Spring-Summer 23
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
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Restoration<br />
Conversations<br />
ISSUE 3, SPRING/SUMMER 20<strong>23</strong><br />
WOMEN’S STORIES: TODAY AND THROUGH THE CENTURIES<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</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>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
From the Editor<br />
‘ Friends and Strangers’, the title of Margie MacKinnon’s article on the London-based<br />
exhibitions of painters Alice Neel and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye could be used to describe<br />
the whole of Restoration Conversations. Indeed, our <strong>Spring</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> issue comprises a<br />
series of ‘meetings’ with modern-day and historic women – who are, in some measure, both<br />
familiar and largely unknown. Many of their ‘facts’ may be known to us: we recall that Joan<br />
Mitchell painted in France, and that Catherine de’ Medici introduced the fork to that country.<br />
We may acknowledge our indebtedness to Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici who saved Florence’s<br />
art from being sold off bit by bit, once her family dynasty reached its end, or recognize many<br />
of the women included in Jann Haworth and Liberty Blake’s seven-panel monumental Work<br />
in Progress, at London’s soon-to-be reopened National Portrait Gallery. At the same time,<br />
each woman featured in these pages is like a world waiting to be discovered. Nicole-Reine<br />
Lepaute calculated a comet’s arrival more accurately than Halley himself. Lee Miller, best<br />
known by some as merely ‘a Surrealist muse’, had the guts to bathe in Hitler’s bathtub, the<br />
day his death was announced – while working as a ‘combat photographer’, reporting from<br />
his Munich flat.<br />
Then we have the modern-day women – custodians of culture and disseminators of knowledge<br />
– the writers, curators and scholars whose words populate this issue. A special mention is<br />
due to Dr Wendy Grossman, who shares with us her quest to rediscover Adrienne Fedelin.<br />
Her article ‘Hidden in plain sight’ is the magazine’s first-ever unsolicited submission – a<br />
small but significant sign of growth. As we conclude this issue, whose preparation ‘devoured<br />
the hours, as if the Sun were hungry’, I am reminded of Carl Jung and his discussion on how<br />
to identify one’s vocation in life: “What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like<br />
minutes? Herein, lies the key to your earthly pursuits,” the Swiss psychoanalyst wrote. As my<br />
adult-self looking back on the girl who ‘made magazines’ during playtime with cutouts and<br />
glue, I can only say how grateful I feel to see our minutes pass so quickly. Enjoy the issue!<br />
Fondly,<br />
Linda Falcone<br />
Managing Editor, Restoration Conversations<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 3
GRAZIE MILLE<br />
As it says on the cover, conversations are at the heart of what we do to fulfil our<br />
mission of creating a greater awareness and appreciation of the achievements<br />
of women in the arts and sciences. Thank you to the curators, authors, art historians<br />
and art conservators who took the time to sit down and explain their work to<br />
us for this issue: Lorenzo Conti, Natacha Fabbri, Flavia Frigeri, Wendy Grossman,<br />
Jennifer Higgie, Paola Lucchesi, Angela Oberer, Barbara Salvadori, Claudia Tobin<br />
and Elizabeth Wicks.<br />
We are also grateful to the institutions that have shared with us images from their<br />
exhibitions and collections: in London, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Modern,<br />
Tate Britain and the Barbican Art Gallery; in Paris, the Fondation Louis Vuitton;<br />
in Dresden, the Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister; and in Florence, Casa Buonarroti<br />
Museum and Palazzo Strozzi.<br />
Grazie mille for the ongoing support of our partner Christian Levett and our<br />
friends and collaborators at Bloomberg Philanthropies, the British Institute of<br />
Florence, the Casa Buonarroti Museum and Foundation, Il Palmerino Cultural<br />
Association, The Florentine and the Museo Galileo.<br />
To the many visitors of the on-site restoration of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory<br />
of Inclination at Casa Buonarroti, thank you for your enthusiastic (and sometimes<br />
deeply emotional) response to this project.<br />
Finally, we extend a very personal and fond acknowledgment to Monica Martin<br />
who describes Restoration Conversations as “the most beautiful magazine I have<br />
ever seen” and who continues to support our work as she begins her 100th year.<br />
4 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
CONTENTS: SPRING/SUMMER 20<strong>23</strong><br />
PORTRAITS AND DIALOGUES<br />
Self-representation and ‘conversations’ on canvas<br />
6 London’s National Portrait Gallery Re-opens<br />
14 Work in Progress: A Monumental Women’s Mural<br />
20 Friends and Strangers: Alice Neel and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye<br />
28 The Paradox of Rosalba Carriera<br />
36 Before the selfie: Women’s self portraits<br />
42 Reflections on the Monet — Mitchell Exhibition<br />
PAGES OF HISTORY<br />
Legacies, letters, archives and books<br />
48 Murders and Marriages: Catherine de‘ Medici<br />
54 A Letter to Madame Christine, from Galileo<br />
60 Hidden in Plain Sight: Adrienne Fidelin<br />
68 A Moveable Feast: Abstractionists, the Women<br />
74 Three Women: Many Moons<br />
80 The Other Side<br />
IN FOCUS TODAY, IN FLORENCE<br />
Follow Calliope Arts at every step<br />
84 ‘Inclination’ Update: Structure Changes<br />
89 Artemisia’s Palette<br />
94 Palace Women: Oltrano and Beyond<br />
98 Calliope Arts News in Brief<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 5
Above: Installation shot of Vanessa Bell’s Portrait by Duncan Grant going back into the National Portrait Gallery. Photo: David Parry, National Portrait Gallery<br />
6 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
From Courtesans to<br />
Conceptual Artists<br />
Women in the frame at London’s re-vamped<br />
National Portrait Gallery<br />
AAfter a three-year renovation, London’s National Portrait<br />
Gallery will re-open on June 22nd, 20<strong>23</strong>. NPG’s Chanel Curator<br />
for the Collection, Dr Flavia Frigeri, spoke to Margie MacKinnon<br />
about the Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture project<br />
(supported by the CHANEL Culture Fund), which aims to<br />
highlight the often overlooked stories of individual women who<br />
have shaped British history and culture.<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 7
Above: Dr. Flavia Frigeri, Chanel Curator for the Collection<br />
Photo: Isabelle Young<br />
At the start of this project, what was<br />
the balance between male and female<br />
representation at the NPG?<br />
“There were approximately 50,000 men in the<br />
collection and about 16,000 women,” Frigeri<br />
points out, “so there was a big disparity. The NPG<br />
is a history museum which means that the sitter<br />
always comes first: who is depicted in the portrait<br />
is always more important than who painted the<br />
portrait. Portraiture is something that is its own<br />
micro-environment within the macro sphere of<br />
art. Historically, the people who would have their<br />
portrait painted were people of means, the upper<br />
class. Even the women who were depicted by<br />
male artists were often from a very specific class<br />
– so it is already creating a tiered system.<br />
The goal of enhancing the visibility of women<br />
as part of the re-organisation of the NPG,” says<br />
Frigeri, “is very much a collective endeavour.<br />
I have been working with a team of curators,<br />
organised by historical period, and they were<br />
already thinking about the place of women<br />
within the re-hang. The way visibility is going<br />
to manifest itself is that, obviously, you’re going<br />
to have some of the ‘greatest hits’ on the walls.<br />
You can expect to see Elizabeth I, you can expect<br />
to see Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. But, then,<br />
what we have tried to do as a team has been to<br />
weave in stories of women that are perhaps more<br />
unexpected. The difficulty is that sometimes we<br />
don’t necessarily have the best portraits for the<br />
best stories.<br />
“We are also thinking about how to educate<br />
people in terms of how to read portraits because,<br />
naturally – and this is something I also fall prey<br />
to – you walk into a room, you see a portrait in<br />
a gilded frame and immediately you think that is<br />
8 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
