Autumn/Winter 2022
Restoration Conversations is a digital magazine spotlighting the achievements of women in history and today. We produce two issues a year: Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter
Restoration Conversations is a digital magazine spotlighting the achievements of women in history and today. We produce two issues a year: Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
Restoration<br />
Conversations<br />
ISSUE 2, AUTUMN / WINTER <strong>2022</strong><br />
WOMEN’S STORIES: TODAY AND THROUGH THE CENTURIES<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 1
Publisher<br />
Calliope Arts Ltd<br />
London, UK<br />
Managing Editor<br />
Linda Falcone<br />
Contributing Editor<br />
Margie MacKinnon<br />
Design<br />
Fiona Richards<br />
FPE Media Ltd<br />
Video maker for RC broadcasts<br />
Francesco Cacchiani<br />
Bunker Film<br />
www.calliopearts.org<br />
@calliopearts_restoration<br />
Calliope Arts<br />
2 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
From the Editor<br />
As we conclude preparations for our <strong>Autumn</strong>/<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> issue, we bid a fond<br />
farewell to ‘Fotografe!’, the Florence exhibition on women photographers,<br />
spotlighting archival treasures from the Alinari Foundation for Photography, which<br />
brought the works of extraordinary women into the public spotlight at Villa Bardini<br />
and Forte Belvedere. Wanda and Marion Wulz and Edith Arnaldi and their legacy<br />
have become part of our lives, as have the people we were fortunate to encounter<br />
through this enriching partnership whose memories fill these pages.<br />
The restoration of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Inclination, whose initial steps<br />
are documented in this issue, provides a unique opportunity for the public to ‘meet’<br />
Artemisia UpClose, as the project name suggests. It is an honor to begin to tell<br />
that story forged in paint centuries ago; its power and beauty continue to sustain<br />
us. Hats off to the project’s expert technicians whose science and manual skills<br />
will reveal the painting’s unknown secrets. We are committed to documenting each<br />
discovery as it brings new color to the canvas’s multi-century life, for our readers –<br />
and the world – to enjoy.<br />
In the issue’s third segment, we are transported to the Royal Academy of London and<br />
the Levett Collection in Florence, to name just two venues waiting to be explored,<br />
and we hope RC’s articles will succeed in whetting the appetite for ‘more’, as far as<br />
stories of women’s achievements are concerned. If that is the case, the magazine’s<br />
editorial team will have reached its own precious pinnacle of ‘achievement’, that of<br />
spreading the word on all the worthy work women do and have done, in bygone<br />
centuries and today. Thank you for being part of our growing community.<br />
Fondly,<br />
Linda Falcone<br />
Managing Editor, Restoration Conversations<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 3
CONTENTS<br />
AUTUMN/ WINTER <strong>2022</strong><br />
EXPOSURE OVERDUE<br />
6 From Shakespeare to Schiaparelli<br />
Highlights from the RC broadcast on ‘Fotografe!’<br />
14 ‘A Tendor Ardour’<br />
Julia Margaret Cameron<br />
18 Edith Arnaldi<br />
A ‘woman of the future’ from the Alinari’s Archives<br />
24 Alinari Reception<br />
A celebratory send off<br />
COME CLOSER<br />
32 Artemisia’s Descent<br />
40 Artemisia UpClose<br />
Many ways to see the mastery<br />
46 A Veiled Issue<br />
The hows and whys behind Artemisia’s veil<br />
54 There’s No Place Like Home<br />
Michelangelo’s house is Artemisia’s abode<br />
FROM SONGS TO SILK<br />
60 The ‘Archive Angel’<br />
Musica Secreta’s Laurie Stras on women’s voices<br />
68 Death of A Duchess<br />
Historical fiction or true crime?<br />
74 ‘More Bill’, Many Kennedys<br />
A spotlight on Elaine de Kooning<br />
78 ‘I Am Becoming Somebody’<br />
Paula Modersohn-Becker at the Royal Academy<br />
88 Sharing Silk<br />
An interview with Elena Baistrocchi<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 5
Above: Jazz band, Wanda Wulz, 1931, Alinari Archives, Florence.<br />
6 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
From S hakespeare<br />
to Schiaparelli<br />
Highlights from the RC broadcast on ‘Fotografe!’<br />
During our autumn episode of Restoration<br />
Conversations, live-streamed on location from<br />
Florence’s Villa Bardini, Walter Guadagnini, cocurator<br />
of the exhibition Fotografe! Women<br />
photographers, Alinari Archives to Contemporary<br />
Perspectives, shared insights on the show’s<br />
protagonists. Here is Walter’s take on three<br />
Dcreative women and their time.<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 7
Above: ‘Fotografe!’ exhibition at Florence’s Villa Bardini, (Image: Olga Makarova).<br />
PHOTOGRAPHY, FINE ART?<br />
The idea of photography reaching fine-art status<br />
has always been a big issue for photographers,<br />
and I believe this dilemma has finally reached its<br />
resolution. Pictorialism, a movement that started<br />
towards the end of the nineteenth century,<br />
addressed this quest, as photographers strove to<br />
ensure that their medium would eventually be<br />
considered a Fine Art, on a par with painting and<br />
sculpture. Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879)<br />
was one of the first photographers ever to create<br />
what is known as the tableau vivant and she can<br />
be considered the mother of Pictorialism – not<br />
only as a ‘female photographer’… as a matchless<br />
creative, independent of her gender.<br />
She used a ‘soft lens’ so her pictures have a<br />
dream-like quality, and brought together groups<br />
of friends and developed certain themes from<br />
Shakespeare’s plays or other literary and religious<br />
works. Oftentimes, she involved members of<br />
Pre-Raphaelite circles or famous personalities<br />
like Lord Alfred Tennyson, astronomer John<br />
Herschel, or poet and playwright Sir Henry Taylor,<br />
whose portrait forms part of the Alinari Archives<br />
collection. In the show, we have the photograph<br />
of a woman, probably an actor, dressed as<br />
Herodias, the mother of Salomé. In other words,<br />
Cameron was engaging in stage photography,<br />
one century before the likes of American artist<br />
8 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
Above: The ‘Pictorialism’ section at ‘Fotografe’. Photos by Julia Margaret Cameron, authored from 1865 to 1870, Alinari Archives, Florence, (Image: Olga Makarova).<br />
Cindy Sherman… Her biography is fascinating;<br />
she received her first camera later in life in 1863<br />
– as a 48-year-old woman, not a young girl, and<br />
she became famous almost immediately. She<br />
exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum<br />
in 1865 – then called the South Kensington<br />
Museum – which purchased 80 of her prints,<br />
as one of the museum’s first acquisitions. In<br />
fact, for two years, her photography studio was<br />
actually inside the Museum!<br />
A GAME OF ‘WHO’S WHO?’<br />
Madame d’Ora’s 1926 portrait, Madame<br />
Schiaparelli, featuring Roman fashion designer<br />
Elsa Schiaparelli and her dog, epitomises the<br />
typical cannons of the period, which were still<br />
significantly influenced by Pictorialism. She is<br />
almost blurred… only her gaze is in focus. This<br />
technique gives the picture a timeless quality.<br />
Schiaparelli (1890–1973) was a rival of Coco Chanel<br />
and she took the fashion world by storm, in the<br />
inter-war period, with her surrealist creations<br />
[and the invention of the shade ‘shocking pink’ in<br />
1937, a colour borrowed, years later, for Marilyn’s<br />
strapless number in Gentleman Prefer Blondes.<br />
Despite her sedate appearance in Madame<br />
D’Ora’s photograph, Schiaparelli, created cuttingedge,<br />
mostly surrealist garments and accessories,<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 9
MADAME D’ORA (1881–1963)<br />
was a Viennese photographer<br />
intent on immortalising the rich<br />
and famous. Josephine Baker,<br />
Tamara de Lempicka and Collette<br />
are just a few of the women<br />
she captured on camera. Until<br />
1925, she worked in Germany<br />
and Austria in tandem with her<br />
partner Arthur Benda, in a studio<br />
they called Benda-D’Ora.<br />
Exact authorship of the<br />
photographs the studio produced<br />
is difficult to determine, and<br />
it should be noted that Benda<br />
kept ‘D’Ora’ as part of the<br />
company name, even after the<br />
pair separated in 1927, despite<br />
Madame D’Ora having founded a<br />
Paris atelier two years earlier. Her<br />
Parisian studio remained open<br />
until Germany occupied the<br />
city, in 1940, at the height of the<br />
Second World War, after which<br />
Madame D’Ora, of Jewish descent,<br />
went into semi-hiding.<br />
10 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
like those born from her creative partnership<br />
with avant-garde artist Salvador Dali].<br />
The Alinari picture is also an example of the<br />
period’s fashion photography, as fashion has<br />
always been one of the most important ways of<br />
spreading the medium throughout the world. It’s<br />
not an exaggeration to say that photography’s<br />
most famous exponents made their name in the<br />
world of fashion, not least, thanks to the renown<br />
of celebrity sitters.<br />
MOVEMENT AND … MUSIC<br />
Wanda Wulz (1903–1984) is often discussed as a<br />
major exponent of Futurism, but her ties to the<br />
movement were short-lived. For most of her<br />
life, she was a studio photographer, who did not<br />
subscribe to a specific movement. Her interest in<br />
Futurism – or its interest in her – developed in<br />
the early 1920s. The movement was founded by<br />
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti – who Wanda knew<br />
and photographed with great skill. Futurism<br />
celebrated modernity and speed, in addition to<br />
militarism and the glories of warfare.<br />
It was the first avant-garde movement strictly<br />
related to photography. We have to remember that<br />
theatre director and cinematographer Anton Giulio<br />
Bragaglia wrote his Fotodinamismo Futurista in<br />
1914. The Cubists and the Expressionists were not<br />
interested in photography… they were suspicious<br />
of it, because it was considered too mechanical.<br />
Wanda often worked with double exposures, and<br />
many of her shots have a mechanical feel, where<br />
she portrays the idea of movement, because,<br />
Left: Wunder-bar, 1930 c.,<br />
Alinari Archives, Florence.<br />
Above: Portrait of Marion Wulz by Wanda<br />
Wulz. Alinari Archives, Florence.<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 11
Above: Marion Wulz in the dress by Anita Pittoni, Wanda Wulz, 1935 c.,<br />
Alinari Archives, Florence.<br />
Above, right: Portrait of Henry Taylor by Julia Margaret Cameron.<br />
Alinari Archives, Florence.<br />
Right: Exercise, Wanda Wulz, 1932, Alinari Archives, Florence.<br />
12 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
y now, we are in the ‘machine era’. One of the<br />
reasons I find photography so interesting is that<br />
it is intrinsically related to societal trends. When<br />
you look at a photograph, you are actually looking<br />
at what is happening in society.<br />
Wanda Wulz was modern in other ways as well.<br />
Women protagonists appear often in her work<br />
– they are gymnasts, Olympians and dancers…<br />
active women. In Jazz band, from 1932, she is<br />
referencing music from the United States, and<br />
you can imagine, in the 1930s, high-society<br />
Europeans were not very friendly towards it…<br />
This photograph is a declaration of modernity,<br />
not least because the player is a woman. We have<br />
many female drummers today, but in Wulz’s time<br />
that would have been a novelty – new music, and<br />
new musicians! RC<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 13
Above: Portrait of Julia Margaret Cameron,<br />
Henry Herschel Hay Cameron, 1870,<br />
MET Museum, New York.<br />
Inset, right: Annie, Julia Cameron, 1864,<br />
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.<br />
14 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
“A tender ardour”<br />
Julia Margaret Cameron<br />
By Linda Falcone<br />
Calcutta-born British photographer Julia<br />
Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) was about<br />
my age when she received her first<br />
camera at 48 – as a gift from her daughter and<br />
son-and-law. It was a suitable present, they<br />
thought, for a woman who needed quite a lot to<br />
keep her occupied. She had<br />
raised five of her relatives’<br />
children and had five of<br />
her own – in addition to<br />
adopting a young Irish girl,<br />
whom she found begging on<br />
Putney Heath. The gift was<br />
“to amuse you, Mother, to try<br />
and photograph during your<br />
solitude.”<br />
In her own words, Julia<br />
handled the camera with<br />
“tender ardour” from the<br />
time she shot what she<br />
referred to as her “first<br />
success” in 1864 – the<br />
photo of a girl called Annie<br />
Philpot, which she purposely<br />
blurred to suggest the child’s<br />
movement, rather than<br />
seeking the usual stoic pose Victorians imposed<br />
upon photographed children.<br />
Julia would transform her estate’s henhouse<br />
into her first darkroom, which she called the ‘glass<br />
house’ and used it to produce dreamy pictures<br />
that photographers hated and artists loved.<br />
Cameron’s only natural daughter – also named<br />
Julia – was right about the gift being an antidote<br />
to solitude. The whole world – or at least the<br />
whole Isle of Wight – was coaxed or commanded<br />
in front of her camera. House workers or hapless<br />
tourists admiring the beach<br />
were somehow lured back<br />
to her ‘lair’ to pose for a<br />
tableau scene, transformed<br />
into characters born in the<br />
mind of Milton. They would<br />
become the Greek poet<br />
Sappho or King Lear’s sad<br />
daughters. The neighbour’s<br />
hired help was dolled up<br />
and made to carry the<br />
Madonna’s Annunciation<br />
lily. Strapped-on swan wings<br />
were a common feature in<br />
her photographs. And in the<br />
buzz and glory of it all, she<br />
treated genius scientists<br />
and humble seamstresses<br />
exactly the same.<br />
Lucky for us, the Isle<br />
of Wight was brimming with the vacationing<br />
elite, which secured for posterity some of the<br />
most important portraits of nineteenth-century<br />
British writers, scientists and poets ever taken.<br />
Poet Alfred Tennyson asked Julia to photograph<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 15
