorced from 

painting or recognise herself, if not as a painter.” 


But what of her method, I ask, and what of 

my stoic saint? “Cecily’s work starts with a sort 

of infatuation,” explains Risaliti, “She becomes 

enchanted by a work from the past. It might be a 

painting by Degas, a work by Bosch, a Tintoretto – 

and that piece gives rise to years of creativity. She 

worked on the image of Saint Anthony Abbott 

resisting temptation for a decade, and it ended up 

being the cycle she wanted to present in Florence. 

Saint Anthony is her initial inspiration. In the 

original engraving from the fifteenth century, he is 

the centre of gravity, and around him, and there is 

centrifugal and centripetal activity, created by the 

monsters. At a certain point, Brown frees herself 

from the figurative element; she disconnects 

from it, without denying the compositional forces 

underlying the image.” 

Above: Cecily Brown, 2023, The Aspiring Subordinate 

We reach the lofty ‘chapel’ room, empty except 

for a small plate attributed to Michelangelo from 

the Kimbell Art Museum, in Fort Worth, Texas and 

a small-scale painting that Risaliti found last year, 

while wandering through Florence’s antiques fair, 

the Biennale dell’Antiquariato. Now in a private 

collection, it is considered an early copy, by a 

sixteenth-century Flemish painter, according to 

an attribution by Cristina Acidini. “I’ve exhibited 

it here in the chapel, as a surprise for Cecily, and 

she was really happy to see it,” Risaliti says. Then, 

he shares an incident involving Michelangelo, 

recounted by both Vasari and Condivi. 

Michelangelo was still an adolescent, aged 13 or 

14, and doing his apprenticeship in the bottega of 

Ghirlandaio. “He was assigned a task to test his 

painting ability, namely to reproduce, in colour, an 

engraving by Martin Schongauer, depicting the 

temptation of Saint Anthony. Vasari and Condivi 

tell us that in order to get the monsters’ colours 

right, he went to fish market, to study the scales 

of every fish on sale there. Michelangelo looked 

to life, as always.” 

“Looking to life” in Florence today, I have to ask 

whether Risaliti has encountered resistance to 

his efforts to “rejuvenate Florence’s relationship 

with the past”. The Museo Novecento puts on 

fifteen to twenty exhibitions a year, not counting 

the art its artistic director installs in other 

venues city-wide, including Palazzo Vecchio, 

the Museo Innocenti and Santa Croce. No. He 

has not encountered resistance. “When you 

speak to cultured people who love art and 

propose serious projects that are mediated and 

pondered, where the objective is not to clash, 

shock or engender provocation… when you 

seek connection, between a story of today and 

one from the past, the doors open. The mind is 

full of prejudices, but the sensitive, creative side 

of ourselves is much more open to dialogue.” 

Well stated, Sig. Risaliti, and lovely to see British 

New York-based Brown in a place whose quiet 

both challenges and embraces such measured 

turbulence. I’m already looking forward to our 

conversation on Louise Bourgeois, whose Museo 

Novecento show is scheduled to open come June. 

LINDA FALCONE 


The Painting in the Dining Room 

Paula Rego’s Garden of Delights 

In 1991, the Sainsbury Wing of London’s 

INational Gallery opened to the public. Along 

Iwith the Renaissance treasures to be discovered 

Iin this newly designed space was a large work 

Iby Paula Rego, 

Crivelli’s Garden (1990-91). The 

Ipainting, more than nine metres in length, had 

Ibeen specially commissioned – not for one of 

Ithe prestigious exhibition rooms - but for the 

Imuseum’s new restaurant. Was this a slight to 

Ian artist with a growing reputation who was 

then ‘having a real moment’ following her major 

survey show at the Serpentine Gallery? 

There is a long tradition of Renaissance 

masters creating ‘last supper’ frescoes in convent 

dining halls where the resident friars or nuns 

could contemplate Jesus’s final meal in silence 

while enjoying their own repasts. One of the 

world’s most celebrated artworks, Leonardo’s 

Last Supper (1495-1498), was painted for the 

refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. 