the most important person in the room. Whereas<br />
it is more of a struggle to see a small photograph,<br />
with no gilding, as being in the same league. So<br />
[when the image isn’t enough] we will be using<br />
other kinds of media that will help to tell the<br />
story in a more nuanced way.”<br />
Apart from royalty, who was the first woman<br />
in the collection?<br />
“The first woman in the collection,” Frigeri<br />
notes, “was Elizabeth Hamilton, a courtesan … I<br />
recently gave a talk in Berlin about this and I was<br />
explaining how the first man in the collection<br />
was Shakespeare. Then I had to admit to the fact<br />
that the first woman was, yes … which doesn’t take<br />
away from her as a woman. The founding fathers<br />
of the NPG were very specific when they wrote<br />
their constitution and I should stress fathers –<br />
no woman was involved. A portrait had to depict<br />
someone of worthiness, achievement, recognition<br />
and fame … and for decades women didn’t really<br />
fit any of those categories, unless they were royal<br />
or attached to the royals somehow.”<br />
When did the collection start opening up?<br />
“Until the 1960’s you could only show the portrait<br />
of someone who had been dead for at least ten<br />
years. The idea was that you needed ten years<br />
to be sure that the achievements of that person<br />
were lasting. But this rule was lifted in the 1960’s<br />
as the need to include more contemporary artists<br />
became apparent. So that is when the collection<br />
started becoming a bit more eclectic in range. In<br />
the 1970’s the trend was to collect mostly women<br />
in the arts, so we have dancers, we have writers, a<br />
lot of actors … there weren’t that many women in<br />
science – that’s a big gap.”<br />
Above: Elizabeth Hamilton, Countess de Gramont by John Giles Eccardt,<br />
after Sir Peter Lely (18th century, based on a work of c. 1663)<br />
© National Portrait Gallery, London<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 9
Is it possible there were fewer women<br />
scientists because their male colleagues<br />
were taking credit for their work?<br />
“Yes,” Frigeri agrees, “there was some of that and it’s<br />
something we have been looking into. We recently<br />
acquired a portrait of Anne McLaren, one of the<br />
women who was instrumental in developing the<br />
science necessary for IVF. She was working with<br />
her husband at University College London for a<br />
long time and was less known than him. McLaren<br />
is an example of someone that we have recently<br />
been able to bring into the collection. For me, this<br />
is important because it is a way to push against<br />
the grain of the founding fathers and say, look,<br />
these are women worthy of that recognition.”<br />
Did the advent of photography have an<br />
impact on the collection?<br />
“It made a huge difference,” says Frigeri, “because,<br />
in a way, photography is the most emancipatory<br />
medium of them all. Photography allowed<br />
women to establish their own portrait studios.<br />
So, even if they had the ambition to go on and<br />
do more avant-garde photography, they were<br />
able to support themselves financially through<br />
their studio. The affordability of photography<br />
drove up the demand for portraits, so it became a<br />
sustainable business.<br />
We have great examples of women like Rita<br />
Martin and Lallie Charles establishing a portrait<br />
studio called The Look which was around the<br />
corner from Regent’s Park and was incredibly<br />
successful. Alice Hughes had a studio on Gower<br />
Street up in Bloomsbury and, at one point, she<br />
employed 50 women assistants. We have many<br />
of these women photographers in the collection,<br />
so it is a very strong area, dating from the 1900’s.<br />
It all began with Julia Margaret Cameron doing<br />
in photography what the Pre-Raphaelites were<br />
doing in painting.”<br />
Another aspect of the project focusses on the<br />
acquisition of new works by women. What<br />
were your guiding principles in choosing<br />
these works?<br />
“I thought about how I could make acquisitions<br />
that were relevant enough and substantial enough<br />
in the long term without ‘breaking the bank’. What<br />
Above: Dame Anne McLaren, photographer unknown, gelatin silver print, 1958, National Portrait Gallery, London<br />
10 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
Above: Ace (retrieved) from ‘The Photomat Portrait Series’ by Susan Hiller, 1972-3<br />
© The Estate of Susan Hiller. Purchased with kind support from the CHANEL Culture Fund for ‘Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture’, 2022<br />
were the things that the portrait gallery wouldn’t<br />
usually collect because they wouldn’t necessarily<br />
be seen as priorities? There was a focus on selfportraiture,<br />
created by artists who were working<br />
with a very feminist conceptual slant. These are<br />
self-portraits, but they are doing lots of other<br />
things on the side.<br />
“In Susan Hiller’s work she was taking her selfportrait<br />
using different photobooth machines<br />
around London and then collecting them. The idea<br />
is – she was taking agency away from herself and<br />
lending it to the machine, and each photobooth<br />
produces a very different kind of image. There is<br />
this piecing together of mechanically produced<br />
images, but also the suggestion that no person<br />
is a single image. We are all made up of lots of<br />
different layers. So, there is a conceptual element<br />
to this work. If you were to see it at the Tate<br />
you would probably read it with very conceptual<br />
language, but here you’re just looking at a portrait<br />
that is not a traditional portrait.<br />
“Rose Finn-Kelcey’s self-portrait is similar. You<br />
cannot see it from this image but there is a cut<br />
in the middle of the image because this was the<br />
pre-Adobe days and she had to glue and stitch<br />
together two images. This is her seated at Marble<br />
Arch at Speaker’s Corner. In this case, she is very<br />
much thinking about the fact that women have<br />
traditionally been left out of all the places where<br />
public speaking happens. She is reclaiming this<br />
space for women in terms of public speaking,<br />
but she is also thinking that the absence of that<br />
space has meant that women had a lot more<br />
existential, private speaking happening within<br />
themselves – so it’s a conversation, or internal<br />
dialogue, between the two selves.<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 11
Above: Självporträtt, Åkersberga by Everlyn Nicodemus, 1982<br />
© the artist, courtesy of Richard Saltoun Gallery<br />
Purchased with kind support from the CHANEL Culture Fund<br />
for ‘Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture’, 2022<br />
“I was able to acquire this beautiful small<br />
portrait of Celia Paul,” Frigeri continues, “and then<br />
this wonderful portrait by Everlyn Nicodemus<br />
called Självporträtt, Åkersberga. This is a selfportrait<br />
she made in 1982 when she was living in<br />
Sweden and had recently given birth to a young<br />
daughter and was struggling with her marriage.<br />
She paints all of these different faces to suggest<br />
the many faces she needs to wear at once –<br />
mother, artist, lover and so forth. This is actually<br />
the first self-portrait by a black artist to enter the<br />
collection.<br />
“And then there is Maeve Gilmore, an exceptional<br />
artist. I love the intensity of her expression and I<br />
love that she is holding with such assertiveness<br />
this piece of charcoal, and just looks at you. And<br />
looking at you really says, this is my place as an<br />
artist. These are some of the works that I have<br />
been bringing into the collection with a focus<br />
on self-portraiture. They are small in number in<br />
terms of acquisitions but they are quite radical in<br />
starting the discourse and taking it in different<br />
directions.”<br />
When the National Portrait Gallery reopens,<br />
more than 200 portraits of women made after<br />
1900 and over 100 portraits created during that<br />
time by women will be exhibited. Adding to that<br />
number will be the newly commissioned Work in<br />
Progress, a group portrait of 133 notable women<br />
created by Jann Haworth and Liberty Blake. (See<br />
feature on p. 14). RC<br />
12 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
Above: Preparatory study for Divided Self by Rose Finn-Kelcey, 1974<br />
© The Estate of Rose Finn-Kelcey. Courtesy of Kate MacGarry Gallery<br />
Purchased with kind support from the CHANEL Culture Fund<br />
for ‘Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture’, 2022<br />
Left: Portrait, Eyes Lowered by Celia Paul, 2019<br />