Above: Vivien and Merlin<br />
(sitters Agnes Mangles, Charles<br />
Hay Cameron) Julia Margaret<br />
Cameron, 1874, Victoria<br />
and Albert Museum Library,<br />
London.<br />
Above, right: King Lear<br />
allotting his kingdom to<br />
his three daughters, Julia<br />
Margaret Cameron, 1872, MET<br />
Museum, New York.<br />
a series to accompany his poem cycle Idylls of<br />
the King and this literary association pleased her<br />
and gave added credence to her quest, namely, to<br />
bring photography out of the technical realm, by<br />
elevating it to the level of the other arts.<br />
Tennyson did not escape her lens, of course –<br />
she made him pose too, once as himself, and other<br />
times – as whomever she saw fit. A description<br />
of Tennyson’s sittings features in Freshwater, the<br />
comic sketch Virginia Woolf wrote for a private<br />
performance at Bloomsbury. Woolf’s mother, Julia<br />
Jackson, was Cameron’s niece and posed for<br />
many pictures as well. Woolf’s character ‘Julia’<br />
snaps at ‘Tennyson’ with characteristic intensity,<br />
“That’s the very attitude I want! Sit still, Alfred!”<br />
Tennyson describes his experience: “The<br />
studio, I remember, was very untidy and very<br />
uncomfortable. Mrs Cameron put a crown on my<br />
head and posed me as the heroic queen. … The<br />
exposure began. A minute went over and I felt as if<br />
I must scream, another minute and the sensation<br />
was as if my eyes were coming out of my head;<br />
a third, and the back of my neck appeared to<br />
be afflicted with palsy; a fourth, and the crown,<br />
which was too large, began to slip down my<br />
forehead; a fifth—but here I utterly broke down,<br />
for Mr Cameron, who was very aged, and had<br />
unconquerable fits of hilarity which always came<br />
in the wrong places, began to laugh audibly, and<br />
this was too much for my self-possession, and I<br />
was obliged to join the dear old gentleman.”<br />
Julia had met Charles Hay Cameron in South<br />
Africa, and married him in India, in 1838. Fifteen<br />
years his wife’s senior, he was man enough<br />
to play Merlin in the artist’s scenes, and any<br />
woman whose husband is smart enough to make<br />
her want to run through the house with fresh<br />
photographs in tow, so that he could receive<br />
them with guaranteed ‘delight’ is a woman I want<br />
to meet in the elevator. “It is my daily habit to run<br />
to him with every glass upon which a fresh glory<br />
is newly stamped,’ she wrote “and to listen to<br />
his enthusiastic applause. This habit of running<br />
into the dining-room with my wet pictures has<br />
stained such an immense quantity of table linen<br />
with nitrate of silver, indelible stains, that I should<br />
16 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
have been banished from any less indulgent<br />
household.”<br />
Cameron’s first show was held in 1865 at the<br />
South Kensington Museum – now the Victoria<br />
and Albert Museum – which, surprisingly,<br />
was also home to her photography studio in<br />
1868. Apparently, the well-connected woman<br />
knew how to get a gig. In fact, although she<br />
did not photograph on commission and never<br />
established a professional studio, she did market,<br />
print and sell her images through Colnaghi, and<br />
the V&A now owns 80 of her pictures, purchased<br />
in the early days of her 12-year career.<br />
In 1875, the Camerons moved to Sri Lanka, then<br />
Ceylon, to tend to a fungus affecting their coffee<br />
plantations. Julia Cameron died there, four years<br />
later, with thousands of photos to her credit.<br />
Photographic materials were scarce in Ceylon,<br />
and her later production diminished, but her<br />
inborn mission – discovered late, and lived with<br />
all the fire of her temperament, would never leave<br />
her. “Beauty, you are under arrest, I have a camera<br />
and am not afraid to use it,” has remained as one<br />
of her most frequently quoted phrases, hence, it<br />
is fitting that “Beauty” was her dying word.<br />
With images of Julia, ‘Merlin’ and crowned<br />
Mr Tennyson, still fresh in our minds, I’d like<br />
to share a final quote, for I would be remiss if<br />
amidst the humour, I neglected to emphasise the<br />
seriousness of Julia’s photographic endeavours.<br />
Victorian critics had ever-harsh words for her.<br />
Photographers derided her ‘soft-focus’ images as<br />
amateurish and her medievalist scenes as reason<br />
for ridicule, yet she approached her work with<br />
religious dedication. Carlyle, Dickens, Darwin,<br />
Herschel, Browning, Watts and more have Julia<br />
Margaret Cameron to thank, for how they are<br />
remembered in the collective consciousness, and<br />
here’s why: “When I have had such men before<br />
my camera,” the photographer wrote, “my whole<br />
soul has endeavoured to do its duty towards<br />
them in recording faithfully the greatness of the<br />
inner as well as the features of the outer man.<br />
The photograph thus taken has been almost the<br />
embodiment of a prayer.”<br />
Amen, dear Julia Margaret Cameron. Amen. RC<br />
Above, left: Maud (sitter Mary<br />
Hillier), Julia Cameron, 1875,<br />
Victoria and Albert Museum<br />
Library, London.<br />
Above: Angel of the Nativity<br />
(Sitter Laura Gurney), Julia<br />
Margaret Cameron, 1872,<br />
J. Paul Getty Museum,<br />
Los Angeles.<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 17
Edith Arnaldi<br />
A ‘woman of the future’ found in Alinari<br />
Archives<br />
By Linda Falcone<br />
Edith Arnaldi – celebrated in Futurist circles<br />
as Rosa Rosà – was a Futurist painter, writer,<br />
illustrator and ceramicist, yet few know that<br />
she was also a dedicated photographer, whose<br />
largely undiscovered oeuvre – comprising<br />
negatives, glass slides and prints – is 10,000<br />
works strong. Florence-based German researcher<br />
Lisa Hanstein, who has studied Arnaldi over the<br />
course of two decades, only recently discovered<br />
the artist’s ‘photographic vein’, thanks to her<br />
copious archive at Florence’s Alinari Foundation<br />
for Photography. As contributor to the short-lived<br />
Florence journal Italia Futurista, Arnaldi (1884-1978)<br />
stood at the forefront of early feminism in Italy,<br />
generating debate among her contemporaries,<br />
authoring essays such as ‘Women of the Future’<br />
and ‘Women Are Finally Changing’, in which she<br />
analysed and advocated for new, anti-bourgeois<br />
roles for women, an issue made even more<br />
relevant once a whole generation of men left for<br />
the front, to fight the Great War.<br />
WOMEN IN THE ROUND<br />
“Over the last few years, my studies on Edith<br />
Arnaldi have focused on her interest in the<br />
invisible – her portrayal of moods and states<br />
of mind. Despite Arnaldi being a prolific artist,<br />
almost none of her paintings and ceramic works<br />
have survived or been traced, therefore, to find<br />
such a large photographic oeuvre in Florence is<br />
exciting. It is also a revelation to find that much of<br />
Arnaldi’s photography captures fleeting moments<br />
in the lives of women. They are pensive or<br />
enthusiastic; they are engrossed in their work…<br />
and most importantly, they are represented as<br />
individuals,” says Dr. Hanstein. “The visual arts<br />
in Arnaldi’s time followed trends advocated by<br />
Istituto LUCE – the Union for Education Cinema<br />
– a major media-arm of the Fascist regime, which<br />
strove to represent certain typecast characters,<br />
and well-established stereotypes. Although<br />
Arnaldi’s photography in the thirties and forties<br />
portrays rural living in Italy’s hillside towns, which<br />
include glimpses of traditional festivals and ageold<br />
customs, you get a sense that the people<br />
her camera captures are never flat characters<br />
– they are real, multi-faceted people, as in her<br />
Ciociaria works. The ‘Water-bearer’, whom she<br />
photographed over the course of several years, is<br />
representative of her sensibility.”<br />
Right: At Edith’s villa, 1951,<br />
Edith Arnaldi, Alinari Archives,<br />
Florence.<br />
18 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 19
Above, left: Somalia, 1951,<br />
Edith Arnaldi, Alinari Archives,<br />
Florence.<br />
Above, right: Piglio [Inv<br />
NVQ-S-002281-4617], 1935,<br />
Edith Arnaldi, Alinari Archives,<br />
Florence.<br />
“We should also note,” Hanstein continues, “that<br />
Arnaldi was not working on commission. She<br />
came from an aristocratic family, and her pictures<br />
were not her livelihood. This meant she could<br />
dedicate a lot of time to experimentation and<br />
work with subjects entirely of her own choosing.<br />
The fact that Arnaldi was an avid traveller<br />
is significant. Her daughter Maretta (Maria<br />
Enrichetta), who married an Italian ambassador,<br />
lived in Madrid (1935-6), Rabat (1938) and Somalia<br />
(1951), and Arnaldi would visit her, sometimes for<br />
months – a daunting journey during her time.<br />
Her Somalia pictures – especially those of village<br />
women – have a similar intimate feel to those<br />
in her Ciociaria series.” The anthropological<br />
nature of Arnaldi’s body of work sheds light on<br />
other parts of the world as well, as she travelled<br />
frequently, from the 1930s to the 1950s – to<br />
Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Germany<br />
and Egypt, among other nations.<br />
AN AURA, A VOCATION<br />
“Scientific photography was very important to<br />
some painters of Italian futurism and, in the first<br />
half of the 1900s, artists started playing with the<br />
idea of using scientific discoveries to define and<br />
inspire their own artistic research, because it<br />
zeroed in on what the naked eye could not see,”<br />
Dr Hanstein explains. As early as 1917, Arnaldi was<br />
interested in scientific photography, and she may<br />
have ultimately turned to the artistic medium<br />
because it could do things that painting and<br />
drawing could not.”<br />
A number of Futurist artists, including Arnaldi,<br />
were impressed by research on paranormal<br />
phenomena leading to the discovery of<br />
magnetism, and the detection of the aura,<br />
for instance, or concentrated their efforts on<br />
what Futurism painter and poet Giacomo Balla<br />
described as, “representing light by separating<br />
the colours that compose it.” Balla, the oldest<br />
20 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
exponent of the Futurists who, incidentally called<br />
themselves ‘the Lords of Light’, was known to wear<br />
a light bulb wrapped in transparent celluloid to<br />
light up his neckties and, in accordance with the<br />
manifesto of the Futurist painters, he maintained<br />
that the eyes of the artist were like an x-ray<br />
that could see things that others couldn’t. “The<br />
vocation of the artist, in the Futurists’ view, was to<br />
make hidden elements visible,” Hanstein explains,<br />
“and, obviously, this view was closely tied to the<br />
occult philosophies in vogue in Europe at the<br />
time, not least Austria, where Arnaldi was raised<br />
and educated.”<br />
‘SEDUCTION’ AND THE NEW WOMAN<br />
“Marinetti called Arnaldi the ‘genius from<br />
Vienna’, and they knew each other, but she did<br />
not cultivate close ties with him,” Dr. Hanstein<br />
notes. “A significant collection of letters penned<br />
by Arnaldi’s hand is yet to be found, but two of<br />
her letters to writer Emilio Settimelli form part of<br />
the Fondazione Primo Conti Museum archive in<br />
Fiesole. ‘I heard Marinetti is going to marry, do<br />
you know who?’ Arnaldi writes, and the question<br />
demonstrates her relationship with the founder<br />
of Futurism was not especially close, despite her<br />
name appearing in his notebooks. The artist’s<br />
letter reveals her sense of humour, and you<br />
get the sense of what she is actually asking:<br />
‘Who would marry Marinetti?’ The answer, of<br />
course, was Benedetta Cappa, an artist and, later,<br />
a major exponent of the movement Marinetti<br />
championed.”<br />
How the women of Marinetti’s circle morphed<br />
the pillars of his Manifesto Futurista into<br />
something that eventually led to their ‘liberation’,<br />
is not evident at first glance. “We want to glorify<br />
war, the only cure for the world – militarism,<br />
patriotism, the destructive gesture of the<br />
anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and<br />
contempt for woman,” Marinetti wrote in the 1909<br />
document that defined the movement.<br />
Below: Piglio [Inv<br />
NVQ-S-002281-4527], 1935,<br />
Edith Arnaldi, Alinari Archives,<br />
Florence.<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 21
Futurist women appear to have taken this<br />
contempt, in stride, and perhaps interpreted it as<br />
a contempt for the limited nature of traditional<br />
female roles. In fact, they shared his disdain<br />
for both the Angel of the Hearth and Femme<br />
Fatale. “Although Arnaldi was a resident of Rome,<br />
she presumably had contact with her female<br />
counterparts living in both Rome and Florence…<br />
Mina Loy, Irma Valeria, Maria Ginanni and Fulvia<br />
Giuliani, and their debate on the role of the New<br />
Woman, was an important one, but we have to<br />
remember, they did not all agree on what ‘la<br />
nuova donna’ meant, or how the change should<br />
play out exactly. They simply shared the need for<br />
a new image.”<br />
Edith Arnaldi, you might say, was a woman of<br />
two names and many souls – at least three – as<br />
the title of her novel A Woman with Three Souls<br />
appears to suggest. Authored in 1918, her novel is<br />
an early example of feminist science fiction, and<br />
considered a tit-for-tat reaction to Marinetti’s only<br />
successful book, How to Seduce Women, printed<br />
in 1916. According to Arnaldi, she did not consider<br />
herself a feminist but as ‘–ist’, hence, she says, ‘the<br />
first part of the word has not yet been found’”. Dr<br />
Lisa Hanstein, for one, is still searching for the<br />
word… or words… that will make a perfect fit. RC<br />
For more on the Digital Archive on Futurism in Florence at the<br />
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut: http://<br />
futurismus.khi.fi.it/index.php?id=100&L=1<br />
Above, left: Geometric conflagration, 1917, L’Italia futurista, Edith Arnaldi (von Haynau or Rosa Rosà),<br />
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz.<br />
Above, right: Dancer, 1921, Edith Arnaldi (von Haynau or Rosa Rosà), Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz.<br />
Above: Display case featuring Edith Arnaldi’s gelatin silver prints with notes (1936) Alinari Archives,<br />