Andrea del Castagno’s Ultima Cena (1445) in the 

Convent of Sant’Apollonia and Andrea del Sarto’s 

1526 masterpiece for the Church of San Salvi 

(otherwise known as the Last Supper Museum of 

Andrea del Sarto) also come to mind. The only 

painting by a woman that depicts this subject, 

Plautilla Nelli’s Last Supper (1550), was created for 

the refectory of her convent, Santa Caterina da 

Siena, and is now exhibited in the Museum of 

Santa Maria Novella in Florence. 

On the other hand, a more recent restaurant 

commission had a less felicitous outcome. In 

1958, Mark Rothko was asked to create a series 

of paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant in 

New York’s Seagram Building, designed by Mies 

van der Rohe. Ambivalent from the outset, Rothko 

(presciently) ensured that his contract would 

allow him to back out of the deal and recover his 

paintings if necessary. Rothko struggled to realise 

his vision for the series and sought inspiration 

on a trip to Italy. “I realized that I was much 

influenced subconsciously by Michelangelo’s 

walls in the staircase room of the Medicean 

Library,” he said. On returning to New York, the 

artist dined at the Four Seasons with his wife to 

get a feel for the space where the murals would 

be exhibited. Far from acting as an incentive, the 

experience reinforced his disdain for capitalist 

values and, that same evening, he cancelled the 

commission, declaring, “anybody who will eat that 

kind of food for those kinds of prices will never 

look at a painting of mine.” 


Above: Installation shot of Paula Rego’s Crivelli’s Garden (1990–1) at the National Gallery of London’s exhibition by the same name 

© Paula Rego, photo by The National Gallery, London 


Above: Carlo Crivelli, 1491, 

Madonna of the Swallow, 

altarpiece from S. Francesco dei 

Zoccolanti, Matelica, 

The National Gallery, London, 

photo by The National Gallery, 

London 

Paula Rego was similarly ambivalent when she 

was asked to become the first participant in the 

National Gallery’s Associate Artist programme 

which would lead to the Crivelli commission. She 

initially declined the offer explaining that, as the 

Gallery’s collection was so male dominated, there 

was not a lot she could do with it. Then, a week 

later, she reversed course and said that, because 

the collection was so male dominated, she would 

absolutely be able to find things there to work 

with. As for the restaurant commission, Rego 

understood the irony, as a woman artist, of being 

shown in that space, as opposed to the collection 

upstairs. But she relished the idea of ‘sneaking 

in’ through the back door, the kitchen door, 

to counteract the overwhelmingly masculine 

influence of the gallery experience which, on 

past visits, had left her feeling queasy. Rego was 

given studio space in The National Gallery for 

two years, beginning in January 1990. In addition 

to the restaurant commission, her residency also 

resulted in an exhibition, Tales of the National 

Gallery, which was presented in the Sunley Room 

(December 1991-March 1992). 

Crivelli’s Garden, which would be Rego’s largest 

ever public commission, hung in the dining room 

for 30 years – until it was taken down to facilitate 

the ongoing renovation of the Sainsbury Wing. 

Happily, it was not consigned to storage but earlier 

this year became the focal point of an exhibition 

located in the central part of the Gallery. It was 

displayed together with the work from which 

its name derives, Carlo Crivelli’s Madonna of 

the Swallow (after 1490). Like Rothko, Rego 

found inspiration in a Renaissance master. “The 

opportunity to subvert the male gaze inherent 

to the history of painting was one too tantalising 

for Paula to resist,” says the exhibition’s curator 

Priyesh Mistry. 

Rego’s mural-like work, painted on five 

canvases, depicts a series of spaces, delineated 

by columns, archways and staircases. They 

are decorated with blue and white tiles and 

populated almost exclusively with female figures 

in various groupings and a range of sizes. The 

figures are mostly clothed in muted browns and 

greys, colours chosen deliberately so as not to 

overwhelm the restaurant setting. The scene 

shifts from one panel to the next, disappearing 

around corners and fading into distant seascapes. 