© Celia Paul. Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro<br />
Purchased with kind support from the CHANEL Culture Fund<br />
for ‘Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture’, 2022<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 13
Work in Progress<br />
The origins of the NPG’s monumental new mural<br />
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In 1967, Jann Haworth and her then husband Peter Blake designed the cover for<br />
the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album, which features the band surrounded by a cast of<br />
characters, from Bob Dylan and Marilyn Monroe to Albert Einstein and Shirley<br />
Temple. Revisiting the cover some years later, Haworth realised it included only<br />
twelve women and, of those, half were fictional. She decided to create a new<br />
women-centred mural featuring women from all different fields who had been<br />
catalysts for change. By the time she found sponsorship for this project it was<br />
2016. In the run-up to the American election, when it seemed, in Haworth’s view,<br />
all but inevitable that Hillary Clinton would win, it was, in the artist’s words, “a<br />
Ipotent moment” to celebrate all that women had achieved.<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 15
Liberty Blake. Photograph courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery<br />
Jann Haworth. Photograph courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery<br />
Of course, the election did not play out as she<br />
anticipated, but Haworth and her daughter,<br />
Liberty Blake, started work on the mural, which<br />
has now grown from its initial 28 feet to 60 feet<br />
in width. Made up of over 300 portraits, created<br />
by 250 participants, the mural was designed so<br />
that it can be transported from place to place<br />
and continually expanded – in other words, it is a<br />
Work in Progress.<br />
Meanwhile in London, in a break between Covid<br />
lockdowns, the National Portrait Gallery’s Flavia<br />
Frigeri “snuck out” of her Bayswater flat to visit a<br />
gallery in Mayfair where Jann Haworth was having<br />
a show. “It triggered my memory because I had<br />
seen the original Work in Progress a few years<br />
before and I thought, this could be a great thing<br />
to do in communities around the country. We<br />
commissioned Jann and Liberty to do a new Work<br />
in Progress for the NPG, celebrating 133 women. It<br />
would be a pantheon of women from Elizabeth I all<br />
the way to Vivienne Westwood and Malala.<br />
“We worked with partner institutions across the<br />
country and each institution hosted a workshop.<br />
The idea was that every person who participated<br />
in the workshops would choose an image and<br />
then make a stencilled portrait. Artists would tune<br />
in via Zoom and they would guide the participants<br />
in cutting out their images and stencilling them<br />
with colours. The stencilled portraits were sent to<br />
Jann and Liberty in Utah where they spent three<br />
months mounting them all on seven giant panels.<br />
“When you come into the National Portrait<br />
Gallery, there will be a gallery about historymakers<br />
and one whole wall will be our mural.<br />
This will set the tone for the way we want you<br />
to think about women, the way we want you to<br />
see women and the way we want to put women<br />
at the forefront. And, if you look at the top of the<br />
seventh panel, you will see an empty silhouette.<br />
Because this is a ‘work in progress’, we don’t want<br />
to suggest that this is the complete pantheon. It<br />
is a pantheon that you can keep adding to, and<br />
you can imagine whoever you want in that blank<br />
space. We are also working closely with the artists<br />
on a series of resources that we’re going to make<br />
available to schools and families so that people<br />
can go home and make their own mural. “These<br />
trailblazing women of the past,” says Frigeri, “are<br />
role models for the future.” RC<br />
Work in Progress by Jann Haworth and Liberty<br />
Blake, 2021-2. Acrylic on paper collaged on panels.<br />
Commissioned by Trustees with kind support<br />
from the CHANEL Culture Fund, 2021.<br />
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PANEL 1<br />
Organic farmer Eve Balfour, businesswoman Anita Roddick, writer Vera Brittain, pianist Shulamith Shafir, artist and<br />
writer Mary Delany, Hospice Movement founder Cicely Saunders, peace activist Mairead Corrigan Maguire, poet<br />
and writer Sylvia Plath, sculptor Alison Wilding, writer and illustrator Beatrix Potter, surgeon Louisa Aldrich Blake,<br />
photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, classicist Mary Beard, novelists Jane Austin, Virginia Woolf and more…<br />
PANEL 2<br />
Actor and comedian Dawn French, writer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, nurse and army medical service reformer<br />
Florence Nightingale, Queen Elizabeth I, political activist Sylvia Pankhurst, activist for women’s rights Ishbel Hamilton-<br />
Gordon, actress Vivien Leigh, chemist and astronaut Helen Sharman, fossil collector Mary Anning, fashion model<br />
Twiggy, educator for race equality Jocelyn Barrow and more…<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 17
PANEL 3<br />
Mental illness physician Helen Boyle, printer and writer Eleanor James, aeronautical engineer and aviator Lilian Bland, traveller<br />
and botanical artist Marianne North, pianist Harriet Cohen, aviator Amy Johnson, comedian Gina Yashere, athlete Rachel Atherton,<br />
photographer Yevonde, novelist Olivia Manning, painter Bridget Riley, social reformer Octavia Hill, archaeologist Gertrude Bell and<br />
fashion designer Mary Quant and more…<br />
PANEL 4<br />
Poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, cartoonist Kate Charlesworth, artist Sonia Boyce, playwright Caryl Churchill, children’s writer Eva<br />
Ibbotson, actress Emma Thompson, Alice Liddell, inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, nurse Elizabeth Anionwu, space<br />
scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock, chemist and crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, film director Gurinder Chadha, writer Agatha<br />
Christie, poet Christina Rossetti and more…<br />
PANEL 5<br />
Sprinter Ethel Scott, historian Joan Thirsk, abolitionist Ellen Craft, Minnie Lansbury, writer Zadie Smith, Paralympic athlete and<br />
broadcaster Tanni Grey-Thompson, designer and painter E.Q. Nicholson, portrait painter Mary Beale, co-founder of Girl Guides<br />
Agnes Baden-Powell, writer J.K Rowling, Boxer and Olympian Nicola Adams, human rights lawyer Shami Chakrabarti, activist and<br />
writer Mala Sen, tennis player Charlotte Cooper and more…<br />
18 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
PANEL 6<br />
Sculptor Barbara Hepworth, suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, artist and curator Lubaina Himid, singer-songwriter Amy<br />
Winehouse, painter Vanessa Bell, suffragette Sophia Duleep Singh, physicist and radio astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell, comedian<br />
and disability rights activist Barbara Lisicki, ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn, actor Olivia Colman, children’s poet and writer Grace<br />
Nichols, model for Pre-Raphaelite artists Fanny Eaton and more…<br />
PANEL 7<br />
Actress Julie Andrews, illustrator Jessie M. King, journalist and historian Jan Morris, painter Joan Eardley, nurse and business woman<br />
Mary Seacole, artistic director and champion of disability arts Jenny Sealey, singer-songwriter Kate Bush, artist Eileen Agar, social<br />
reformer and theatre manager Emma Cons, artist Gillian Wearing, journalist Kate Adie, artist Paula Rego, electrical engineer and<br />
inventor Hertha Ayrton, cellist Jacqueline du Prè and more…<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 19
Friends and Strangers<br />
Portraits by Alice Neel<br />
and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye<br />
Two London exhibitions, one just ended, the<br />
other ongoing, illustrate the continuing<br />
allure of portrait painting in Western art<br />
and its possibilities for radical re-invention.<br />
Tate Britain recently hosted Fly in League with<br />
the Night, a show of some 80 paintings and<br />
works on paper created by London-born artist<br />
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. At the Barbican, works<br />
from the American painter Alice Neel’s 60-year<br />
career are currently on display under the title<br />
Hot off the Griddle.<br />
In their own way, each of these artists brought,<br />
or brings, a revolutionary approach to portrait<br />
painting. Neel explained that one of her reasons<br />
for painting “was to catch life as it goes by, right<br />
hot off the griddle”. She welcomed sitters into<br />
her home, chatted away to them, and invited<br />