Florence, (Image: Olga Makarowa).<br />
22 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
D<br />
r. Lisa Hanstein received her PhD at<br />
the Goethe University Frankfurt in<br />
2015. She is Academic Assistant in the<br />
library at the Kunsthistorisches Institut<br />
in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut. She<br />
co-organised ‘Mapping Futurism’, the<br />
conference proceedings and digital<br />
projects on Futurism. Hanstein is the<br />
author of several books and essays,<br />
including the in-English publications:<br />
Edyth von Haynau, Edyth Arnaldi and<br />
Rosa Rosà: One Woman, Many Souls<br />
(2021) and Edyth von Haynau: A Viennese<br />
Aristocrat in the Futurist Circles of the<br />
1910s (2015).<br />
She specialises in the impact of<br />
psychology, spiritism and science on<br />
Italian Futurist art and has published<br />
articles on the topic, as well as on<br />
Edith Arnaldi and on the KHI’s Futurism<br />
Archive. Her work on Edith Arnaldi, in<br />
the Alinari Archives with co-curator<br />
Emanuela Sesti, was paramount to the<br />
Fotografe! exhibition (See page 7).<br />
Top: The ‘Edith Arnaldi’ section at ‘Fotografe!’ at Forte di Belvedere,<br />
featuring Arnaldi’s Ciociaria series, (1935), (Image: Olga Makarowa).<br />
Above: Co-curator Emanuela Sesti oversees exhibition set-up, June <strong>2022</strong>.<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 23
24 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
Alinari Reception<br />
A celebratory send-off<br />
On September 27, <strong>2022</strong>, Calliope Arts gathered with<br />
its partners and friends to celebrate the successful<br />
conclusion of the show FOTOGRAFE! Women<br />
photographers: Alinari Archives to Contemporary Perspectives.<br />
Villa Bardini, one of the exhibition’s venues – together with Forte<br />
di Belvedere – provided an evocative backdrop to the festivities,<br />
which brought together our growing network of like-minded<br />
individuals, committed to the art-and-culture scene in Florence<br />
and further afield. The show, curated by Emanuela Sesti and<br />
Walter Guadagnini, ran from June 18 to October 2, <strong>2022</strong>. Presented<br />
and promoted by the Alinari Foundation for Photography and the<br />
Fondazione CR Firenze, in collaboration with the Municipality of<br />
Florence, it saw the participation of donors Calliope Arts.<br />
Through its grants programme, Calliope Arts funded the<br />
creation of two exhibition sections devoted to significant<br />
collections from the Alinari Archives: that of the sisters Wanda<br />
Wulz (Trieste 1903-1984) and Marion Wulz (Trieste 1905-1990) and<br />
that of Edith Arnaldi (Vienna 1884-Rome 1978). “We are especially<br />
interested in photography by women because it is an art form<br />
that has always been relatively accessible to women, unlike the<br />
more traditional fine arts,” says Calliope Arts President Margie<br />
MacKinnon, “The explosion of popularity of photography<br />
coincided with the expansion of women’s freedom to be active<br />
in public spheres and women’s demands for more independence<br />
and recognition. Thus, this exhibition’s creativeness brought<br />
dynamism, experimentation, and new techniques to the fore. We<br />
have been delighted to see these pioneers and contemporary<br />
women in the exhibition spotlight. It has been an enriching<br />
partnership, which we hope will continue in the future.”<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 25
26 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
Previous page: Views of Villa Bardini. Photos by<br />
Federica Narducci<br />
Left, top: E. Pavesi, Vice Mayor of Monzuno,<br />
RC managing editor L. Falcone, Calliope Arts<br />
founders W. McArdle and M. MacKinnon,<br />
co-curator E. Sesti and publisher F. Richards.<br />
Bottom left: D. Bolognini with The Florentine<br />
co-owner G. Giusti.<br />
Bottom right: Scholar C. Tobin, Violinist<br />
R. Palmer and archaeologist B. Leigh.<br />
Right, top: Atelier degli Artigianelli’s B. Cuniberti<br />
with artist V. Slichter.<br />
Right, middle: Conservator R. Lari and<br />
Il Palmerino’s V. Parretti.<br />
Right, bottom: Calliope Arts co-founder<br />
W. McArdle with artist R. Stavropoulos and<br />
husband G. Maragno.<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 27
28 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
Clockwise from top left: US Consul General R. Gupta,<br />
W. McArdle and UK collector C. Levett,<br />
Vice President of AADFI G. Bonsanti with L. Falcone,<br />
B. Balducci and Accademia Gallery director C. Hollberg,<br />
Casa Buonarroti president C. Acidini with Rosalia Manno,<br />
director of the Archives for the Memory and Writings of Women,<br />
Alinari Foundation for Photography: Director C. Baroncini,<br />
President G. Van Straten, Press coordinator C. Briganti,<br />
US philanthropists D. and C. Clark.<br />
This page, top: Front-row guests: Accademia Gallery director<br />
C. Hollberg, British Institute of Florence director S. Gammel,<br />
Il Palmerino’s V. Parretti, US Consul R. Gupta, Conservator<br />
E. Wicks and husband C. Marino.<br />
Opposite: Photographers A. Barrucchieri and<br />
A. Tommasi from Il Cupolone, S. Pretsch, Fondazione Lisio.<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 29
Enjoying the show:<br />
This page, left: V. Parretti with photographer J.M. Cameron.<br />
Centre : D. Bolognini with M. Meloni’s pictures.<br />
Below: C. Bartolini, C. Tobin and conservator A. Gavazzi in room<br />
featuring F. Belli’s works.<br />
Right, top: Guests share a laugh with co-curator E. Sesti.<br />
Right, below: Santa Maria Nuova Foundation secretariat and<br />
president C. Bartolini and G. Landini.<br />
30 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 31
32 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
Artemisia’s<br />
descent<br />
Project donors hold their breath as<br />
Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of<br />
Inclination (1616) is removed from the Casa<br />
Buonarroti Museum’s ceiling on Day 1 of<br />
the ‘Artemisia UpClose’ restoration project,<br />
in October <strong>2022</strong>. Once the painting is<br />
safely ‘grounded’, its patrons share their<br />
first impressions.<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 33
34 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
Previous page: Donors Margie<br />
MacKinnon, Wayne McArdle<br />
and Christian Levett, Project<br />
donors and management watch<br />
Artemisia’s descent at Casa<br />
Buonarroti.<br />
Left: Conservator Elizabeth Wicks<br />
at work.<br />
Above: Donor Margie MacKinnon<br />
with the Inclination.<br />
MARGIE MACKINNON<br />
“I was surprised at what a moving experience<br />
it was. This project has been months in the<br />
making, so while this was the first moment of<br />
the restoration, it was not the first moment of<br />
the project. Watching the painting coming down,<br />
your heart is in your mouth… because you are<br />
desperate that nothing is going to go wrong. Now<br />
that I see the canvas and can stand in front of<br />
it, what really excites me is knowing how many<br />
people are going to get to see this painting up<br />
close. When the conservation is finished, it will<br />
go back onto the ceiling where it lives, but during<br />
the time it is being restored and exhibited, people<br />
are going to have such a wonderful opportunity<br />
to see and appreciate this amazing work.”<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 35
Below: Donor Wayne McArdle shares<br />
first impressions.<br />
Right: Artemisia’s painting is<br />
removed from Gallery ceiling<br />
framework.<br />
WAYNE MCARDLE<br />
“Seeing the painting’s descent was a very<br />
emotional moment! What surprised me was how<br />
lightly the frame of the painting was placed on the<br />
ceiling. I expected there would be some chipping<br />
away at paint, or adhesive or something… nails<br />
or screws, but no! They just lifted the painting<br />
lightly off the frame, and brought it down from<br />
the ceiling, very, very gently. Of course, once<br />
down, it was simply wonderful to see the work. I<br />
think we were all totally impressed by the quality<br />
of the painting itself. I believe we are going to<br />
see some real revelations when the restoration<br />
and investigation work is finished and, as far as<br />
Calliope Arts and our mission is concerned, I<br />
can’t think of a better way to demonstrate what<br />
we are trying to do, in bringing the work of<br />
women artists to the attention of the public, so<br />
I’m delighted.”<br />
36 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 37
38 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong><br />
CHRISTIAN LEVETT<br />
Firstly, the painting looks to be over five feet<br />
high, so when you see it way above you on the<br />
ceiling, you don’t get a sense of how big the<br />
painting actually is; it just looks like another one<br />
of the panels. The scale of it is impressive, once it<br />
comes down. I think you also get a sense of how<br />
fantastic it’s going to look once the restoration<br />
is completed. Of course, when it is up high, it’s<br />
dark… it has withstood the test of time the last<br />
400 years – because they don’t think it has been<br />
moved during that period.<br />
When you see it up close, you get the feeling<br />
immediately as to what an amazing project this is.<br />
The other fantastic and slightly unexpected thing<br />
is that, as they took it out of the ceiling frame and<br />
brought it down, 400 years of dust fell from the<br />
canvas, and that, in and of itself, was a spectacular<br />
moment. So, a whole array of different things<br />
impressed me… it’s tremendously exciting! RC
Left: Donor Christian Levett<br />
discusses Artemisia UpClose.<br />
Above: Project donors<br />
and management at Casa<br />
Buonarroti: C. Levett, L.<br />
Falcone, A. Cecchi, C. Accidini,<br />
M. MacKinnon, W. McArdle.<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 39
Artemisia<br />
UpClose<br />
Many ways to see the mastery<br />
At its inception, and over the course of<br />
many months of planning, we referred<br />
to our wonderful Artemisia Gentileschi<br />
project as ‘Artemisia Unveiled’. This title was<br />
intended as a metaphorical nod to the part<br />
of the restoration project in which we would<br />
use sophisticated diagnostic equipment, such<br />
as infra-red technology, to ‘peek’ beneath the<br />
veil and discover how the painting originally<br />
looked, allowing us to recreate a virtual image<br />
of Artemisia’s work as it would have appeared to<br />
Michelangelo the Younger, who commissioned it.<br />
It was always intended that the restoration of the<br />
painting would leave the veil intact – as it has<br />
become an integral part of the work and its history.<br />
In order to make clear our intentions, with the<br />
descent of the painting into the museum spotlight<br />
and the restoration’s media debut, we have<br />
renamed our project ‘Artemisia UpClose’. This not<br />
only removes the ambiguity of the ‘Inclination’s’<br />
unveiling, it also highlights the fact that this<br />
restoration provides a unique opportunity for the<br />
public to truly view Artemisia’s work up close –<br />
while it is undergoing conservation treatments<br />
and when the restored work is exhibited, along<br />
with the virtual image of ‘what lies beneath the<br />
veil’. In due course, the painting will return to<br />
the ceiling niche for which it was created. While<br />
still on view, it will then be well out of touching<br />
distance.<br />
Right: Diagnostic analysis:<br />
Examining the painting in raking<br />
light ; Artemisia’s Inclination in the<br />
Model Room at Casa Buonarroti.<br />
40 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 41
IN PROGRESS AT THE MUSEUM<br />
OCTOBER <strong>2022</strong> TO APRIL 2023<br />
We’d like Florence and its countless international<br />
visitors and expats to meet Artemisia in person!<br />
Fondazione Casa Buonarroti president, art<br />
historian and author Cristina Acidini, welcomed<br />
the painting – which has never been in the public<br />
eye at such close range before – by sharing her<br />
initial impressions: “It was very exciting to have<br />
the opportunity to examine the canvas close<br />
up. Underneath the altered varnish, we can see<br />
that the painting is of extremely high quality.<br />
We know that Artemisia was an extraordinary<br />
painter and the Inclination confirms it. If you<br />
look at the softness of the skin, the tenderness<br />
of her forms, the figure’s luminosity and even her<br />
very complex hairstyle – all of these elements are<br />
sure to prove very interesting once its complete<br />
legibility is achieved.”<br />
During museum opening hours, the artloving<br />
public will have the opportunity to see<br />
the Allegory of Inclination restoration project<br />
in progress, thanks to a worksite set up in Casa<br />
Buonarroti’s ‘Model Room’. Head conservator<br />
Elizabeth Wicks will be available to answer<br />
questions from the public, on Fridays. Those who<br />
will not be able to make it to Florence in person<br />
can count on getting a glimpse of the process,<br />
thanks to a series of short videos created by<br />
Florence-based filmmaker Olga Makarova. The<br />
first segment, ‘Artemisia, The Descent’ has already<br />
gone viral on social media. For more on the<br />
science-side of the restoration, see page 52.<br />
EXHIBITION AND PUBLICATION PLANS<br />
SEPTEMBER 2023 TO JANUARY 2024<br />
“Artemisia UpClose will transform into a future<br />
exhibition at Casa Buonarroti, scheduled for next<br />
September,” says museum director Alessandro<br />
Cecchi, who is overseeing the project, together<br />
with Jennifer Celani, official for the Archaeological<br />
Superintendence for the Fine Arts and Landscape<br />
for the metropolitan city of Florence. Although<br />
full exhibition details are still in the development<br />
phase, Dr. Cecchi shares the following, “The show<br />
will spotlight conservation findings and explore<br />
the context surrounding the painting’s creation,<br />
including the significance of her Florentine<br />
debut and her key relationships with Grand Duke<br />
Cosimo de’ Medici and the city’s cultural milieu.”<br />
Again, those unable to see the show in person,<br />
can still have a keepsake from the exhibition:<br />
the English language exhibition catalogue (The<br />
Florentine Press, 2023) will be finalised next<br />
summer, and later, flanked by the Italian language<br />
publication ‘Buonarrotiana’ series (2023 edition)<br />
featuring specialist studies on Artemisia and<br />
her time, followed by a lecture series with major<br />