Its characters represent women from myths, 

fables and biblical stories, as well as people from 

Rego’s life, including women who were working 

at the Gallery during her residency. 

At first glance, it is not easy to see the connection 

between Rego’s work and the Crivelli altarpiece. 

The Madonna of the Swallow, created for the 

Odoni family chapel in the Franciscan church at 

Matelica in the Marche region of Italy, depicts the 

Virgin Mary and the Christ Child, together with 

Saints Jerome and Sebastian. The choice of saints 

reflects the interests of the painting’s patrons, 

one a theologian, the other a soldier. In the 

predella, on which the painting ‘rests’, those two 

saints appear again, along with Saint Catherine of 

Alexandra and Saint George. Saints Jerome and 


Catherine represent theological learning. Saint 

Sebastian, the patron saint of soldiers, is joined 

by Saint George, another military saint. Crivelli 

has used the common Renaissance technique 

of expanding the stories of the figures in the 

altarpiece with narrative scenes in the predella 

providing details of their lives. 

According to Mistry, Rego spent hours in 

the company of then-curator Colin Wiggins, 

soaking up the Gallery’s extensive collection of 

Renaissance works, “talking about the artworks, 

picking out details, perhaps laughing about them 

and discussing them in different ways. And I think 

they would often return to Crivelli,” says Mistry. 

“He is a painter that appeals to so many artists 

because his figuration and his way of depicting 

space is so peculiar. And what’s really amazing 

about Crivelli is his linear perspective, which 

recedes far into the distance.” Mistry points out 

the architectural features of the predella panel 

showing Saint Sebastian being shot with arrows. 

“There is something interesting about the way 

Crivelli is able to build a world that you feel that 

you can enter.” This, he explains, is what created 

the stage for Crivelli’s Garden. Rego “imagined 

creating another kind of complex, quite mazelike 

garden for her to host women saints, for the 

women to occupy these spaces and to be able 

to tell their stories.” The scale of the painting 

certainly allows the viewer to enter into that 

space, especially in the exhibition setting. 

The work also celebrates the tradition of 

storytelling with which Rego grew up in her native 

Portugal. “Crivelli’s Garden is quite identifiably 

set within a Portuguese garden, by virtue of the 

distinctive blue and white tiles which you see 

almost everywhere in Portugal,” Mistry points 

out. “The tiles are significant because they 

hold stories within the images that they depict, 

adding another layer of narrative.” Rego had a 

Catholic upbringing and, in addition to religious 

stories, she absorbed folklore from her aunt 

and grandmother. She had conducted extensive 

research into fairy tales and fables from around 

the world, all of which fed into her artistic practice. 

Among the references immediately evident in 

Crivelli’s Garden are Aesop’s ‘The tortoise and 

the hare’ and ‘The ant and the grasshopper’ at 

the base of the fountain in the first panel. In the 

next panel the mythological ‘Leda and the Swan’ 

adorn a column. The thirteenth century treatise 

The Golden Legend became another resource for 

Rego in preparing for the commission. Used by 

many of the same masters whose works are found 

in the Gallery, this collection of biographies of 

Christian saints provided a tangible connection 

to artists of the past. 

On the right-hand side of the painting, two 

women are engaged in a private conversation. 

The older, taller woman is passing on a secret to 

the woman in white, her message hidden behind 

her raised hand and the intimacy of the moment 

Above: Carlo Crivelli, 1491, Predella of Madonna of the Swallow, altarpiece from S. Francesco dei Zoccolanti, Matelica, The National Gallery, London. 

Photo by The National Gallery, London 


conveyed by her other hand gripping the arm of 

her younger companion. A small figure in the 

corner of the panel clothed in animal skin and 

holding a lamb (attributes of John the Baptist) 

gives us a clue to the protagonists. This is a 

version of the Visitation, a meeting between the 

Virgin Mary, then pregnant with Jesus, and her 

cousin Elizabeth (then in her eighties), pregnant 

with John the Baptist. This pivotal event, marking 

the transition from the Old to the New Testament, 

is often depicted with the two women bathed in 

supernatural light, but here, as Mistry comments, 

“Rego renders it almost ordinary … a private 

matter, a secret of concern shared between two 

relatives.” In Rego’s hands it becomes a relatable 

moment: two women who have found themselves 

pregnant in unexpected circumstances. No 

wonder they have secrets to share! 