them to share their own stories. She painted<br />
figuratively when the prevailing trend favoured<br />
Abstract Expressionism. While the AbEx artists<br />
created works that reflected their reactions to a<br />
period of tumultuous change, Neel hid her own<br />
struggles behind a smile and brought out the<br />
feelings of her subjects. “I paint to try to reveal<br />
the tragedy and joy of life,” she said.<br />
Despite appearances to the contrary, Yiadom-<br />
Boakye’s paintings are not portraiture in the<br />
traditional sense. The subjects are not real<br />
people, but creations of the artist’s imagination,<br />
based on a combination of memory, family<br />
snapshots, images from magazines collected in<br />
scrapbooks and details of paintings. A writer, as<br />
well as an artist, Yiadom-Boakye says, “I write<br />
about the things I can’t paint and paint the things<br />
I can’t write about …”. These fictional, nameless<br />
strangers seem every bit as full of humanity as<br />
Neel’s living, breathing sitters.<br />
ALICE NEEL<br />
Born at the turn of the last century, Alice Neel<br />
grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania. Her<br />
parents were not artists and she had little<br />
exposure to culture, but, somehow, she knew<br />
from a young age that she would become an<br />
artist. In 1921, she began her art studies at the<br />
Philadelphia School of Design for Women (also<br />
known, because of its conservative reputation, as<br />
the ‘Philadelphia School for Designing Women’).<br />
She met Cuban artist Carlos Enriquez Gomez at<br />
a summer art course in 1924, and they married<br />
the following year. Their first child, a daughter<br />
named Santillana, tragically died just before her<br />
first birthday. By then the couple had moved<br />
to New York where Neel soon had a second<br />
daughter, Isabetta. Husband and wife continued<br />
to paint but struggled to support themselves,<br />
moving to ever cheaper accommodation. In<br />
May of 1930, Gomez took Isabetta with him to<br />
Havana, telling Neel he would send money back<br />
to enable her to join them. The money never<br />
materialised, and Neel only saw her daughter a<br />
handful of times after that.<br />
20 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
Above, left: Alice Neel. 1977. Mary D. Garrard.<br />
© The Estate of Alice Neel<br />
Courtesy of The Estate of Alice Neel<br />
Above, right: Alice Neel, 1960. Frank O’Hara.<br />
© The Estate of Alice Neel<br />
Courtesy of The Estate of Alice Neel<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 21
This trauma seems to have informed much<br />
of Neel’s work and underscores the difficulty<br />
experienced by so many female painters of<br />
combining life as an artist with motherhood.<br />
Following the stock market crash and during<br />
the period of the Great Depression in the 1930’s,<br />
life was punishingly hard. Countless artists,<br />
including Neel, were saved from starvation by<br />
the government-sponsored Federal Art Project<br />
which paid unemployed artists a small salary in<br />
exchange for producing works of art to decorate<br />
public buildings. The deprivation of these times<br />
produced in Neel a “desire to bear witness to<br />
the hardships of life as experienced by most<br />
Americans” in that decade. Neel’s salary from the<br />
Art Project allowed her to secure an apartment<br />
which she also used as studio space. At the same<br />
time, she joined the Communist Party, an event<br />
that would later lead the FBI to open a file on her<br />
and even show up at her door to investigate her,<br />
having identified Neel as a ‘romantic, Bohemian<br />
type Communist’. Characteristically, she was<br />
sanguine about the encounter and asked if<br />
the agents would be interested in sitting for a<br />
painting. (They declined.)<br />
In the 1940’s, when up-and-coming artists such<br />
as Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning and Grace<br />
Hartigan were moving downtown to convert<br />
lofts into studios and creating pioneering works<br />
of Abstract Expressionism, Neel moved north to<br />
Spanish Harlem and persisted with figurative<br />
painting, largely dismissed as an artist out of step<br />
with the times. But it was there that she met the<br />
subjects for her works, however unfashionable<br />
they may have been. She was, she said, “not<br />
against abstraction, but against saying that Man<br />
himself has no importance.”<br />
Neel’s T.B. Harlem (1940) is a comment on<br />
the epidemic of TB that had broken out in<br />
overcrowded areas of New York. It depicts an<br />
unnamed young man who is recovering in a<br />
tuberculosis hospital. Before effective antibiotics<br />
were widely available, TB treatment was brutal.<br />
Left, top: Alice Neel, 1940. T.B. Harlem. © The Estate of Alice Neel<br />
Courtesy of The Estate of Alice Neel<br />
Left: Alice Neel, 1943. The Spanish Family. © The Estate of Alice<br />
Neel. Courtesy of The Estate of Alice Neel<br />
22 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
The bandage on the left of the man’s chest is<br />
from a thoracoplasty, a surgical procedure which<br />
involved removing several ribs and collapsing<br />
the affected lung. The painting is simple, with a<br />
muted colour palette, making the blood seeping<br />
out from under the bandage more evident. The<br />
plain background draws the viewer towards the<br />
man’s face, which registers a resigned stoicism.<br />
He is just one man among many suffering a<br />
similar fate.<br />
The loss of her mother, in 1954 at the age of<br />
86, sent Neel into a deep depression that lasted<br />
over the next few years and, in 1958, she began<br />
to see a therapist for the first time. Neel credits<br />
her therapist with encouraging her to be more<br />
ambitious with her work and “getting it into the<br />
world”. She summoned the courage to approach<br />
the poet Frank O’Hara, then a curator at the<br />
Museum of Modern Art, to sit for her. The picture<br />
appeared in ARTnews alongside an enthusiastic<br />
review describing how “her paintings cast a spell’.<br />
This marked a turning point in Neel’s career,<br />
and she began to paint more recognisable figures,<br />
including Andy Warhol. His portrait reveals Neel’s<br />
remarkable ability to get her sitters to trust<br />
her, allowing her to paint them with all their<br />
vulnerabilities. In Warhol’s case, this included<br />
showing the scars that had resulted from a vicious<br />
assault by Valerie Solanas, a former member of<br />
Warhol’s Factory entourage.<br />
Other well-known faces amongst Neel’s sitters<br />
included feminists Kate Millet (whose portrait<br />
Neel was commissioned to paint for the cover<br />
of Time magazine), Mary D. Garrard (known<br />
for her ground-breaking studies of Artemisia<br />
Gentileschi) and Linda Nochlin (author of ‘Why<br />
are there no great women artists?’) Neel’s ability<br />
to disarm seems not to have worked on Garrard,<br />
who looks particularly ill-at-ease in the familiar<br />
blue and white striped chair. Still wearing her<br />
hat, coat and scarf, she looks directly at the artist,<br />
as if daring her to reveal anything beyond her<br />
inscrutable surface. Nochlin is painted with her<br />
young daughter, Daisy. Apparently, Neel was keen<br />
to portray Nochlin as both an intellectual and a<br />
mother. She told the eminent art historian, “you<br />
don’t look anxious, but you are anxious”. Perhaps<br />
she was projecting her own maternal anxiety<br />
onto her sitter.<br />
Neel would have to wait until 1974, when she<br />
was 74 years old, to have the first retrospective<br />
exhibition of her work, which was held at the<br />
Whitney Museum of Art in New York. The<br />
Barbican art director, Will Gompertz, describes<br />
Neel’s portraits as “the very opposite of an<br />
Instagram image … You can’t photograph what<br />
Alice Neel painted. Her ability to simultaneously<br />
show a sitter’s conscious and unconscious state,<br />
and imperceptibly morph the two, was a magic<br />
trick of sorts … She didn’t simply paint faces, she<br />
revealed souls.”<br />
Right: Alice Neel, 1929. Alice Neel at the age of 29.<br />
© The Estate of Alice Neel<br />
Courtesy of The Estate of Alice Neel<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations <strong>23</strong>
Above: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, 2011. Condor and the Mole, Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London. © Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye<br />
Right: Installation shot at the Tate, Madeline Buddo<br />
24 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE<br />
British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, born in<br />
London in 1977 to Ghanaian parents, is one<br />