scholars in response to the show.<br />
Right, top left: Conservator Elizabeth Wicks uses<br />
a digital microscope to examine<br />
the painting’s condition.<br />
Right, top right: Conservator examines<br />
re-painting by Il Volteranno.<br />
Right: Phase-1 diagnostics,<br />
Artemisia UpClose.<br />
42 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 43
44 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
TENDER LOVING CARE FOR CASA<br />
BUONARROTI<br />
While the Allegory of Inclination is at the heart<br />
of the project, its restoration is by no means<br />
the only initiative forming part of ‘Artemisia<br />
UpClose’. “We’d like to look at the project as<br />
the start of something bigger,” says project codonor<br />
Christian Levett. Beyond the restoration<br />
of Artemisia’s Buonarroti painting, the project<br />
includes a refurbishment of the museum entrance,<br />
the renewal of its signage, and the redesign of<br />
the Gallery room’s lighting. This museum has an<br />
amazing story to tell, and we want to shed more<br />
light on it—literally.” This ‘tender-loving-care’ for<br />
the gallery will be completed by the end of 2023,<br />
and enhance the visitor experience, particularly<br />
of the seventeenth-century wing, a treasure trove<br />
designed by Michelangelo the Younger over the<br />
course of 30 years, whose genius conceived the<br />
first-ever architectural and artistic tribute to an<br />
artist, his great uncle, ‘Michelangelo the Divine’.<br />
WHO’S INVOLVED?<br />
The project, funded by Calliope Arts and<br />
Christian Levett (see page 38), is curated by<br />
Fondazione Casa Buonarroti and overseen by<br />
the Archaeological Superintendence for the Fine<br />
Arts and Landscape for the metropolitan city of<br />
Florence. It brings together restoration scientists,<br />
technicians, photographers and filmmakers to<br />
compile, analyse, document and share findings.<br />
Its players include: Head conservator Elizabeth<br />
Wicks, Italy’s National Research Council (CNR)<br />
and National Institute for Optics (NIO), Teobaldo<br />
Pasquali for X-ray and radiographs, Ottaviano<br />
Caruso for diagnostic images; Massimo Chimenti<br />
of Culturanuova s.r.l. for digital image creation;<br />
Olga Makarova for video and reportage<br />
photography. Project Coordinator: Linda Falcone.<br />
Media partners: Restoration Conversations and<br />
The Florentine. RC<br />
Left: Detail of the painting, pre-restoration, showing<br />
upclose Artemisia’s brushstrokes.<br />
Above, top: Cleaning handmade paper layer glued to<br />
revervse of canvas.<br />
Above: Painting facedown with original canvas nailed<br />
to corner of stretcher. Layer of canvas and paper glued<br />
to the reverse.<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 45
A veiled issue<br />
The hows and whys behind Artemisia’s veil<br />
THE POEM AND THE PREMISE<br />
In 1846, Robert and Elisabeth Browning secretly<br />
eloped to Florence, one week after their London<br />
wedding, and settled in Casa Guidi, which<br />
Elizabeth described as being “six paces from<br />
the Piazza Pitti”. In the Tuscan capital, Elisabeth<br />
quipped, “we should live like the Grand Duke with<br />
five hundred a year” – which was lucky, since her<br />
father had all but disowned her for marrying<br />
Robert. They lived mostly in Florence for 15 years,<br />
until her death, and it was there she published a<br />
novel in verse, Aurora Leigh – her longest work<br />
– in 1857. Florence would provide inspiration<br />
to Robert as well, and his sometimes derisive<br />
and often humorous pen gave a voice to those<br />
who once dwelled in Florence’s palazzi – even<br />
after he had stopped living in one. In his final<br />
volume of poems, Asolando: Fancies and Facts –<br />
published in Venice on the day of his death in<br />
1889 – he includes “Beatrice Signorini”. Browning<br />
thought the poem the best in the book – told<br />
by an ‘external narrator’ in many ways similar to<br />
himself.<br />
In “Beatrice Signorini”, Artemisia Gentileschi<br />
is portrayed as “a wonder of a woman, and no<br />
Cortona drudge”. She is cast as the lover of<br />
Baroque painter Francesco Romanelli, a Viterboborn<br />
moderately successful painter. Their<br />
romance is fictional, but the jealousy the poem<br />
conveys is real. As the story goes, Artemisia<br />
produced a Florence picture: “a semblance of<br />
her soul, she called ‘Desire’” painted to “brighten<br />
Buonarroti’s house”. The Inclination, which<br />
Browning never mentions by name, presides over<br />
a room “where the fire sits”.<br />
The poet’s imaginary narrative continues, and<br />
Romanelli’s wife – the poem’s namesake – takes<br />
revenge on a portrait her husband painted of<br />
Artemisia. By contrast, the allegorical figure “with<br />
starry front as guide”, authored by Gentileschi’s<br />
own hand, remains unharmed. “If you see<br />
Florence, “pay that piece your vows”, the narrator<br />
urges, before launching into a poetic tirade that<br />
alludes to a real-life scenario still relevant to<br />
the art world today: the addition of Artemisia’s<br />
46 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
Right: Allegory of Inclination,<br />
Artemisia Gentileschi, 1616,<br />
Casa Buonarroti Museum,<br />
Florence, pre-restoration,<br />
(Image: Ottaviano Caruso).<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 47
Left: Portrait of Robert Browning, Herbert Rose Barraud,<br />
1888 c. The Roy Davids Collection, London.<br />
Above: Elisabeth Barrett Browning, Michele Gordigiani,<br />
1859, National Portrait Gallery, London.<br />
Right: Self portrait of Baldassarre Franceschini,<br />
Il Volterrano, 1636-1646, The Glories of the House of<br />
Medici, Villa della Petraia, Florence.<br />
48 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
veil and drapery. Browning blames the Grand<br />
Duke’s prudish superintendent – whom the poet<br />
targets in more than one work: “The blockhead<br />
Baldinucci’s mind, imbued / With monkish morals,<br />
bade folk Drape the nude / And stop the scandal!”<br />
In his own six-volume work, ‘Notes on Teachers<br />
of Drawing from Cimabue until Now’, Filippo<br />
Baldinucci (1665-1717), a post-Vasari art historian<br />
and biographer, reports that on the instruction<br />
of Lionardo Buonarroti, he asked Volteranno to<br />
spare the blushes of women and children, by the<br />
addition of a flowing veil over the lower part of<br />
the painting. This order, made “for the decorum<br />
and modesty” of the Buonarroti home, “filled with<br />
young ones, his children… and his wife” made the<br />
ink in Browning’s pen boil: “Hang his book and<br />
him!” he wrote.<br />
Although Baldinucci takes the literary brunt of<br />
Browning’s disdain, it is not likely the biographer<br />
had the power to sway Lionardo Buonarroti one<br />
way or the other, as Hawklin and Meredith point<br />
out (2009). What we can say is that censoring<br />
nudes was a common practice that generations<br />
of artists of Artemisia’s calibre and beyond had<br />
to grapple with.<br />
The 1684 addition of the veil to the Inclination<br />
was carried out by a painter from the Tuscan<br />
town of Volterra, Baldassare Franceschini (1611-<br />
1689). Noted as a fresco painter, he received<br />
commissions from the Medici family for work<br />
in the Villa Petraia. Franceschini was known<br />
as Il Volterrano (referencing his birthplace) or<br />
sometimes Il Volteranno Giunore, to distinguish<br />
him from an earlier painter from the same town.<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 49
Below: Detail, The Last Judgment, Sistine Chapel ceiling,<br />
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1508-1512).<br />
Right: Detail, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco, prerestoration,<br />
with evidence of Il Braghettone’s handiwork.<br />
That painter was Daniele Ricciarelli (1509-1566).<br />
Sadly for Ricciarelli, he was also to become known<br />
as Il Braghettone or ‘the breeches maker’’. This is<br />
because it was Ricciarelli who was engaged by Pope<br />
Pius IV to cover up, with fig leaves and loincloths,<br />
the ‘naughty bits’ of the figures in Michelangelo’s<br />
Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.<br />
50 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
That painter was Daniele Ricciarelli (1509-1566).<br />
Sadly for Ricciarelli, he was also to become<br />
known as Il Braghettone or ‘the breeches<br />
maker’’. This is because it was Ricciarelli who<br />
was engaged by Pope Pius IV to cover up, with<br />
fig leaves and loincloths, the ‘naughty bits’ of the<br />
figures in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the<br />
Sistine Chapel. Ricciarelli is said to have been<br />
well liked by Michelangelo, and may have done<br />
less damage to Michelangelo’s fresco than other<br />
censors, following Counter-reformation diktats.<br />
When it came to the cleaning and restoration<br />
of the Chapel in 1980, a controversy arose over<br />
whether to leave Il Braghettone’s additions or to<br />
restore Michelangelo’s masterpiece to its original<br />
state. In the end, it was possible to uncover only<br />
a portion of the original work. Luckily, in 1549<br />
the farsighted Cardinal Alessandro Farnese had<br />
commissioned Marcello Venusti to paint an exact<br />
copy of the Last Judgment for posterity, now in<br />
the Capodimonte Museum in Naples.<br />
In the absence of an equivalent saviour of<br />
Artemisia’s work, we now have the technological<br />
means of ‘recreating’ her original painting while<br />
leaving the historic work, including Il Volteranno’s<br />
additions, intact, as US Florence-based conservator<br />
Elizabeth Wicks explains below.<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 51
PLANS AND PULLEYS<br />
Elizabeth Wicks, who heads the project’s state-ofthe<br />
art team comprising expert technicians and<br />
restoration scientists, under the supervision of<br />
Casa Buonarroti Director Alessandro Cecchi and<br />
Jennifer Celani, official for the Archaeological<br />
Superintendence for the Fine Arts and Landscape<br />
for the metropolitan city of Florence, shares<br />
questions and insight about Artemisia’s veil, as<br />
the project enters phase 1.<br />
“Artemisia’s nude allegorical figure was covered<br />
up by Baldassare Franceschini, the artist known<br />
as ‘Il Volterrano’. With all due respect, to this<br />
famous Baroque painter, some of the veil work<br />
and drapery is surprisingly slapdash. This begs<br />
the question: Was this sloppiness due to a hasty<br />
commission, a deliberate affront to Artemisia’s<br />
painting, or was Il Volterrano uncomfortable about<br />
being tasked to cover the nude and, therefore,<br />
simply did not put his heart into it?<br />
From the outset, an important aspect of this<br />
project has been to create a virtual image of<br />
Artemisia’s original work, on the premise that<br />
the over-painting will not be removed,” Wicks<br />
explains. “The first reason is that Il Volteranno’s<br />
repaints are considered historic and part of the<br />
painting’s setting and life story. Secondly, there<br />
is only a 70-year difference between Artemisia’s<br />
painting and the ‘censoring’ draperies and veil.<br />
It’s a thick layer of paint, with impasto. It may turn<br />
out that the two artists’ layers are very strongly<br />
bonded, and, if that is the case, we absolutely<br />
cannot put the painting at risk.<br />
Beyond the veils, as mentioned in the<br />
description of the painting by contemporary<br />
biographer Filippo Baldinucci, and shown in<br />
a sketch by Michelangelo the Younger of his<br />
original idea for The Inclination in the Casa<br />
Buonarroti archives – he drew the iconographic<br />
plan of the entire Buonarroti Gallery ceiling –<br />
Artemisia’s allegorical figure originally had two<br />
pulleys at her feet. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to<br />
find those now-invisible pulleys, hiding under the<br />
clouds! Again, it is all hypothetical at this point.<br />
As the team makes discoveries and explores<br />
the Inclination’s needs from a philosophical and<br />
technical standpoint, we’ll gain the knowledge to<br />
make informed decisions. For now, it’s early days.<br />
I am still removing the paper and canvas layers<br />
glued to the back of the stretcher, and once that<br />
process is finished, we will be able to continue<br />
with diagnostics and begin conservation work on<br />
the front of the painting.<br />
Through working photographs, diagnostic<br />
imaging and analysis, we will be able to<br />
determine the exact technique Artemisia used,<br />
correctly map the work’s condition, and monitor<br />
our treatment plan for the painting. Due to the<br />
historic nature of the repaints, it is not possible<br />
to remove them from the surface, but the scope<br />
of our diagnostics will facilitate the creation of a<br />
virtual image of the original that lies beneath the<br />
surface of the painting, as we see it today,” Wicks<br />
explains. “Next week, we start our virtual journey<br />
‘beneath the veil’ under diffuse and raking light<br />
sources, followed by UV and infrared research.<br />
Hypercolormetric Multispectral Imaging and<br />
examination by digital microscope will then help<br />
us learn as much as possible about the condition<br />
of the original painting technique and the later<br />
repaints. X-ray and high-resolution reflectography<br />
and other analytical techniques will follow.” RC<br />
52 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
Right: Artemisia Gentileschi’s<br />
Allegory of Inclination under<br />
raking light<br />
(Image: Ottaviano Caruso).<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 53
54 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
There’s no place like ‘home’<br />
Michelangelo’s house is Artemisia’s abode<br />
The modest via Ghibellina palazzo was one<br />
Artemisia herself frequented during her stint<br />
as a court painter in Florence, hobnobbing<br />
with Michelangelo the Younger – one of her most<br />
dedicated patrons and namesake of her daughter<br />
Agnola, born in 1614, who, unfortunately, died<br />
before she had time to be baptised.<br />
At Casa Buonarroti, Artemisia socialised with<br />
and befriended renowned members of the<br />
Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, Europe’s first<br />
drawing academy, of which Artemisia became a<br />
member in 1616. Her fellow members included<br />
Galileo, with whom the artist corresponded,<br />
even after his exile. The compass held aloft by<br />
the Inclination’s allegorical figure is thought<br />
to be a nod to the renowned scientist and his<br />
controversial theories.<br />