Rego called the diminutive character in the 

painting’s lower right corner its ‘anchor figure’. 

Also known as ‘the reader’, she looks out from 

the canvas rather than at the book in her lap, 

whose pages are left blank. A beautifully executed 

pencil drawing of this figure was included in the 

exhibition, along with several other preparatory 

drawings, and the care that Rego took over this 

one in particular is evident. With her dark hair, 

direct gaze and head tilted toward the painting, the 

reader could be a substitute for Rego, inviting the 

viewer to take in the dramas unfolding around her. 

In fact, she was modelled on Ailsa Bhattacharya 

(also the model for the young girl painting the 

snake), one of several members of the National 

Gallery’s education team who Rego invited to sit 

for her. “Paula based the characters in Crivelli’s 

Garden on women that surrounded her in her 

life, and used their characters or the way that she 

perceived these people to inform which roles they 

would take within the painting,” says Mistry. 

The book on the reader’s lap recalls Rego’s 

preoccupation with fairy tales and storytelling. 

For Mistry, the reader is “a nod to the power 

inherent in stories that are passed down through 

the matriarchal lineage. Under Salazar’s regime 

in Portugal where Paula grew up, women didn’t 

have many rights, but there was an extraordinary 

resilience within the Portuguese women, and the 

communication of stories from one generation 

to the next allowed this form of resilience to 

continue.” It is also tempting to interpret the 


ook’s blank pages as symbolic of the unwritten 

stories of women throughout the ages, and 

perhaps especially the stories of women artists. 

Elsewhere in the painting, a young and 

troubled-looking Judith deposits what we assume 

to be Holofernes’ head into an apron held open 

by her maid, a sleeping Samson is oblivious to 

his fate as Delilah looms over him, and virtuous 

Martha efficiently wields her broom while her 

penitent sister Mary sits below her on the steps, 

adopting the pose of Rodin’s Thinker. Rego 

focuses on the moments before or after the 

dramatic action, forcing us to think about what 

is going on in the minds of these protagonists. 

Among the more obscure figures is Saint Mary 

of Egypt, the figure in the central panel, next to a 

lion. Like Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt was a 

‘fallen woman’ who retreated to the desert after 

she had renounced her life of sin. Rego portrays 

her, says Mistry, as “this aged woman, covered by 

a wealth of matted hair, almost like Cousin It from 

the Addams Family.” Ancient sources recount that, 

on her death, the monk who was struggling to 

dig her grave under the burning sun was given 

assistance by a passing lion, thus acknowledging 

her repentance and conferring nobility on her. 

In the preface to the exhibition’s catalogue, 

Paula Rego’s son, Nick Willing, recounts, “I 

remember my mother being told more than once 

that a great male artist could paint the female 

experience as well as, if not better than, a woman.” 

Rego would not have needed any help to prove 

the fallacy of this claim; it is simply impossible 

to imagine a male artist having created Crivelli’s 

Garden with its multi-layered narratives portrayed 

from a distinctively female perspective, its 

symbolism, the rich cast of female characters, 

intergenerational relationships representing the 

transmission of knowledge – from mother to 

daughter, teacher to student, and the divulging 

of secrets from one expectant mother to another. 

Having initially found a way into the National 

Gallery’s patriarchal collection from a side door, 

Rego’s work will eventually be exhibited in a 

more permanent place in the National Gallery 

when it reopens in 2024. Sadly, Rego died before 

the exhibition was mounted, but Mistry relates 

that, “she was thrilled at the prospect of being 

able to take her rebellious garden out and show 

it alongside one of the old master paintings 

within the collection.” While her work may owe 

a debt to the old masters, her contemporary 

retelling of timeless stories is uniquely her own. 


Curator Priyesh Mistry is Associate Curator of 

Modern & Contemporary Projects at the National 

Gallery, London where he works towards an 

ambitious programme to integrate contemporary 

art within the context of the museum and its 

historic collections. 