of a number of artists who have transformed<br />
portraiture over the last decade. Her recent<br />
exhibition at London’s venerable Tate Britain<br />
follows earlier shows in Munich, Basel and New<br />
York, among others. Some of her works are also<br />
featured in the Reaching for the Stars exhibition<br />
at Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi.<br />
Yiadom-Boakye’s works, while recognisably<br />
part of the continuum of European portraiture,<br />
are innovative in their subject-matter, style and<br />
atmosphere. Most notably, rather than working<br />
with live models, Yiadom-Boakye draws from her<br />
experience as a writer to create her own fictional<br />
subjects. In doing so, she turns the aphorism that<br />
‘portraits are the one genre of art in which the<br />
subject is more important than the artist’ on its<br />
head. “Over time,” she says, “I realised I needed<br />
to think less about the subject and more about<br />
the painting. So I began to think seriously about<br />
colour, light and composition.”<br />
The artist also subtly subverts traditional<br />
portraiture in rejecting the genre’s conventional<br />
function of not only creating a likeness, but<br />
conveying the sitter’s class and status, usually by<br />
including symbolic objects denoting education,<br />
wealth and power – or their opposites. Yiadom-<br />
Boakye’s subjects are difficult to place within a<br />
social group or culture or a specific place or time<br />
period. This timeless quality is deliberate, as it<br />
requires the viewer to engage with the subject<br />
and to use their curiosity to project their own<br />
interpretations and imagine the story behind the<br />
painting.<br />
The canvases depict young men and women,<br />
by themselves or in small groups, many larger<br />
than life-sized. The scale adds to the quality of<br />
the work. Very broadly and confidently painted,<br />
the compositions are intriguing, drawing the<br />
viewer in. “Her painting of dark skin in shadow,<br />
circumambient gloaming or night is superb,” says<br />
critic Laura Cumming. “She makes a strong virtue<br />
of contrapposto, chiaroscuro and the sumptuous<br />
sinking of oil into linen.”<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 25
Above, left: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, 2018<br />
To Improvise a Mountain. Private Collection<br />
© Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye<br />
Photo: Marcus Leith<br />
Above, right: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, 2014<br />
Citrine by the Ounce. Private Collection<br />
© Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye<br />
A young male dancer stretches at the barre while<br />
his friends engage in conversation nearby, two girls<br />
play in the rockpools along a beach, absorbed in their<br />
activity and each other, a woman with an elaborate<br />
frilly collar stares out unblinkingly from the canvas<br />
– is she willing you to come closer or daring you to<br />
stay away? In Penny for Them (2014), another woman<br />
resting her chin in her hand is lost in thought. In<br />
each case, the audience may be reminded of a<br />
painting they have seen or a memory from their own<br />
life. It is up to us to give these characters their story.<br />
Tate Britain is home to a collection of British<br />
artworks dating back to 1545. Seeing a whole<br />
gallery there filled with her work is a powerful<br />
experience. “That Yiadom-Boakye’s subjects happen<br />
to be Black, reflecting her own identity, reminds us<br />
of the overwhelming whiteness of the tradition of<br />
[European portraiture],” notes the museum’s Director,<br />
Alex Farquharson. Yiadom-Boakye points out that,<br />
“Blackness has never been other to me. Therefore,<br />
I’ve never felt the need to explain its presence in the<br />
26 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
work anymore than I’ve felt the need to explain my<br />
presence in the world, however often I’m asked.”<br />
Despite their many differences – in background,<br />
style and subject matter – Neel and Yiadom-Boakye<br />
have both succeeded in ‘bringing out whatever their<br />
subjects have in common with the rest of humanity’,<br />
the goal that art historian Erwin Panofsky identified as<br />
the central desire of Renaissance artists. Neel talked<br />
to her subjects as if they were old friends, allowing<br />
them to relax and drop their guard so that she could<br />
catch something of their inner nature. Yiadom-<br />
Boakye’s fictional sitters are enigmatic ‘strangers’ on<br />
whom we can project our own thoughts and desires.<br />
By thinking about what we see in them, we learn<br />
something about ourselves. RC<br />
Above, left: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, 2020<br />
Razorbill, Tate<br />
© Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye<br />
Above, right: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, 2017<br />
In Lieu of Keen Virtue<br />
© Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Corvi-Mora, London<br />
and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York<br />
Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle is at London’s Barbican<br />
Art Gallery until 21 May 20<strong>23</strong><br />
Reaching for the Stars is at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence,<br />
until 18 June 20<strong>23</strong><br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 27
Above: Rosalba Carriera, A Black-haired Lady with a Thin Gold Necklace. © Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Photo: Elke Estel/ Hans-Peter Klut<br />
28 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
Artemisia’s<br />
‘A Rare Talent’<br />
The paradox of Rosalba Carriera<br />
I<br />
have not come across another artist that<br />
has been so completely neglected after so<br />
much success.” Angela Oberer is talking<br />
about Venetian painter Rosalba Carriera (1673-<br />
1757), a celebrated artist in her day and one<br />
of the most successful women artists of any<br />
era. Known as the ‘first painter of Europe’, her<br />
pastels were highly admired by 18th-century<br />
European collectors, and prominent foreign<br />
visitors to Venice and Grand Tourists were<br />
eager to sit for portraits by her. An astute<br />
entrepreneur, she set new trends in style and<br />
technique, and was admitted to membership<br />
of three art academies.<br />
For one hundred years after her death,<br />
Carriera continued to enjoy recognition and<br />
influence as an accomplished artist. And<br />
then, as dramatically as it had risen, her star<br />
plummeted, and she lapsed into relative<br />
obscurity. Carriera’s story presents us with a<br />
paradox: how did she achieve her remarkable<br />
professional and financial success at a time<br />
when so few women were able to make a living<br />
at their art, and how did she subsequently<br />
come to be all but forgotten?<br />
On the 350th anniversary of Carriera’s birth<br />
and the eve of a major exhibition of her work<br />
in Dresden, Angela Oberer, a professor and<br />
art historian who has authored two books on<br />
“<br />
Carriera, gave a talk at the British Institute of<br />
Florence about her interest in a painter who<br />
was highly sought-after as a miniaturist and<br />
portrait painter, but who subsequently fell out<br />
of fashion.<br />
Oberer has been researching Carriera<br />
for over ten years. “I had a special interest<br />
in sisters,” she explains. “I have an older<br />
sister, and I just wanted to understand this<br />
funny relationship … so I was looking for a<br />
painter with one or more sisters. And then I<br />
stumbled across that self-portrait of Carriera<br />
with her sister Giovanna.” (See feature on<br />
p .36). A fortuitous match between researcher<br />
and subject seemed all but inevitable when<br />
Oberer tracked down two volumes at the<br />
Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence containing<br />
transcriptions of Carriera’s correspondence<br />
and diaries – a cache of documents comprising<br />
over 800 pages. In other words, a scholar’s<br />
dream come true. Combing through this<br />
archive over several years has enabled Oberer<br />
to understand how Carriera achieved her<br />
renown, despite all the usual impediments to<br />
be overcome as a female artist.<br />
Carriera’s early life and training remain<br />
something of a mystery. Unusually for female<br />
artists of her era, she did not come from an<br />
artistic family. Although various scholars have<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 29
Left: Rosalba Carriera, 1730/31<br />
Self-portrait as Winter<br />
Photo: Katrin Jacob<br />
& Wolfgang Kreische<br />
Right, clockwise from top left:<br />
Rosalba Carriera, A Young<br />
Gentleman in a Puffy Blue<br />
Coat<br />