With her intelligence, exceptional selfpromotion<br />
skills, and the Grand Duke’s favour<br />
– Cosimo II had commissioned several works<br />
by the artist prior to the Buonarroti picture –<br />
Artemisia was at home in Florence’s cultural<br />
scene. “The seven years she spent in Florence<br />
marked a period of transformation for Artemisia,”<br />
writes Letizia Treves in the catalogue of<br />
Artemisia, the show she curated at London’s<br />
National Gallery in 2020. “She learnt to read and<br />
write, forged enduring friendships, met influential<br />
figures at the Medici court and moved in cultured<br />
intellectual circles. The artistic practices she had<br />
learnt from her father Orazio stayed with her, but<br />
her art took a new direction. Fully conscious of<br />
the singularity of her position as a gifted female<br />
painter, she frequently used her own image in her<br />
work and, as a member of the artists’ academy,<br />
was abreast of developments in contemporary<br />
art.”<br />
Artemisia had the opportunity to enter into<br />
dialogue with up-and-coming artists of her day,<br />
through her work on the Allegory of Inclination,<br />
one of a series of fifteen canvases, created by<br />
emergent Tuscan painters, to tribute the values<br />
of Michelangelo the Great. When the younger<br />
Buonarroti commissioned a five-month pregnant<br />
Artemisia Gentileschi to paint her piece for<br />
the piano nobile, or ‘first floor (fit for nobility)’,<br />
the artist’s fee was three times that of her male<br />
counterparts, and she is said to have been given<br />
more ‘iconographic freedom’ than the other artists<br />
involved, which include dall’Empoli, Passignano,<br />
Matteo Rosselli and Francesco Furini. On the<br />
ceiling, across from Artemisia’s canvas is a work<br />
by Francesco Bianco Buonavita – also painted in<br />
1616 – which depicts the attribute of Ingenio –<br />
the genius or intelligence one needs to produce<br />
art. This value is inclination’s inseparable twin –<br />
the drive to produce art must be accompanied by<br />
exceptional skill.<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 55
56 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
Previous pages: Views of the Casa Buonarroti<br />
Gallery Ceiling, (Image: Olga Makarova).<br />
Left: Saint Michael Archangel, Michelangelo<br />
Cinganelli, 1922, Casa Buonarroti Museum Chapel.<br />
Inset, below: Giuliano Finelli, Bust of Michelangelo<br />
the Younger, 1630, Casa Buonarroti Museum.<br />
The Gallery ceiling was, of course, merely a<br />
small part of a much larger project, conceived<br />
by Michelangelo the Younger, who shared<br />
his great uncle’s obsession with building an<br />
“honourable” home in Florence from the<br />
five buildings the artist had purchased in<br />
1508, the year he began work on the Sistine<br />
Chapel. [The museum’s street address is<br />
now number 70]. Buonarroti the Younger<br />
– a poet, playwright and academician<br />
– who incidentally was a great patron of<br />
female creativity (his support of composer<br />
Francesca Caccini is a case in point) –<br />
restored the complex with a home-museum<br />
in mind, and spent over three decades<br />
(1612 to 1643) working in his studiolo,<br />
a wooden booth-like structure, that<br />
could be described as a ‘walk-in<br />
desk’.<br />
In this miniature fortress<br />
of privacy, placed in what<br />
is now the seventeenthcentury<br />
wing, he worked<br />
to devise and execute<br />
a plan, in painstaking<br />
detail. Hence, this wing<br />
of the museum is entirely<br />
to his credit and, beyond<br />
the Gallery, it includes the<br />
Chamber of Day and Night, the<br />
jewel-box Chapel of Archangel<br />
Michael – the palace patron<br />
saint for obvious reasons – and the<br />
Studio, whose ceiling fresco tributes<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 57
Above: Model of the facade of the San Lorenzo Church<br />
Right, top: Battle of the Centaurs, Michelangelo Buonarroti<br />
(1490-92) Casa Buonarroti Museum.<br />
Right: Detail, Battle of the Centaurs, Michelangelo<br />
Buonarroti.<br />
‘the greats’ of all fields of knowledge. Even Galileo<br />
is featured among his scientist forefathers – a<br />
brave decision by Michelangelo the Younger, in a<br />
climate that would soon give rise to the scientist’s<br />
condemnation as a heretic for his heliocentric view<br />
of the Cosmos. (Galileo was sentenced to life in<br />
prison, later commuted to house arrest which he<br />
served in Arcetri, just south of Florence).<br />
58 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
For the duration of the Artemsia UpClose<br />
project, a life-size photograph of the artwork has<br />
taken its place inside the ceiling’s monumental<br />
frame, to avoid a gaping hole and assure the<br />
visitor Artemisia’s painting – under restoration<br />
in the adjacent Model Room, will return to her<br />
usual ‘height’ once Florence and the world has<br />
had a chance to see her up close. As a sidebar,<br />
the ‘Model’ in whose shadow the Inclination’s<br />
restoration is underway, is the architectural<br />
model of San Lorenzo Church that Michelangelo<br />
designed in circa 1518, by request of the Medici<br />
pope, Leo X, the second son of Lorenzo the<br />
Magnificent. Michelangelo had lived with the<br />
future Pope Leo X – then known as Giovanni –<br />
for part of his youth, after being discovered by<br />
Il Magnifico in the San Marco sculpture-garden<br />
workshop, and invited to live in the Medici<br />
palace and be educated together with the<br />
Medici children.<br />
When Artemsia’s guests move from the<br />
Model Room, and walk towards the Gallery,<br />
they will cross the museum’s Marble Room,<br />
newly restored by Friends of Florence, and<br />
host to Michelangelo’s Madonna della<br />
Scala (c. 1491) and Battle of the Centaurs<br />
(c. 1492). There is a figure among the latter<br />
relief’s mass of wrestling bodies that<br />
Artemisia used as a source of inspiration<br />
for the positioning of her own allegorical<br />
figure. Look for the leaning figure on the<br />
left-hand side who is holding a cube-like<br />
stone which he is preparing to launch into<br />
the chaos – he is Michelangelo’s man who<br />
inspired our woman. RC<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 59
Left: Biffoli-Sostegni<br />
Manuscript. Library of<br />
the Royal Conservatories<br />
of Brussels, Belgium<br />
Manuscript B-Bc 27766<br />
(page 23v).<br />
Overleaf: Musica Secreta<br />
CD covers.<br />
60 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
The ‘archive angel’ and new<br />
music from the Renaissance<br />
Musica Secreta’s Laurie Stras on women’s voices<br />
By Margie MacKinnon<br />
I“<br />
I’ve made it my musicological life goal to restore<br />
the female voice to its central role in the sound<br />
of the Renaissance city.” These are the words of<br />
Laurie Stras, director of Musica Secreta, a British<br />
vocal ensemble founded in 1991 to explore,<br />
perform and record music written by and for<br />
women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.<br />
Stras is making the point that traditional musical<br />
history focuses on compositions that would have<br />
been performed (by men) at great Papal and ducal<br />
chapels – accessible to only a small number of<br />
‘worthy’ individuals. The music that would have<br />
been familiar to ordinary citizens, on the other<br />
hand, was “the sound of female voices, going up<br />
to God, and maintaining the spiritual health of the<br />
city”. People could walk into a convent at almost<br />
any hour of the day and hear women’s voices.<br />
“The sisters would have spent at least eight hours<br />
singing,” notes Stras, “and would never have got<br />
much sleep!”<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 61
Over the course of 30 years, Musica Secreta<br />
have recorded ten CDs, four of which are of<br />
music exclusively by historic women composers.<br />
Their most recent CD, Mother Sister Daughter,<br />
features music believed to have originated in two<br />
Italian convents, Santa Lucia in Verona, and the<br />
Florentine San Matteo in Arcetri. The album was<br />
included in a New York Times review of ‘classical<br />
music albums to listen to right now’, which<br />
noted approvingly that, the repertoire includes<br />
“a setting of the Vespers of St Lucy that has a …<br />
tangy simplicity and transparency; [and] two sets<br />
of Vespers for St. Clare [that] are … polished and<br />
pristine.” The review also singled out Stras for<br />
creating the performing editions, which include<br />
light accompaniment for harp, organ and bass<br />
viol, as well as for directing “this precise, intimate<br />
and unaffected gathering of voices.”<br />
Stras explains that creating the performing<br />
editions is a process of taking various bits of<br />
music from a manuscript, which may have been<br />
written in separate polyphonic voices, and<br />
working out how to put them together. Where<br />
there are ‘gaps’ in a score, the composer must<br />
try to work out what the missing notes are from<br />
what’s left or, in the worst case scenario, she will<br />
have to recompose things - much like a restorer<br />
matching an artist’s style to fill in damaged parts<br />
of a painting. In some cases, an instrument will<br />
be substituted for a lower voice, or music will be<br />
transposed to suit the register of the singers.<br />
A meticulous scholar, Stras often can’t say<br />
definitively which music is linked to a particular<br />
convent. “There is no incontrovertible evidence<br />
linking the Vespers of St. Lucy with Santa<br />
Lucia,” she explains, “but both their repertoire<br />
and the illuminations in the manuscripts point<br />
to a Benedictine convent dedicated to Saint<br />
Lucy.” Archival research is the starting point for<br />
uncovering the music of the Renaissance – but<br />
‘archives’ can vary from sophisticated digital<br />
platforms that allow scholars to search documents<br />
62 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
online, to a cardboard box tucked out of view in<br />
the vestry of an ancient church – and everything<br />
in between. As with all historical research, original<br />
documents may be incomplete or difficult to<br />
decipher, or so fragile that it is not possible to<br />
consult them. Important discoveries may be<br />
serendipitous or, as Stras prefers to think, given<br />
a helping hand by an “‘archive angel’ who guides<br />
you towards things that you would not otherwise<br />
find, when you least expect to find them”.<br />
Stras describes a research expedition she had<br />
planned in 1996 to the State Archives in Regio<br />
Emilia. With only a brief amount of time available<br />
to her, she called ahead to ensure the Archives<br />
would be open on the day of her visit. But, when<br />
she arrived, she was met with a sign announcing<br />
‘Archivio Chiuso’ – Archives Closed. “Some years<br />
later,” she continues, “I found myself at a loose<br />
end, and decided that I would go for a half day<br />
and look through this book that I hadn’t managed<br />
see earlier. As I read it, I noticed something about<br />
one of the pieces that was very unusual, but I<br />
knew exactly what it was because I was doing<br />
a research project at that time about musical<br />
puzzles. What I found indicated that the whole<br />
piece would have been a musical puzzle – but<br />
I wouldn’t have known that in 1996 and I would<br />
never have returned to that archive and seen<br />
that book had I not been prevented from seeing<br />
it when I first attempted to visit.”<br />
Another intervention of the ‘archive angel’<br />
came on the day in 2018 that Musica Secreta<br />
arrived in Florence to perform at the unveiling<br />
of a newly restored painting by sixteenthcentury<br />
painter Sister Plautilla Nelli, at the Last<br />
Supper Museum of Andrea del Sarto. Stras made<br />
an impromptu visit to the Biblioteca Nazionale<br />
where, in the final moments before closing time,<br />
she discovered the manuscript of the complete<br />
Lamentations for Good Friday by Antoine Brumel,<br />
one of the most celebrated composers of the<br />
Renaissance. Musica Secreta’s 2019 album From<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 63
Left : Galileo Galilei: the Torre del Gallo and Villa Galletti with the old Galileo<br />
observatory in Arcetri, Wellcome Collection.<br />
Above: Portrait traditionally identified as Virginia (1600-1634), natural<br />
daughter of Galileo Galilei and Marina Gamba, Wellcome Collection.<br />
Left: Map made during<br />
the pastoral Visit of Msgr.<br />
Pietro Niccolini to the<br />
Church at the Monastery<br />
of S. Matteo in Arcetri<br />
(1638).<br />
Florence, Archiepiscopal<br />
Archives. Diocesan<br />
Pastoral Visitation,<br />
b. 11, f. 5.<br />
64 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
Above: Torre del Gallo, at a distance.<br />
Darkness Into Light became the first recording of<br />
Brumel’s ‘Lamentations’ which had been believed<br />
to be lost.<br />
The Vespers for St Clare were found in the<br />
‘Biffoli-Sostegni’ manuscript, dated 1560, and<br />
named for the two nuns whose names are<br />
embossed on the leather bindings: Agnoleta<br />
Biffoli and Clemenzia Sostegni. It was apparent to<br />
Stras that the Vespers were written for four skilled<br />
women’s voices. “It is possible,” she suggests, “that<br />
they were specifically written for the nuns at San<br />
Matteo. They have these three shimmery really<br />
high voices, and a fourth that is almost as high<br />
as the others, in this kind of transparent sound<br />
which is quite extraordinary.” Stras discovered<br />
that the manuscript originated from the small<br />
and relatively poor convent of San Matteo, about<br />
a mile south of Florence’s city walls.<br />
Despite its modest stature, San Matteo has<br />
an illustrious connection: it was home to the<br />
illegitimate daughter of the scientist Galileo<br />
Galilei. Born Virginia Galilei, but known as Sister<br />
Maria Celeste, she was sent to live in the convent<br />
soon after her thirteenth birthday. As well as<br />
taking on the duties of apothecary, Maria Celeste<br />
became responsible for the day-to-day running<br />
of the choir. Stras admits that “it is tempting to<br />
speculate that Maria Celeste herself would have<br />
used the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript after it<br />
reverted to the convent on Clemenzia Sostegni’s<br />
death some time after 1606.”<br />
We have been able to learn a great deal about<br />
the close relationship between daughter and<br />
father through a series of 124 letters written by<br />