Left and above: Details from 

Paula Rego’s Crivelli’s Garden 

(1990–1). Presented by English 

Estates, 1991 © Paula Rego, 

photo by The National Gallery, 

London 


Above: Cover of Flavia Frigeri’s new book featuring art by Jann Haworth and Liberty Blake 


Women at Work 

Portraits in Words and Pictures 

A new publication from the National Portrait 

AGallery, AWomen at Work, 1900 to Now, ‘celebrates 

Athe professional accomplishments of women 

Awho have made their mark on history because of 

Atheir determination, talent and unique approach 

Ato life.’ It begins with tennis player Charlotte 

ACooper who, at the 1900 Paris Games, became the 

Afirst female Olympic champion in an individual 

Aevent, winning the Ladies’ Singles and the Mixed 

ADoubles titles. She was renowned for her mental 

strength and ability at the net and was one of 

the few women to serve overhead. Deaf from 

the age of 26, she reached the singles final at 

Wimbledon 11 times, winning in 1895, 1896, 1898, 

1901, and 1908. Her victory at almost 38 years 

of age in 1908 makes her the oldest woman to 

claim the title and one of only a few to do so 

after having children. She is memorialised at the 

tennis museum at Wimbledon by a single object: 

a silver dressing-table powder compact awarded 

as ‘3rd prize’ in 1912. 

The volume ends with the 2023 unveiling of the 

seven-panel mural Work in Progress, which was 

created by artists Jann Haworth and Liberty Blake 

in collaboration with communities throughout 

the United Kingdom. The mural showcases 130 

inspiring women who, over the course of many 

centuries and across numerous disciplines, have 

made significant contributions to British history 

and culture. A blank silhouette in the seventh 

panel represents the many women, past and 

future, who also deserve to be recognised. Just 

like this mural, women’s history is a ‘work in 

progress’, with the stories of those who have 

been omitted or written out still to be told. 

In addition to verbal portraits of individual 

women, who range from a little known secret 

agent to Royal Academician Tracey Emin, the 

book includes insightful essays on the challenges 

faced by women who worked as social activists, 

photographers, scientists, writers, artists and 

designers. Editor Flavia Frigeri is quick to point 

out that “while a deliberate choice has been 

made to focus on women who have joined the 

paid labour force, this is in no way meant to 

disavow the work that women do within the 

household … [where] women still shoulder the 

majority of unpaid domestic labour, irrespective 

of how much they earn.” 

In her essay, ‘Hidden Heroines of Design’, 

Alice Rawsthorn provides a literal example of a 

woman being airbrushed out of the story. She 

recounts that when a group photograph of British 

architects was taken to promote a 2014 BBC 

documentary series called The Brits Who Built 

the Modern World, it included one woman, Patty 

Hopkins, along with five of her male colleagues. 

When it came to promoting the third episode of 

the series, the network, without any explanation, 

simply deleted Hopkins from the photograph. 


Above: Tracey Emin’s 

The Doors, 2023, 

National Portrait Gallery, 

London © Olivier Hess 

“The lady vanished,” says Rawsthorn, “leaving 

five white cis men to represent the BBC’s choice 

of the nation’s most influential architects.” It is 

worth noting that this occurred less than ten 

years ago when it might have been expected that 

the programme makers would have been aware 

that such narrow representation would not reflect 

well on them, nor fairly represent the profession 

at the time. 

Women have had to overcome barriers to entry 

in almost every profession. In the design world, 

mentorship and collaboration with experienced 

colleagues are necessary for establishing the 

credibility to secure commissions and to gain 

access to production facilities. When the 

gatekeepers are men with little inclination to 

admit women, it becomes difficult to find a way 

into the profession. As an exception to this, 

Rawsthorn cites the “glorious anomaly of a group 

of women’s suffrage campaigners during the 

late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.” 