Photo: Elke Estel<br />
& Hans-Peter Klut<br />
Rosalba Carriera, c. 1725/30<br />
A Lady with a Parrot on her<br />
Right Hand (Allegory of<br />
Eloquence)<br />
Photo: Marina Langner<br />
& Wolfgang Kreische<br />
Rosalba Carriera, c. 1735/40<br />
A Venetian from the House of<br />
Barbarigo (Caterina Sagredo<br />
Barbarigo)<br />
Photo: Marina Langner<br />
& Wolfgang Kreische<br />
Rosalba Carriera, 1730<br />
Archduchess Maria Theresia<br />
of Habsburg<br />
Photo: Elke Estel<br />
& Hans-Peter Klut<br />
All images © Gemäldegalerie<br />
Alte Meister, Staatliche<br />
Kunstsammlungen Dresden<br />
tried to identify who her first teachers might<br />
have been, Oberer notes that, “So far, we don’t<br />
have any documents to state definitively who<br />
she studied with, if anyone. Maybe she was<br />
mainly self-taught?”<br />
Carriera began her career helping her<br />
mother with her embroidery and lace-making<br />
business. When snuff-taking became popular<br />
during the second half of the 17th century,<br />
Carriera took advantage of the opportunity<br />
to begin painting miniatures for the lids of<br />
snuffboxes. She not only had a particular talent<br />
for working at this scale, but she benefitted<br />
from a dearth of miniaturists in her home city<br />
of Venice, where her male contemporaries were<br />
busy competing for lucrative commissions for<br />
altarpieces, city views and fresco painting.<br />
Showing further initiative, Carriera became<br />
one of the first painters to use ivory instead<br />
of vellum as a support for miniatures. “She<br />
got a name for her miniatures very quickly<br />
and, one curious and fun fact is that some of<br />
30 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 31
Rosalba Carriera, Female Study Head in Grey-purple Coat<br />
© Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden<br />
Photo: Elke Estel & Hans-Peter Klut<br />
the letters mention that forgeries of her work<br />
were already being offered for sale in Venice,”<br />
Oberer observes.<br />
Carriera was also quick to spot an<br />
opportunity in Venice’s growing tourist trade.<br />
The city was an obligatory stop on the Grand<br />
Tour undertaken by young sons and daughters<br />
of the nobility, as well a favourite destination<br />
for other prominent visitors and diplomats.<br />
Carriera used her networking skills to develop<br />
a market for portraits. Once again, her genius<br />
for innovation came to the fore as she began<br />
producing these portraits in pastel, a medium<br />
that had, until then, been used mainly for<br />
preparatory drawings.<br />
Carriera’s popularity helped to encourage<br />
the production of high-quality pastel sticks<br />
in varied textures and in a greater range of<br />
colours than had previously been available.<br />
Pastel portraits came to be seen as equivalent<br />
in quality to oil portraits; they offered other<br />
advantages as well: the materials were<br />
cheaper and easier to transport, portraits could<br />
be executed quickly as there was no drying<br />
time, and fewer sittings were required, a boon<br />
to both artist and subject. On the other hand,<br />
pastel is a notoriously fragile medium, subject<br />
to fading when exposed to light. Unlike oils,<br />
pastels’ vulnerability to fading is increased<br />
because they are not protected by a varnish,<br />
nor are the powdery components surrounded<br />
by a resin. The works had to be covered with<br />
glass, but this was not available in a large<br />
format. “Carriera’s portraits have a kind of<br />
standard size”, notes Oberer. “They didn’t get<br />
much higher than around 60 centimetres.”<br />
Great care was required when shipping them<br />
to their owners. “Carriera had a beautiful way<br />
of sending off her portraits with a little token,<br />
tucked between the painting’s wooden support<br />
and the canvas liner, placed there to protect it<br />
on its journey.” One such token was a tiny print<br />
of the three Magi, thought to be appropriate<br />
guardians because of their association with<br />
long, difficult journeys.<br />
32 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
Her visit to Paris in 1720-21, as the guest of the<br />
influential collector and connoisseur Pierre<br />
Crozat, sparked a widespread interest in<br />
portraits in pastel that continued throughout<br />
eighteenth-century Europe. While in Paris,<br />
Carriera painted the French artist Antoine<br />
Watteau, as well as numerous portraits of the<br />
French nobility including the young Louis<br />
XV. She was elected a member of the Paris<br />
Academy by acclamation, the first foreigner<br />
and only the fifth woman to receive that<br />
honour. While this event is recorded in her<br />
diary, Carriera seems not to have been overly<br />
excited by it. “This was objectively one of the<br />
most incredible events in her life,” remarks<br />
Oberer, “and she just basically writes ‘I was<br />
accepted in the Academy by a great majority’”.<br />
This tendency towards self-effacement was<br />
also evidenced by her inclination to downplay<br />
her impressive financial success. She seems to<br />
have taken the view that her prospects would<br />
benefit from remaining modest about her<br />
accomplishments (and wealth) and presenting<br />
herself to the art world as a quiet, unassuming<br />
spinster.<br />
While preferring, as much as possible, to live<br />
and work in Venice, which helped to reduce her<br />
expenses, Carriera made a long journey to the<br />
royal court in Vienna, Austria, in 1730. There,<br />
she enjoyed the patronage of Emperor Charles<br />
VI, who amassed a large collection of more<br />
than 150 of her pastels. These would later form<br />
the basis of the collection of the Alte Meister<br />
Gallery in Dresden, still the owner of the largest<br />
number of works by the artist. Pastel was<br />
prized for the lifelike quality it conferred on<br />
its subjects and for its ability to reflect, rather<br />
than absorb, light. Carriera’s pastels were<br />
noted in particular for their radiant palettes<br />
and velvety finish. She also brought her skills<br />
as a miniaturist to the finer details. Part of<br />
the appeal of owning a portrait by Carriera<br />
was the identifiable style of the paintings. As<br />
Carriera’s renown grew, her sitters clamoured<br />
to be painted with what Oberer has called the<br />
Rosalba Carriera, 1720/21. King Louis XV of France<br />
© Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden<br />
Photo: Marina Langner & Wolfgang Kreische<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 33
Carriera ‘mask’. Oberer argues that the fashion<br />
to be painted ‘by Carriera’ developed into a<br />
desire to ‘be a Carriera’. The ‘sameness’ of her<br />
portraits, noted by some critics, was not due to<br />
a lack of skill or imagination on Carriera’s part,<br />
but simply a consequence of compliance with<br />
the desires of her clients.<br />
Key to Carriera’s success was her acumen as<br />
a businesswoman. “She knew very well how<br />
to organise her business, with the help of her<br />
sister and her mother,” says Oberer. “There<br />
were so many people involved, so many<br />
letters to write and answer, so many packages<br />
to prepare. And there were copies to be made,<br />
because her sister made a lot of copies of the<br />
portraits.” The nerve centre of this operation<br />
was Carriera’s palazzo on the Grand Canal.<br />
Recognised professionally by prestigious<br />
art academies, she was an innovator in her<br />
use of ivory, her popularising of pastels<br />
and her ‘branding’ of the Carriera style.<br />
She had numerous followers, and her<br />
impact continued to be felt for decades<br />
after her death.<br />
Among the documents that Oberer studied<br />
was a room-by-room inventory of the contents<br />
of this property which provided clues as<br />
to how Carriera carried on her business.<br />
The main room, facing out onto the canal,<br />
contained over 30 paintings (mainly pastels),<br />
five mirrors, 14 chairs (but no table), and an<br />
array of porcelain cups and Chinese trays for<br />
serving the then-exotic beverages tea, coffee<br />
and chocolate. This was not just a living room,<br />
Oberer concluded. “It was her studio, it was<br />
her museum and sales room. It was the room<br />
where she received guests and held concerts.”<br />
(In addition to her artistic talent, Carriera was<br />
an accomplished musician.) One can imagine<br />
aristocratic visitors sipping hot chocolate from<br />
delicate chinoiserie cups and inspecting the<br />
rosy-cheeked portraits displayed on the walls,<br />
all the while pondering how they might look<br />
as ‘a Carriera’.<br />
Rosalba Carriera achieved everything<br />
that is thought necessary to be considered<br />