Maria Celeste to Galileo which were discovered<br />
among his papers after his death. The letters also<br />
reveal many of the details and hardships of life<br />
inside the convent. In a letter to her father dated<br />
18 October 1630, Maria Celeste wrote: “I write at<br />
seven hours after sunset: I beg your Lordship to<br />
excuse me if I make errors, because during the<br />
day I haven’t an hour that I can call mine, since<br />
to all my other jobs is now added the teaching<br />
of plainchant to four girls and … the organisation<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 65
Above, top: Laurie Stras, centre, and Musica Secreta, (Image: Nick Rutter). Above: Musica Secreta, (Image: Kate Beaugié).<br />
Right: Cover of the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript, Library of the Royal Conservatories of Brussels, Belgium Manuscript B-Bc 27766 (binding).<br />
66 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
of the Office in the choir. This wouldn’t be<br />
tiring for me, except that I do not understand<br />
Latin at all.”<br />
After being condemned by the Roman<br />
Inquisition in 1633 for his theory of a suncentred<br />
cosmos, Galileo returned to live<br />
under house arrest in Arcetri, in a villa within<br />
view of his daughter’s convent. Just four<br />
months after he arrived there in 1634, Sister<br />
Maria Celeste died of dysentery at the age<br />
of 33.<br />
All that remains of the original Convent<br />
of San Matteo is a door and a courtyard, but<br />
it is possible to imagine how the convent<br />
looked from a whimsical document created,<br />
during Maria Celeste’s lifetime, by a visiting<br />
archbishop. Concerned about the fact that<br />
the villagers in Arcetri had to come into the<br />
convent to draw water from their well, the<br />
archbishop drew a map showing the existing<br />
layout – in preparation for building a well<br />
outside the convent walls.<br />
“He must have had a lot of time on his<br />
hands,” Stras comments, pointing out the<br />
details. “It even has little footsteps, almost<br />
like the Harry Potter maps.” One can only<br />
wonder how much longer the villagers<br />
lingered at the well, just to hear the voices<br />
of the nuns chanting the psalms and<br />
reciting stories in music. For them, it might<br />
have been the high point in a long day of<br />
arduous toil. For us, it is further proof of<br />
how essential the female voices emanating<br />
from Renaissance convents were to the<br />
everyday well-being of the city. RC<br />
Available as a download or CD, Mother Sister Daughter concludes with Musica Secreta’s first<br />
commissioned work: The Veiled Sisters by British composer Joanna Marsh. This work weaves<br />
together the present and the past, combining the words of contemporary Norfolk poet Esther<br />
Morgan and the seventeenth-century poet Alessandro Francucci, contrasting the moment a beautiful<br />
young singer enters a convent with the view of another woman looking out from a dark interior.<br />
www.musicasecreta.org<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 67
Death of a Duchess<br />
Historical fiction or true crime?<br />
By Margie MacKinnon<br />
‘LM’ – a young girl from a wealthy and powerful<br />
family; ‘AF’ – an older man with an ancient and<br />
noble lineage. Their marriage is hastily arranged<br />
after the untimely death of LM’s older sister, AF’s<br />
intended bride. After a lengthy engagement, their<br />
childless marriage of less than a year ends with<br />
LM’s death at the age of 16. The official cause is<br />
tuberculosis, but rumours soon circulate that LM<br />
has been murdered, most likely poisoned, by her<br />
husband. There is a history of violent death in<br />
the family …<br />
Cue the Netflix true crime series vowing to get<br />
to the bottom of the story. Sadly, the witnesses are<br />
all dead and the documentary evidence is slim:<br />
a contemporary portrait of LM, a poem written<br />
some 300 years later and, now, a novel by Maggie<br />
O’Farrell entitled The Marriage Portrait, inspired<br />
by both.<br />
AF is Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, in need of a<br />
wife to provide him with an heir to his 900-yearold<br />
title. LM is Lucrezia de’ Medici, born in 1545, the<br />
third and last (legitimate) daughter of Cosimo I,<br />
the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and his wife Eleonora<br />
of Toledo. True to her place in the family, Lucrezia,<br />
at first glance, comes across as a Cinderella<br />
figure. Caroline P. Murphy’s excellent biography<br />
of Lucrezia’s older sister Isabella reports that, “at<br />
the Medici court, [oldest daughter] Maria earned<br />
praise for her graciousness, her rare beauty, and<br />
regal ways” while Isabella, her father’s favourite,<br />
was noted for her “liveliness and irrepressibility”.<br />
Lucrezia, on the other hand, was “less gifted than<br />
her sisters [and] attracted little comment.”<br />
The absence of hard evidence – letters,<br />
diaries, household accounts and inventories, on<br />
which biographies are often based – creates a<br />
void, which O’Farrell fills with imaginative and<br />
evocative prose to recreate Lucrezia’s story. The<br />
author remains faithful to the known facts of the<br />
young duchess’s life, with a few alterations “in<br />
the name of fiction” for narrative cohesion and<br />
to avoid confusion amongst various characters<br />
with the same names. The fictional Lucrezia is<br />
highly educated, having been tutored at home,<br />
along with her brothers. Although most girls in<br />
sixteenth-century Italy would have received little<br />
formal education, it was not unusual for young<br />
women of noble or wealthy families to receive<br />
the training necessary for them to be considered<br />
good marriage prospects. In the Grand Duke’s<br />
family, both the boys and the girls were taught<br />
Latin and Spanish (their mother’s language); they<br />
studied the works of philosophers and historians;<br />
they learned to play several instruments and<br />
became skilled equestrians.<br />
With no way to make use of the intellectual gifts<br />
so assiduously instilled by the family tutor, the<br />
fictional Lucrezia turns to painting as a creative<br />
outlet. While there is no evidence of the real<br />
Lucrezia having been an artist, she would have<br />
68 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
Above: Portrait of Lucrezia de’ Medici, Agnolo<br />
Bronzino, 1560, North Carolina Museum of Art,<br />
Raleigh.<br />
Right: Portrait of Alfonso II d’Este, unknown author,<br />
late XVII century, MET, New York.<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 69
Above: Casa Guidi, where the<br />
Brownings lived during their<br />
time in Florence.<br />
Right: Maggie O’Farrell, (Image:<br />
Murdo Macleod).<br />
Far right: Lucrezia de’ Medici’s<br />
tomb at the Corpus Domini<br />
Monastery, Ferrara.<br />
grown up amid the masterpieces of the Medici art<br />
collection and been surrounded by palace walls<br />
frescoed by Vasari and other renowned artists of<br />
the Renaissance. Any art training she received<br />
would have steered her towards painting genres<br />
suitable for young women. Thus, it feels right<br />
when the fictional Lucrezia, who finds solace<br />
in painting fantastical scenes of wild imaginary<br />
creatures, hides them from Alfonso by covering<br />
them with the traditional still lifes deemed<br />
appropriate for women artists.<br />
It is also true, as the novel reveals, that the<br />
Grand Duke kept a menagerie of exotic animals,<br />
including lions, in the cellars below the Palazzo<br />
Vecchio. The roars of the lions could be heard<br />
by those passing behind the palace on the aptly<br />
named via dei Leoni, and no doubt would have<br />
fed the imaginations of the real Medici children<br />
as well as the fictional Lucrezia. It has been<br />
suggested that the foul odours emanating from<br />
the animal enclosures prompted the family’s<br />
subsequent move to Palazzo Pitti on the opposite<br />
side of the Arno.<br />
The ‘Marriage Portrait’ of the book’s title is an<br />
invention of the Victorian poet Robert Browning.<br />
His monologue ‘My Last Duchess’ is written in the<br />
voice of Alfonso. Addressing an emissary who<br />
has come to Ferrara to negotiate the recently<br />
widowed Duke’s next marriage, Alfonso draws a<br />
curtain and invites his guest to look at a portrait<br />
on the wall. “That’s my last Duchess painted on<br />
the wall/ Looking as if she were alive,” he says.<br />
He describes Lucrezia’s kind and happy nature<br />
but complains that ‘”she had a heart … too soon<br />
made glad … twas not her husband’s presence<br />
only” that drew her smiles; instead, she was “too<br />
easily impressed; she liked whate’er she looked<br />
on … [and] ranked my gift of a nine-hundredyears-old-name<br />
with anybody’s gift’”. Chillingly, he<br />
states, ‘”I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped<br />
together.’” Having made this startling admission,<br />
Alfonso resumes the tour of his artworks and<br />
returns to discussing the arrangements for<br />
marriage to another young girl.<br />
In an afterword to the novel, O’Farrell recounts<br />
that she had been rereading Browning’s dramatic<br />
70 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
monologues and came across a reference to<br />
them, as she was looking through her diary while<br />
waiting to collect her daughter from a play date.<br />
“I was thinking about ‘My Last Duchess’ and its<br />
brilliance in capturing the sinister narcissism of<br />
the Duke. In the space of a few lines, Browning<br />
conveys a man so assured of his position and<br />
authority that he thinks nothing of telling<br />
the family of his new betrothed that he had<br />
his previous wife murdered for the grave sin<br />
of smiling too much.” Searching Lucrezia de’<br />
Medici’s name online on her phone, O’Farrell was<br />
struck by the image that appeared on the screen.<br />
“Here she was: the wife from the poem, the<br />
one kept behind a curtain which only the Duke<br />
himself was allowed to draw back, so he and he<br />
alone could control her smiles.” The seed for a<br />
new novel was sown.<br />
The painting that is often associated with<br />
Browning’s poem is a portrait of Lucrezia<br />
commissioned shortly before the future Duchess<br />
left for Ferrara. It has been attributed variously<br />
to Agnolo Bronzino (or his studio) or his nephew<br />
Alessandro Allori. This painting, possibly<br />
commissioned by Lucrezia’s brother Francesco,<br />
the future Grand Duke, did not travel to Ferrara<br />
but remained in Florence to be hung in one of<br />
the Medici palaces as a constant reminder of the<br />
absent princess.<br />
Browning and his wife, fellow poet Elizabeth<br />
Barrett Browning, lived for 14 years, from 1847<br />
to 1861, in rooms in the Palazzo Guidi, located<br />
opposite the south wing of the Palazzo Pitti which<br />
was Lucrezia’s childhood home. The Palatine<br />
Gallery of the Palazzo opened to the public in<br />
1828, so it seems Browning would have had an<br />
opportunity to view the picture. The original<br />
painting now resides in the North Carolina<br />
Museum in Raleigh while a much smaller copy,<br />
O’Farrell says, hangs in relative obscurity, “low<br />
down on a wall in a distant room of the Palatine<br />
Gallery, next to a fire extinguisher”.<br />
O’Farrell has said that it is not a coincidence<br />
that she wrote about a woman confined to a<br />
palazzo for her own safety (as all upper class<br />
Renaissance women were) during the Covid<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 71
lockdown, when many of us experienced that<br />
strict confinement first hand. What better time<br />
to try to get into the mind of a woman who<br />
rarely went beyond the walls of her house<br />
while waiting for her husband to claim her and<br />
take her away to start a new life? The usual<br />
process of first researching and then writing a<br />
novel was reversed in the case of The Marriage<br />
Portrait, with the writing mostly completed in<br />
the spaces between home schooling and<br />
escapes for a daily walk around the local park.<br />
The research trip to Florence and Ferrara to<br />
take notes, visit locations and sketch maps<br />
came later, as soon as travel was permitted.<br />
When she was finally able to see the places<br />
Lucrezia had lived, O’Farrell was unprepared<br />
for the emotional impact this would have<br />
on her. “I hadn’t bargained for the effect of<br />
walking along a corridor where a person you<br />
have been thinking and dreaming about for<br />
two years had lived.” A visit to the monastery<br />
outside of Ferrara where Lucrezia was buried<br />
left her devastated. “When the custodian of<br />
the monastery told me that in all the time he<br />
had worked there, not a single person had ever<br />
before asked to see the grave of Lucrezia de’<br />
Medici d’Este, I’m not ashamed to say that I<br />
cried. Because she had died a long way from<br />
72 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
her home and family, surrounded by people<br />
she barely knew.” This, too, resonates in the<br />
time of Covid.<br />
For a young woman about whom so little is<br />
known, it is striking that Lucrezia was the subject<br />
of a portrait by the pre-eminent artist of the<br />
Cinquecento in Florence, and commemorated<br />
in a poem by one of the most highly-regarded<br />
English poets. With so little hard evidence to<br />
go on, historical fiction becomes a way to tell<br />
stories of women whose lives would otherwise<br />
remain unknown. The Marriage Portrait is<br />
an immersive story that shines a light on a<br />
historical figure, capturing the setting and<br />
circumstances of her life, while reminding us<br />
about the deeper truths of human existence.<br />
As for the Netflix true crime series, Isabella<br />
de’ Medici, rather than her sister Lucrezia, might<br />
make a better subject. Cosimo I had looked<br />
out for his favourite daughter throughout her<br />
life and unhappy marriage to Paolo Giordano<br />
Orsini but, on Cosimo’s death, she no longer<br />
enjoyed this protection. It is widely believed<br />
that the new Grand Duke Francesco and Orsini<br />
conspired to murder Isabella, whose untimely<br />
death was explained as the result of an accident<br />
while washing her hair… RC<br />
Top: Seventeenth-century map of Ferrara<br />
Above: Central Ferrara<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 73
‘More Bill’, many<br />
Kennedys<br />
A spotlight on Elaine de Kooning from ‘Restoration<br />
Conversations’ with art collector Christian Levett<br />
BEGINNINGS<br />