Among them were cousins Agnes and Rhoda 

Garrett who, having finally managed to secure 

apprenticeships with an architect, were then 

thwarted by being banned from ‘unladylike’ 

building sites. They chose a new tack by opening 

their own interior design company which 

promoted a style of decoration that would make 

it easier for women to clean their homes, freeing 

up time for other, more interesting, activities. 

Among the Garretts earliest clients were Agnes’ 

two sisters, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (Britain’s 

first qualified female doctor) and Millicent 

Fawcett (a suffrage campaigner). These women, 

in turn, recommended the design firm to their 

friends, including Fanny Wilkinson who became 

the first woman to practise landscape design in 

the UK. Agnes went on to design the interior 

of the New Hospital for Women as well as the 

Ladies’ Residential Chambers which provided 

accommodation for single professional women 

in London. 


Above: Mary Somerville by James Rannie Swinton, 1848 

© National Portrait Gallery, London 

Right: Agnes Garrett by Olive Edis. c. 1900s 

© National Portrait Gallery, London 

Design became an important element in the 

cause of women’s suffrage. The purple, green and 

white sashes worn by suffrage advocates created 

an easily recognisable visual identity. This colourcoded 

identity was used in creating the Holloway 

Brooch, designed by leading suffrage campaigner 

Sylvia Pankhurst, and awarded to militants upon 

their release from Holloway Prison. Ethel Smyth, 

composer of ‘The March of Women,’ would 

become one such recipient. (See feature on p. 20). 

As Rawsthorn explains, “By constructing a circular 

economy of clients, funders and collaborators 

within the suffrage movement, Agnes and 

Rhoda Garrett, Fanny Wilkinson, Sylvia Pankhurst 

… [and others] circumvented the male design 

establishment.” Their imagination, ingenuity and 

courage continue to serve as an example for 

women today. 

In her essay on early women scientists, Emma 

Chapman notes that, when given the task of 

drawing a scientist, the great majority of children 

– whether girls or boys – draw a picture of a man. 

She then points out the irony of this situation, 

given that the word ‘scientist’ was invented 

specifically to describe work that had been 

carried out by a woman. That woman, the Scottish 

polymath Mary Somerville (1780-1872), was a 

highly respected mathematician and philosopher 

who wrote books on a wide range of subjects. In 

his review of Somerville’s second book On the 

Connexion of the Physical Sciences, historian 

and noted neologist William Whewell could not 

compare her to other ‘men of science’ and so he 

coined ‘scientist’ as a term that allowed for the 

possibility of both men and women contributing 

to scientific knowledge. 

Despite her accomplishments and renown, Mary 

Somerville was ineligible for membership of any of 

the professional bodies that regulated education, 

publications and academic appointments within 

the sciences. The Royal Astronomical Society’s 

charter, for example, referred to members using 


Above, left:Sir William Herschel and Caroline Herschel. William 

polishing a telescope element, probably a mirror and Caroline 

Herschel adds lubricant. Colour lithograph by A. Diethe, ca. 1896. 

Image: Wikimedia Commons 

Above, right: Portrait of Hertha Ayrton, Girton College, University of 

Cambridge; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation 

Opposite page: Tennis player Charlotte Cooper 

© International Tennis Hall of Fame 

male pronouns, and this was sufficient to deny 

women full membership, although Somerville 

was made an honorary member in 1835. Other 

female scientists suffered similar indignities. 

Caroline Herschel’s astronomical discoveries won 

her the RAS’s Gold Medal in 1828, but she was not 

permitted to present the results of her work to 

the Society. That honour was given to her brother, 

William. Hertha Ayrton, who gained international 

recognition for her research into artificial lighting, 

was unsuccessful in her bid for membership of the 

Royal Society because, as a married woman, she 

had no personhood under law. 

Considering that these and many other 

women have gone largely unrecognised, 

despite their significant contributions to 


scientific advancement, it is not surprising that, 

even now, children are more likely to picture 

men, rather than women, as scientists. Female 

role models are essential for girls to imagine 

themselves in these positions. The National 

Portrait Gallery is working to redress the gender 

imbalance in its collection by filling in the gaps 

in representation of women. Women at Work 

provides a fascinating glimpse of just some of 

the women in Britain’s past whose achievements 

deserve to be celebrated. It is important not 

only to read about them but also to come face 

to face with their images in the museum. As 

schoolchildren wend their way through the 

halls of the Gallery, it is vital for boys and girls 

to see that just as many women as men have 

shaped the nation’s artistic, intellectual, social 

and political history. 