a ‘great artist’. Recognised professionally<br />
by prestigious art academies, she was an<br />
innovator in her use of ivory, her popularising<br />
of pastels and her ‘branding’ of the Carriera<br />
style. She had numerous followers, and her<br />
impact continued to be felt for decades after<br />
her death. But when the Rococo style gave<br />
way to Neoclassicism, Carriera’s name and<br />
her influence were dismissed. What accounts<br />
for this? The light and playful style of the<br />
Rococo period became associated with the<br />
superficiality of France’s ancien regime and all<br />
the frivolity and excesses that encompassed.<br />
It was, perhaps, easy to overlook works that<br />
lacked a seriousness of purpose and ignored<br />
the economic and social realities of life. There<br />
is also the fact that the paintings themselves,<br />
because of their fragility, were difficult to<br />
transport without risk of damage and, as a<br />
result, were not exhibited widely. Until now, the<br />
only monographic exhibition of her work was<br />
held in 1975, in Karlsruhe.<br />
And then there is the question of gender.<br />
Carriera was treated as a rarity as a woman<br />
artist. She endured offensive descriptions<br />
of her appearance by critics who seemed<br />
to suggest that her artistic talent had a<br />
direct inverse relationship to her perceived<br />
unattractiveness. “Just as nature was miserly in<br />
her external gifts all the more did she endow<br />
her with very rare internal talents which<br />
she cultivated with every care,” Anton Maria<br />
Zanetti the Younger wrote of Carriera in 1771.<br />
Unmarried, childless, as sublimely talented<br />
as she was (apparently) lacking in beauty, it<br />
was easy to think of Carriera as something<br />
of an aberration and perhaps, for this reason,<br />
easier to forget. The upcoming exhibition in<br />
Dresden of Carriera’s works and the soon-tobe-published<br />
book by Angela Oberer on the<br />
artist will go some way to redress the balance.<br />
By coincidence, in 1948, another trendsetting<br />
woman art entrepreneur, Peggy Guggenheim<br />
(who also had to put up with disparaging<br />
comments on her appearance), would<br />
purchase the palazzo next door to what had<br />
been Carriera’s residence on the Grand Canal.<br />
That palazzo became the home of the Peggy<br />
Guggenheim Collection, one of the most<br />
visited museums in Venice. Two remarkable<br />
women who became next-door neighbours<br />
across the centuries, successful despite the<br />
odds against them. RC<br />
34 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
Rosalba Carriera, Mary with her Left Hand on her Breast. © Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche<br />
Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Photo: Wolfgang Kreische<br />
You can watch the video recording of Angela Oberer’s lecture Rosalba Carriera:<br />
The First Painter of Europe on the Calliope Arts YouTube channel This is one of a<br />
series of lectures on women artists at the British Institute of Florence sponsored<br />
by Calliope Arts.<br />
Rosalba Carriera by Angela Oberer, part of the Lund, Humphries series ‘Illuminating<br />
Women Artists’ will be published on June 15, 20<strong>23</strong>.<br />
Celebrating the 350th anniversary of her birth, the exhibition Rosalba Carriera –<br />
Perfection in Pastel is on at the Alte Meister Gallery in Dresden from 9 June to 24<br />
September 20<strong>23</strong>.<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 35
Above: Anna Waser, 1691, Self-portrait at the Age of 12. Kunsthaus, Zürich, Wikimedia Commons<br />
36 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
Before the Selfie<br />
A few words on women’s self-portraits<br />
I“I have been paying a lot of attention to how women artists<br />
chose to depict themselves. Every decision is very deliberate in<br />
self-portraits. In the age of the ‘selfie’, where any one of us can<br />
just pick up a phone and take a ‘self-portrait’, I think it becomes<br />
even more pivotal to understand the meaning of those portraits<br />
and those choices,” says Flavia Frigeri, who has spent the past<br />
two and a half years thinking about how women are represented<br />
at Britain’s National Portrait Gallery.<br />
A self-portrait is never just a likeness of the artist, but a female<br />
self-portrait is particularly loaded. The artist often displays the<br />
tools of her trade – a palette, a paintbrush and easel – or includes<br />
objects, such as flowers or elaborate fabrics, to show off her<br />
particular skills as a painter. She may even include her children,<br />
identifying as a mother. She might present an ‘air-brushed’<br />
version of herself, either out of vanity or for marketing purposes.<br />
But, most importantly, she creates a calling card that says, ‘I am a<br />
woman and I am an artist’.<br />
The self-portraits of women artists sometimes depict their family<br />
members – usually fathers or uncles, also in the painting trade,<br />
as a symbol of standing. More rarely, they paint their children or<br />
mothers beside them. Rolinda Sharples’ 1820 self-portrait with<br />
mother Ellen, at the Bristol City Art Museum and Gallery, is one<br />
delightful example. Painting one’s master was equally common<br />
in early self-portraiture, as a way of claiming one’s spot as ‘true<br />
heir’ to the craft. Such is the case of Anna Waser’s 1691 painting<br />
at the Kunsthaus in Zürich once known by its original title: Selfportrait<br />
in the artist’s twelfth year, painting the portrait of her<br />
teacher Johannes Sulzer. At Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum, Mimmi<br />
Zetterström’s self-portrait from 1876 is equally worthy of note.<br />
She paints herself working alone, yet, in this colourful scene, her<br />
atelier or workroom, is a character-of-sorts – and the walls speak<br />
volumes about her prolific nature as a painter.<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 37
Left: Alice Neel, 1980. Self-Portrait<br />
© The Estate of Alice Neel<br />
Courtesy of The Estate of Alice Neel<br />
Above: Rolinda Sharples, 1820<br />
Self-portrait with the Artist’s Mother Ellen Sharples<br />
Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, Wikimedia Commons<br />
Many of the artists featured in this issue of<br />
Restoration Conversations have created one or<br />
more self-portraits that provide us clues to their<br />
personalities. Alice Neel completed her first selfportrait<br />
at the age of 80. “All my life I’ve wanted to<br />
paint a self-portrait,” Neel declared. “But I waited<br />
until now, when people would accuse me of<br />
insanity rather than vanity.” She painted herself<br />
nude, and presents herself as both artist, holding<br />
a paintbrush, and subject, seated in the striped<br />
blue and white chair that featured in many of<br />
her portraits. Not unlike her subjects, she looks<br />
slightly awkward, with her feet splayed and her<br />
torso leaning forward rather than relaxing into<br />
the chair. But the tilt of her chin seems to say, ‘this<br />
is who I am – an artist who tells it like it is.’<br />
Rosalba Carriera was another artist who did<br />
not shy away from painting herself in old(er)<br />
age. Indeed, as Jennifer Higgie points out in The<br />
Mirror and the Palette, in Carriera’s 1730-31 pastel<br />
Self-Portrait as ‘Winter’, she “depicted herself<br />
not only as someone who has aged, but as the<br />
embodiment of the passing of the seasons, as if<br />
she were not only a woman but a landscape as<br />
well.” She is not troubled with vanity. Her grey<br />
hair matches the fur draped around her neck; no<br />
rouge brightens up her cheeks or enhances her<br />
slightly pursed lips [Editor’s note: this painting is<br />
featured at Carriera’s Dresden: show, p. 30]. We<br />
acquire more insight into her inner life with her<br />
1715 Self-portrait Holding a Portrait of her Sister.<br />
Here, again, she presents an unvarnished ‘warts<br />
38 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
Above: Rosalba Carriera, 1709<br />
Self-portrait Holding a Portrait of her Sister<br />
Uffizi Galleries, Florence<br />
Right: Mimmi Zetterström, 1876, Self-portrait<br />
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm<br />
Wikimedia Commons<br />
and all’ version of herself, but the fact that she<br />
includes her sister in the picture demonstrates<br />
the importance of this relationship and the depth<br />
of feeling between them. And this is all the more<br />
so when we consider that this was the painting<br />
Carriera contributed to the Medici collection of<br />
self-portraits at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.<br />
Initiated by Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici in<br />
the seventeenth century, this extensive collection<br />