“About eight years ago, when I began collecting<br />
what would eventually become the Levett<br />
Collection in Florence, I was buying purely postwar<br />
paintings by both males and females, without<br />
differentiating between the two, but the more<br />
research I did, the more interested I became<br />
in the women painters. There’s a trend now, of<br />
collecting female artists,” explains art collector<br />
Christian Levett, during our autumn episode of<br />
Restoration Conversations, featuring his home<br />
gallery, open to museum docents, scholars and<br />
collectors for private research tours. Christian’s<br />
more than 100-piece collection features an<br />
impressive array of Abstract Expressionist female<br />
artists, including several ground-breaking works<br />
by New York-based artist Elaine de Kooning<br />
B(1918–1989).<br />
74 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
“At the moment, everyone is trying correct the<br />
past, in that the media worked out ten years ago<br />
that 95 percent of artworks on museum walls<br />
were by white male artists. It was a slightly<br />
different path for me, I was collecting both male<br />
and female – so, I bought Joan Mitchell, Helen<br />
Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner and male artists<br />
as well. Then I bought Elaine de Kooning’s<br />
portrait catalogue and became familiar with the<br />
‘Ninth Street Women’ show, where she and others<br />
were featured, and began thinking, ‘There is a<br />
whole group of women artists who should be<br />
brought back to the fore!’” The excerpts below,<br />
gleaned from Christian’s conversation, provides<br />
a ‘canvas-like window’ onto a few of the artist’s<br />
most famous works.<br />
THE BURGHERS OF AMSTERDAM<br />
AVENUE<br />
One of the major paintings of Abstract<br />
Expressionism was by Elaine de Kooning who<br />
began experimenting with Abstract portraiture<br />
in the 1940s, and continued to do so throughout<br />
her career. Possibly her most famous picture is<br />
named after the famous Rodin sculpture from<br />
1885, The Burghers of Calais. There are all sorts of<br />
Dutch connotations in it. It’s called The Burghers<br />
of Amsterdam Avenue; Amsterdam Avenue runs<br />
up into Harlem. She is Elaine de Kooning, married<br />
to Willem de Kooning, who is Dutch; and she<br />
wants to set it out like a seventeenth-century<br />
portrait, like a Night Watch or an early Rembrandtesque<br />
Dutch or Flemish family scene. When you<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 75
stand back, you can see it’s a monumental multifigured<br />
portrait, but if you take any 50 square<br />
centimetres of the canvas, eliminating the heads<br />
and feet, all you will see is pure abstraction.A<br />
friend of Elaine de Kooning’s taught an art class<br />
at a drug rehabilitation centre on an island east<br />
of the Bronx, which is where de Kooning found<br />
these ‘sitters’. She wanted to create major political<br />
picture to draw attention to the terrible plight of<br />
drug addiction in New York in the 1960s – this<br />
was painted in 1963 – and it was the perfect year<br />
to paint a picture that would make a political<br />
splurge, because it was also the year she was<br />
painting the US president, JFK.<br />
PORTRAIT GESTURES<br />
In 1962, Elaine de Kooning was given a commission<br />
by the Truman Library in Missouri and she spent<br />
nearly all of 1963 painting pictures of JFK. He was<br />
assassinated in November 1963, and because she<br />
was so focused on this commission, she went<br />
through a long period of mourning, and didn’t<br />
paint much in 1964, until she finally delivered<br />
the commission to the Truman library in 1965 –<br />
almost 3 years after the original commission. She<br />
did a hundred or so sketches of JFK, and over 20<br />
paintings of all different sizes. This is the second<br />
or third largest one, in a wonderful pose, legs<br />
open casually, yet he was the president!<br />
Another telling portrait by Elaine is her<br />
depiction of Willem (Bill) de Kooning, from 1952.<br />
In the mid-1940s she starts painting oil portraits,<br />
using quite a dark palate; the faces are largely<br />
wiped, with almost no features to the face.<br />
Regarding this one, she once wrote, ‘As soon<br />
as I wiped off his face, it was more Bill’. Theirs<br />
was a turbulent open marriage, but there was<br />
a sweetness and connection that remained<br />
between them. The reason she didn’t paint face<br />
details is that she always said you learned more<br />
about a person from their posture, the way they<br />
carry themselves. She wanted to bring that idea<br />
76 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
through, because normally, when you<br />
look at a portrait, the first thing you do is<br />
look at the face, and the expression. She<br />
wanted to do the opposite, for us to look<br />
at the mass of colour, the general feeling<br />
and the position of the person.<br />
Previous page: The Burghers<br />
of Amsterdam Avenue, 1963,<br />
Elaine de Kooning, Levett<br />
Collection, Florence.<br />
(Image: Marco Badiani).<br />
Far left: The Levett Collection<br />
home-galllery, Florence, with<br />
Pat Passlof’s Stove, 1959, on the<br />
central wall.<br />
(Image: Marco Badiani).<br />
Above: John F. Kennedy, 1963,<br />
Elaine de Kooning, Levett<br />
Collection, Florence<br />
Bill, 1952, Elaine de Kooning,<br />
Levett Collection, Florence.<br />
Left: Self portrait, 1965, Elaine<br />
de Kooning, Levett Collection,<br />
Florence.<br />
BULLFIGHT<br />
She painted five of these ‘Bullfight’<br />
paintings, and some are as large as 4<br />
metres long – one is in the permanent<br />
collection at the Denver Art Museum, for<br />
example. This one is acrylic on canvas,<br />
and it depicts a fantastic charging bull<br />
– one can see the spears and feathers<br />
charging out… the back of his shoulders<br />
and this violent action, and it is one of<br />
her most famous series of works which<br />
was extremely popular. I often think<br />
that this is the time Picasso is trying to<br />
introduce bullfighting into the south<br />
of France, from Spain, and we see a<br />
constant minotaur occurring in his work.<br />
It was 1959, and, in Europe, everyone<br />
knew Picasso; he would visit New York<br />
time and again, and here, we have<br />
Elaine de Kooning portraying bullfights<br />
because she’s been to Mexico and seen<br />
them. It’s an interesting connection. The<br />
movement here is unbelievable. He is<br />
charging head down… he’s absolutely<br />
flying – spears, feathers and everything<br />
– it’s powerful! She painted movement<br />
tremendously. RC<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 77
78 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
“I am becoming<br />
somebody”<br />
Paula Modersohn-Becker at the Royal Academy of Art<br />
By Margie MacKinnon<br />
Four pioneering female artists of the avantgarde<br />
movement in Germany are the focus of a<br />
new exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Art.<br />
Opening in November <strong>2022</strong>, ‘Making Modernism’<br />
features the work of Gabriele Münter, Käthe<br />
Kollwitz, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Marianne<br />
Werefkin. All four were working in Germany in<br />
the early 1900s, exploring themes of identity,<br />
representation and belonging. The Modernist<br />
movement in art began at the end of the<br />
nineteenth century. It was a rejection of traditional<br />
approaches to art, notably the realistic depiction of<br />
subjects, in favour of experimentation with form<br />
and colour, and a leaning towards abstraction.<br />
Expressionism, which was an early manifestation<br />
of Modernism, originated in Northern Europe and<br />
was particularly popular in Germany.<br />
With the exception of Kollwitz, who abandoned<br />
painting altogether after 1890, in favour of etching<br />
and, later, sculpture and woodcuts, these early<br />
Expressionist painters created works of startling<br />
simplicity and intense colours, with forms defined<br />
by dark outlines. Seeking to convey emotions and<br />
the responses that events arouse within a person,<br />
Expressionism is characterised by the use of<br />
vivid colours, and forms that have been reduced<br />
to their purest essence. Münter described her<br />
pictures as “moments of life … instantaneous<br />
visual experiences, generally noted very rapidly<br />
and spontaneously.” Werefkin was influenced by<br />
Van Gogh, Gauguin and Edvard Munch, as well as<br />
the ideas of the Nabis painters (such as Edouard<br />
Vuillard) whose works emphasised the flatness of<br />
the painting surface through the use of simplified<br />
areas of colour.<br />
Within this group of accomplished artists,<br />
Paula Modersohn-Becker stands out, partly<br />
because of the subject matter of her works and<br />
her unapologetic unidealised portraits of girls<br />
and women, and partly because she managed to<br />
develop her artistic vision and create a lasting<br />
legacy, despite dying at the age of only 31.<br />
Left: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Mother with Child on<br />
her Arm, Nude II, autumn 1906. Oil on canvas,<br />
80 x 59 cm. Museum Ostwall im Dortmunder U.<br />
(Photo: Jürgen Spiler, Dortmund).<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 79
Left: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-portrait as<br />
a Standing Nude with Hat, summer 1906. Oil<br />
tempera on canvas. 40 x 19.5 cm. Paula Modersohn-<br />
Becker Stiftung, Bremen, on loan from a private<br />
collection.<br />
Right: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Girl with<br />
Child, 1902. Oil on cardboard, 45.3 x 50.5 cm.<br />
Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague.<br />
Born in Dresden, Germany in 1876, Paula’s<br />
art studies began at age 16, when she attended<br />
drawing classes at St John’s Wood Art School in<br />
London. A few years later, she was admitted to the<br />
inaugural painting class at the Women’s Academy<br />
in Berlin. On her return to the family home (by<br />
then relocated to Bremen), she convinced her<br />
parents to allow her to attend another course at<br />
the nearby artists’ colony in the northern town<br />
of Worpswede. Here, she met her future husband<br />
Otto Modersohn, and began close friendships<br />
with the sculptor Clara Westhoff and the poet<br />
Rainer Maria Rilke. Finding the Worpswede style<br />
too refined and restrictive for her developing<br />
tastes, and having come into a small endowment<br />
from her uncle, in 1900 Paula joined her friend<br />
Clara in Paris where the latter had gone to study<br />
with Auguste Rodin. Paula enrolled in classes at<br />
the Academie Colarossi (where she went on to<br />
win first prize) and began the study of anatomy<br />
at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which had only just<br />
opened its doors to women.<br />
During her brief working life, Paula produced<br />
more than 700 paintings and over 1,000 drawings.<br />
Starting with landscapes and scenes of local<br />
peasant life in Worpswede, she soon concluded<br />
that painting people was more satisfying; she<br />
also felt that the conventional Worpswede style<br />
was too genre-like to render her emotional<br />
response to her subjects. She began to use a<br />
more restricted colour palette, deploying it in a<br />
symbolic rather than naturalistic manner. Paula is<br />
known in particular for her portraits of women<br />
and children, and for her nude self-portraits. With<br />
her Self-portrait on the 6th wedding Anniversary<br />
(1906) she became the first painter to have painted<br />
herself pregnant and nude. The apparent naivety<br />
and simplicity of her style mask a complex and<br />
conscious effort to find the essence of things,<br />
and, in her portraits of women especially, to<br />
reveal their humanity.<br />
80 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
Like many female painters, Paula struggled<br />
with the conventional expectations of her as a<br />
woman, and the difficulty of reconciling marriage<br />
and motherhood with her need to express herself<br />
as an artist. Her engagement in 1901 to Otto<br />
Modersohn came only months after his first wife’s<br />
death. The swiftness of this event, combined with<br />
the 11-year age gap between the two, concerned<br />
Paula’s parents only slightly less than the fact that<br />
her cooking skills were inadequate to keep her<br />
husband properly fed. They made it a condition<br />
of the marriage that she take cooking lessons.<br />
Sent to live with an aunt in Berlin to attend a twomonth<br />
course, Paula described it as a “culinary<br />
century” and was filled with longing to return to<br />
her studio and paintbrushes.<br />
Paula quickly discovered that marriage did not<br />
bring her the happiness she expected. In the<br />
first year of her marriage, she “cried a great deal<br />
and the tears often come like the great tears of<br />
childhood.” She was happier when she was away<br />
from Otto, and happier still when on her own<br />
in Paris, drinking in the paintings at the Louvre,<br />
taking drawing classes and, always, painting. In a<br />
letter to her sister, written during her final trip to<br />
Paris in May of 1906, Paula wrote, “I am becoming<br />
somebody—I’m living the most intensively happy<br />
period of my life.” In September of that year, Otto<br />
arrived in Paris for a six-month stay, and by the<br />
following March Paula had fallen pregnant.<br />
Paula Modersohn-Becker gave birth to her<br />
daughter, Mathilde, on November 2, 1907.<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 81
Marianne Werefkin, Twins, 1909. Tempera on paper, 27.5 x 36.5 cm.<br />
Fondazione Marianne Werefkin,<br />
Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna, Ascona.<br />
Marianne Werefkin, Circus – Before the Show, 1908/10. Tempera on<br />
cardboard, 53 x 88.5 cm. Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren.<br />
(Photo: © Peter Hinschlaeger).<br />
Following a difficult delivery that lasted for two<br />
days, the doctor ordered Paula to stay in bed to<br />
recover. When it was finally considered safe for<br />
her to get up, eighteen days later, a little party<br />
was organised and a group of friends and family<br />
gathered to celebrate. After almost three weeks<br />
of immobility, Paula rose from the bed, then<br />
collapsed on the floor. Within hours she died of<br />
an embolism, from lying down too long. The last<br />
word she uttered was, “Schade.” A pity. Mathilde<br />
lived to be ninety-one. She and her half-sister,<br />
Elsbeth, the daughter of Otto Modersohn’s<br />