One of the first women’s colleges at Oxford 

University, established in 1879, was named after 

the first ‘scientist’, Mary Somerville. Perhaps 

Wimbledon could consider naming one of their 

courts after the remarkable Charlotte Cooper, 

whose record string of eight trips to the 

Wimbledon finals lasted 90 years, until Martina 

Navratilova earned her ninth finals appearance 

in a row in 1990. 


Flavia Frigeri (ed.), Women at Work, 1900 to Now, 

National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2023 


Two New Books for 2024… 

PALACE WOMEN 

Creators of Culture in Florence 

Eleonora di Toledo’s purchase of an Oltrarno home and the 

emergence of Florence’s artisan district. Cristina di Lorena’s creation 

of a Medici wonderland at Villa La Petraia. Vittoria della Rovere’s role 

in supporting women’s art at Poggio Imperiale. Anna Maria Luisa de’ 

Medici’s stroke of legal genius which linked Florence to an eternal 

Renaissance. Elizabeth Browning’s perspective from the windows of 

Casa Guidi, where she called for freedom and claimed it for herself. 

Fifteen women photographers and eight contemporary artisans 

rediscover female influencers in their Tuscan palaces, villas or 

garden oases and produce artisanal works or pictures celebrating 

their untold legacies. From the former convent of San Francesco di 

Paola, to the once-hunting lodge of Isabella de’ Medici, this keepsake 

volume explores multiple venues, where ‘palace women’ – from 

the sixteenth century to the present day – have carved their place 

in history as creators of culture, giving new meaning to the everrelevant 

aspiration: ‘a room of one’s own’. 

Photos: Gruppo Fotografico Il Cupolone 

Author/Editor: Linda Falcone 

The Florentine Press, 2023 

ARTEMISIA UPCLOSE 

A day in the life of Artemisia... today 

Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Inclination (1616) tributes the 

genius of Michelangelo, gives a nod to Galileo, and bears a striking 

resemblance to Artemisia herself. During its conservation at Casa 

Buonarroti, the canvas was removed from its ceiling heights, and 

placed at eye-level in the Florentine home-museum where Artemisia 

worked while five months pregnant, receiving a salary three times 

that of her male counterparts, and earning the esteem of her patron, 

Michelangelo the Younger. 

Artemisia UpClose documents this once-in-a-lifetime encounter 

and celebrates a project that encompasses research, restoration 

and an exhibition, in which world-renowned curators, conservators, 

philanthropists, art historians, restoration scientists and the artloving 

public come together to discover the untold mysteries of an 

extraordinary artist and her censored artwork, painted over with 

draping not long after its creation, now unveiled – virtually – for 

the world. 

Authors: Cristina Acidini, Alessandro Cecchi, Elizabeth Cropper, 

Mary Garrard, Margie MacKinnon, Elizabeth Wicks, Linda Falcone (ed.) 

The Florentine Press, 2023 


A day in the life... 

Crafters Jane Harman and Ilaria Ceccarelli from the collective 

‘Intreccio Creativo’ meet up for work at Harman’s studio in 

Pelago to discuss the installation Tablescape for the Palace 

Women exhibition at Cultural Association Il Palmerino (October- 

December 2023). Creativity always starts with conversation! 

Photo by Viola Parretti, Gruppo Fotografico Il Cupolone 

Front cover: 

A Portal at Villa La Petraia by Viola Paretti 

© Gruppo Fotografico Il Cupolone and Calliope Arts Archive 

Back cover: 

Wanda and Marion Wulz pictured with a friend while leafing through a book (c. 1920) 

by Carlo Wulz © Archivi Alinari, Florence

Restoration Conversations magazine - Winter 2023

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Restoration Conversations magazine - Winter 2023

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