first wife, who also died young, lived together<br />
in Bremen where they both worked in health<br />
services and welfare.<br />
Praising his wife’s work, Otto Modersohn noted<br />
Paula’s “strength and intimacy” and described her<br />
as “an artist through and through”. Her talent<br />
was not universally appreciated, with an early<br />
exhibition of her work being subjected to an<br />
hysterical attack by the art critic Arthur Fitger<br />
who claimed to “feel sick” when confronted with<br />
Paula’s pictures. After her death, however, she was<br />
quickly taken up by the local art establishment.<br />
She was included in numerous group shows<br />
in Germany, and many museums and private<br />
collectors bought her works. The poet, Rilke,<br />
memorialised Paula in his Requiem for a Friend.<br />
The Paula Becker-Modersohn House in Bremen,<br />
which opened its doors in 1927, was the first<br />
museum in the world devoted to a female artist.<br />
Ten years later, the Nazis “purged” German<br />
museums of seventy of her paintings. Many were<br />
destroyed; some were exhibited as “degenerate<br />
art”, described as “a revolting mixture of colours,<br />
of idiotic figures … the dregs of humanity”. Her<br />
reputation survived, and in Germany today her<br />
work can be spotted on posters, magnets and<br />
postcards. Paula’s mother printed a selection<br />
of her daughter’s letters which was a huge<br />
publishing success, selling 50,000 copies between<br />
the two wars.<br />
In the month before she died, Paula told her<br />
mother, “I would so love to go to Paris for a week.<br />
Fifty-five Cezannes are on exhibit there now!”<br />
And, to her friend Clara, she excitedly wrote, “My<br />
mind has been much occupied these days by the<br />
thought of Cezanne, of how he is one of the three<br />
or four powerful artists who affected me like a<br />
thunderstorm, like some great event…. If it were<br />
not absolutely necessary for me to be here right<br />
now, nothing could keep me away from Paris.”<br />
There is something satisfying in knowing that,<br />
when the ‘Making Modernism’ exhibition opens<br />
at the Royal Academy in London, introducing<br />
Modersohn-Becker’s works to a new audience,<br />
her ‘mentor’ Paul Cezanne will be the subject of<br />
his own show – just a short trip across the river<br />
Thames, at the Tate Modern.<br />
‘Making Modernism’ is showing at the<br />
Royal Gallery of Art, London<br />
12 November <strong>2022</strong> – 12 February 2023<br />
The main reference for this article was Being<br />
Here is Everything, The Life of Paula-Modersohn-<br />
Becker by Marie Darrieussecq (2017).<br />
82 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 83
Marianne Werefkin, The Contrasts, 1919. Tempera on paper on cardboard,<br />
81.5 x 65.5 cm. Collection of the Municipality of Ascona,<br />
Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna, Ascona.<br />
Gabriele Münter, Portrait of Anna Roslund, 1917. Oil on canvas, 94 x 68 cm.<br />
Leicester Museums & Galleries. © DACS <strong>2022</strong>.<br />
84 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 85
Above, left: Gabriele Münter, Self-portrait, c. 1908. Oil on cardboard,<br />
49 x 33.6 cm. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. © DACS <strong>2022</strong>.<br />
Above, right: Gabriele Münter, Still-life on the Tram (After Shopping), c. 1912.<br />
Oil on cardboard, 50.2 x 34.3 cm. Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner-<br />
Stiftung, Munich. © DACS <strong>2022</strong>.<br />
Left: Erma Bossi, Portrait of Marianne Werefkin, c. 1910. Oil on cardboard,<br />
71.6 x 58 cm. Gabriele Munter- und Johannes Eichner-Stiftung, Munich.<br />
© The Estate of Erma Bossi.<br />
Right: Käthe Kollwitz, Self-portrait, 1934. Lithograph on paper, 20 x 18.7 cm.<br />
© Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln.<br />
86 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 87
88 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
Sharing silk<br />
An interview with Elena Baistrocchi<br />
Fondazione Arte della Seta Lisio<br />
by Linda Falcone<br />
At Fondazione Arte della Seta Lisio Firenze,<br />
a team of (mostly women) weavers work on<br />
manually-operated Jacquard looms, constructed<br />
in the nineteenth century, to develop some of the<br />
loveliest velvets and brocades of the Florentine<br />
tradition. A 20-minute car ride from downtown<br />
Florence, this historic workshop, library, archive<br />
and study centre provides fundamental support<br />
to textile restoration laboratories associated with<br />
Amuseums worldwide.<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 89
90 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
Previous page: The woven fabrics of Fondazione<br />
Arte della Seta Lisio Firenze, in its showroom and<br />
workshops.<br />
Left: The workshop.<br />
All photos from the Fondazione Arte della Seta Lisio<br />
Firenze Archives.<br />
Yet, restoration is just one of the many (silk)<br />
hats they wear at the ‘Fondazione Lisio’, whose<br />
statutory mission is the preservation of artistic<br />
silk production. It teaches the art of silk-making<br />
as well as a plethora of other fabric-based courses<br />
that range from ‘Lace Analysis’ to the ‘Recognition<br />
of Textiles’. Furthermore, the foundation’s<br />
production department works to create madeto-order<br />
fabrics inspired by traditional designs,<br />
but its showroom also boasts a surprising array<br />
of modern motifs where ancients technique<br />
meet the shapes and colours of modernity. The<br />
company was established in 1906 by Giuseppe<br />
Lisio, who moved to Florence from his native<br />
Abruzzo, after a stint in Milan. The original<br />
headquarters was the centrally located via de’<br />
Fossi, where he set up shop, after registering at<br />
the local chamber of commerce, as a professional<br />
‘setaiolo’ or silk-maker.<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 91
Left: Director Elena Baistrocchi,<br />
(Image: Stefano Casati).<br />
Below: A jacquard loom from the 1800s.<br />
Giuseppe’s daughter Fidalma Lisio, who<br />
would take over the company in 1954, nearly a<br />
decade after the founder’s death, purchasing the<br />
property which hosts the foundation’s presentday<br />
complex at Via Benedetto Fortini 143, near<br />
Ponte d’Ema. Fidalma is remembered as being a<br />
battagliera – a fighter – and a woman profoundly<br />
driven by her faith which was centred in Christian<br />
principles and a quest for the common good. Of<br />
practical mind and giving spirit, she created not<br />
only a factory on a hill, but an entire village, in<br />
which her labourers could live, work and access<br />
resources serving their entire family. Hence, she<br />
designed and constructed the factory, its canteen,<br />
a church, a kindergarten, an exhibition centre<br />
and a textiles school, not to mention employee<br />
housing. Currently, most of the complex’s<br />
buildings are used for education, production and<br />
exhibition purposes, but Fidalma’s creation is the<br />
last ‘workers village’ of its kind in the whole of<br />
Italy. Fidalma Lisio died in 2001, a woman rooted<br />
in tradition and ahead of her time.<br />
Inspired by the EU-funded project ‘Shemakes’<br />
which held its consortium seminar in Florence<br />
this autumn, with the aim of addressing the<br />
gender gap in the textile industry and the<br />
importance of leadership roles for women, we<br />
interviewed Fondazione Lisio General Director<br />
Elena Baistrocchi, a former biologist, whose<br />
‘scientific past’ gives her a unique perspective<br />
on the ins and outs of craftsmanship and its<br />
fascinating phases.<br />
“Artisanship is a unifying force. In the apprentice<br />
phase, trainees learn to build relationships with<br />
someone who teaches them skills and shares<br />
their same values. This phase is one’s first<br />
approach, but as training continues, apprentices<br />
choose their masters well. No one ever chooses a<br />
92 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
Above: Weavers at the Florence<br />
workshop in the first decade of<br />
the 1900s.<br />
Right: In 1906, Giuseppe Lisio<br />
founded his first shop and<br />
workshop in Florence.<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 93
Above and right: Some of the<br />
beautiful fabrics produced in<br />
the workshop.<br />
master who does not reflect the values they seek.<br />
Therefore, choosing one’s master is a powerful,<br />
democratic process. Young artisans choose the<br />
context of their first encounter. By ‘young’, I am<br />
not referring to one’s age. I am referring to<br />
experience level. I am 57 years old, and yet I am<br />
young as far as textiles are concerned.<br />
Interestingly enough, my field is not textiles, but<br />
Biology. I first came to the Foundation as manager<br />
of the textiles school, and was hired as director<br />
in 2019. I have experience in management and<br />
training, but I am an ‘apprentice’, in the sense<br />
that I am in the process of examining the art of<br />
textile-making in depth. Our weavers share their<br />
challenges with me, introduce me to the beauty<br />
of their technique – the strength of their gestures<br />
and the importance of their work at the loom.<br />
I do not find Biology a far cry from the study<br />
of textiles, no matter how strange that may seem.<br />
Biology is the study of life, and in the three phases<br />
of artisanship, I see many of the same processes<br />
characterising zoological development!<br />
In the artisans’ second phase, their selfawareness<br />
grows, and artisans begin<br />
experimenting with personal creativity. An<br />
emergent artisan strives to gain experiences,<br />
and severs the ‘umbilical cord’. They learn to<br />
craft their own philosophy, just as they craft<br />
their own product – based, of course, on ageold<br />
knowledge, and painstaking technique.<br />
Phase two is a moment of huge growth, and<br />
it is the time in which an artisan truly forges<br />
their own path, perfecting and expanding upon<br />
their skills. Of course, as one’s skills grow, an<br />
artisan gains the freedom to discover their own<br />
potential – and even more than that – they<br />
discover their individuality. This is the true<br />
power of craftsmanship: the ability to respect a<br />
standard, to uphold an age-old process, and all<br />
the while, to create a piece that is unique and<br />
unlike any other, simply because it was made in<br />
that moment, by that person, with its excellent<br />
‘imperfections’, thanks to which one’s finished<br />
product can be considered virtually perfect!<br />
94 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 95
In phrase three, an artisan becomes an elder.<br />
In primates, the ‘grandmother’ is tasked with<br />
taking care of orphaned young, and she is the<br />
one in charge of resolving conflicts within the<br />
group. The importance of her role cannot be<br />
underestimated. The same goes for humans! The<br />
‘grandmother’ is the master artisan who wants to<br />
pass on her knowledge, because that is the only<br />
way her work can become part of our universal<br />
heritage, otherwise, her expertise – and the<br />
craft from whence it came – is lost. In life, we’d<br />
compare it to the generational process that plays<br />
out between daughter, mother and grandmother.<br />
In life, we’d compare phrase three to the<br />
generational process that plays out between<br />
daughter, mother and grandmother. The artisan<br />
is struck by the desire to share all that she<br />
herself has learned. This is a vital phase. Italian<br />
laws complicate the traditional process of<br />
apprenticeship, making it difficult to hire the<br />
newest generations, so that they can learn from<br />
master artisans while they are still active. Without<br />
this opportunity, craftsmanship is lost, and we<br />
cannot allow this to happen. ‘The grandmother’<br />
must be allowed to share her wisdom, and<br />
despite the generalised indifference that Western<br />
culture shows towards its elders, the mind, heart<br />
and hands of the aging artisan must be regarded<br />
as our greatest asset, deserving of our utmost<br />
respect.” RC<br />
An excerpt of this interview was published in<br />
The Florentine, October <strong>2022</strong>.<br />
For more: www.fondazionelisio.org<br />
96 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 97
Grazie Mille<br />
As always, we are grateful to the collaborators and friends who support us<br />
in our mission to promote women’s achievements in all fields of endeavour.<br />
With the launch of Artemisia UpClose we extend our thanks, in particular, to Casa<br />
Buonarroti Foundation Director, Cristina Acidini, Casa Buonarroti Museum Director,<br />
Dr. Alessandro Cecchi, and art historians Elena Lombardi and Marcella Marongiu.<br />
We would also like to acknowledge the team at Arternativa who did a masterful<br />
job of removing Artemisia’s Inclination from the ceiling, releasing the dust of four<br />
centuries with the greatest of care. Thanks also to Olga Makarova and Ottaviano<br />
Caruso for creating photographic and video documentation of the progress of the<br />
painting’s restoration. We are especially grateful to our co-donor, Christian Levett,<br />
whose expertise as a museum director has added an important dimension to this<br />
project.<br />
A huge thank you is due to Head conservator Elizabeth Wicks and Project<br />
co-ordinator Linda Falcone who, together, conceived of the project and will be<br />
instrumental in carrying out its many facets.<br />
Finally, grazie mille to our media partner The Florentine for their invaluable<br />
support in spreading the word about the project and its importance in highlighting<br />
the contribution of women artists to Florence’s art history.<br />
98 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
A day in the life...<br />
Head conservator Dr Elizabeth Wicks uses a digital microscope to examine the<br />
condition of Artemisia’s painting at the Casa Buonarroti Museum. In addition<br />
to verifying the overall health of the canvas, Dr Wicks is studying the painter’s<br />
technique and comparing it to Il Volterrano’s repaints on a microscopic level.<br />
(Image: Olga Makarowa)<br />
Front cover: Detail of Artemisia's Allegory of Inclination, 1616, pre-restoration,<br />
Back cover: Detail of Artemisia's Allegory of Inclination, 1616, under raking light.<br />
Both images: Ottaviano Caruso.<br />
<strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • Restoration Conversations 99
100 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Autumn</strong> / <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2022</strong>