comprises some 1,800 paintings. Until it was<br />
closed for renovations in 2016, 600 self-portraits<br />
were exhibited in the Vasari Corridor, which<br />
connects the Palazzo Vecchio, via the Uffizi and<br />
the Ponte Vecchio, to the Palazzo Pitti on the other<br />
side of the Arno River. Because the Medici Grand<br />
Dukes were particularly keen to collect female<br />
self-portraits, this prestigious series boasts the<br />
highest concentration of works by women artists<br />
available for public viewing in the world. For<br />
anyone fortunate enough to have taken it, the<br />
‘Vasari Corridor tour’ was revelatory – who knew<br />
there were so many recognised female painters<br />
going back to the 1500’s?<br />
When the Vasari Corridor reopens, at a date yet to<br />
be disclosed, it will no longer house the self-portrait<br />
collection. Perhaps the women’s self-portraits will<br />
be dispersed throughout the collection across<br />
different periods. Or perhaps they will be part of<br />
a rotating group of self-portraits in a designated<br />
gallery. But it seems certain that the impact of<br />
concentrating so many works of and by women in<br />
a unique part of the museum will be lost.<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 39
40 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
One self-portrait that is missing from<br />
the Medici collection is that of Artemisia<br />
Gentileschi. This is surprising given that she<br />
lived and worked in Florence for seven years<br />
and was patronised by Cosimo II de’ Medici.<br />
It sometimes appears as if every female<br />
protagonist in her paintings, whether saint,<br />
Biblical heroine or allegorical figure, is mooted<br />
as a possible ‘self-portrait’. This applies to her<br />
‘Allegory of Inclination’ currently the subject of<br />
a restoration at Casa Buonarroti. Commissioned<br />
by Michelangelo the Younger, and planned<br />
by him in every detail, the commission was<br />
“particularly audacious,” in the words of art<br />
historian Sheila Barker, “because it called for<br />
female nudity in a canvas meant for semipublic<br />
display … Had it been painted by a man,<br />
the female nudity would have been perceived<br />
as an allegorical attribute; however, because it<br />
was painted by an attractive young woman, the<br />
nude body could be taken as a literal reference<br />
to the artist’s own body.”<br />
Barker goes on to explain that “rather than<br />
trying to forestall that inevitable association,<br />
Artemisia embraced it by giving her own<br />
idealised facial features to the nude figure.<br />
In reality, that nude figure, which is seen<br />
from below and, therefore, required difficult<br />
foreshortening, was necessarily made with the<br />
assistance of a female model …”<br />
Artemisia would have been pleased to be<br />
identified with the allegorical figure in the<br />
Inclination because she aspired to be seen<br />
as possessing the same attributes that were<br />
associated with Michelangelo. But it seems to<br />
beg the question, when is a self-portrait not a<br />
self-portrait …? RC<br />
Above: 15th-century depiction of Roman painter Iaia at work, from<br />
Giovanni Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris<br />
Bibliothèque nationale de France. Wikimedia Commons<br />
Left: Artemisia Gentileschi, 1615. Allegory of Inclination<br />
Casa Buonarroti Museum, Florence,<br />
under restoration by Calliope Arts and Christian Levett<br />
FURTHER READING:<br />
Barker, Sheila, Artemisia Gentileschi,<br />
Lund Humphries, London, 2022<br />
Higgie, Jennifer, The Mirror and the Palette,<br />
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2021<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 41
All About Joan<br />
Reflections on the Monet-Mitchell exhibition<br />
at Fondation Louis Vuitton<br />
By Margie MacKinnon<br />
When I told an artist friend about my (then)<br />
upcoming weekend in Paris, the highlight<br />
of which was to be a visit to the Monet–<br />
Mitchell exhibition, she briefly deflated my spirits<br />
by saying she had found the show disappointing.<br />
The juxtaposition of the American’s works next<br />
to those of the great French master, she opined,<br />
did not enhance Mitchell’s paintings, but made<br />
them seem ‘derivative’. I am happy to report<br />
that my own impression was quite the opposite.<br />
The exhibition was a wonderful showcase of<br />
Mitchell’s works, and she had no trouble holding<br />
her own when viewed ‘in dialogue’ with one of<br />
Impressionism’s greatest exponents.<br />
FLV’s artistic director, Suzanne Page, a visitor<br />
to Joan Mitchell’s home in Vétheuil in 1982,<br />
claimed that the artist “hated” being compared<br />
to Claude Monet, but such comparisons were all<br />
but inevitable given that, for many years, Mitchell<br />
lived in a house whose terrace overlooked the<br />
residence where Monet spent the final years of<br />
his life. Her view was the landscape that he often<br />
painted. Many Abstract Expressionist painters,<br />
including Mitchell, were inspired by Monet’s<br />
large-scale works, such as his celebrated water<br />
lilies series. Perhaps Mitchell, who was intensely<br />
competitive, thought she could not come out on<br />
top in such a comparison, given Monet’s exalted<br />
stature in the art world.<br />
Born in 1925, Mitchell grew up in a well-to-do<br />
family in Chicago. According to Mary Gabriel in<br />
her authoritative chronicle Ninth Street Women,<br />
Joan’s mother was distant, and her father was so<br />
disappointed she was not a boy that he wrote the<br />
name ‘John’ on her birth certificate. Perhaps in a<br />
bid to win her father’s approval, Mitchell took up<br />
a variety of sports – figure skating, diving and<br />
tennis – at which she excelled. She attacked her<br />
art studies at the School of the Art Institute of<br />
Chicago with equal determination.<br />
Upon graduation she won a travelling fellowship<br />
and a print prize that led to her first mention in<br />
ArtNews. By 1950, Mitchell was in New York where<br />
she soon wangled an introduction to Willem de<br />
Kooning, who would have a major influence on<br />
her early work. She joined the group of artists,<br />
Right: Installation<br />
views of Joan Mitchell<br />
Retrospective. Courtesy of<br />
Fondation Louis Vuitton<br />
42 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 43
Below: Joan Mitchell, 1971. Plowed Field, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris © The Estate of Joan Mitchell<br />
including Grace Hartigan and Elaine de Kooning,<br />
that congregated at the Cedar Bar. In 1951, the<br />
three of them, together with Lee Krasner and<br />
Helen Frankenthaler would be the only women<br />
to be included in what would become known as<br />
the ‘Ninth Street Show’, a seminal moment in the<br />
American Abstract Expressionist movement in art.<br />
I arrived at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, on<br />
the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, some thirty<br />
minutes before the time designated on my<br />
ticket. The clear skies promised by the weather<br />
forecast gave way to a grey drizzle, but even<br />
this didn’t dampen my spirits. The Fondation’s<br />
Frank Gehry-designed building is a mesmerising<br />
confection of geometric curves and lines. The<br />
architect took his inspiration from the lightness<br />
of late nineteenth-century glass and garden<br />
architecture, and the building’s twelve glass sails<br />
play with the light and reflections of water from<br />
the basin in which it stands, creating an ideal<br />
setting for this exhibition.<br />
I hadn’t realised that, as well as the Monet–<br />
Mitchell dialogue on the upper floors, the<br />
museum was hosting a retrospective of Mitchell’s<br />
work, beginning with an untitled abstract painting<br />
from 1950 that was quite similar to the one she<br />
exhibited at the ‘Ninth Street Show’. Nearby<br />
was The Bridge, 1956, Mitchell’s first polyptych,<br />
which became her signature form from the early<br />
1960’s onward. A note beside the work explains<br />
that the title “invokes a mix of references, to the<br />
bridges her grandfather built in Chicago, her first<br />
New York apartment under Brooklyn Bridge, and<br />
the bridges of Paris … as well as her frequent<br />
transatlantic crossings.”<br />
While some of the early paintings are almost<br />
monochromatic, many of the later works are<br />
brimming with colour. Ode to Joy, 1970-71,<br />
combines vibrant yellows and blues in what<br />
could be an abstract bouquet of flowers. The<br />
title invokes the final movement of Beethoven’s<br />
Ninth Symphony, as well as a poem of the same<br />
44 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
Above: Joan Mitchell, 1983. Detail, La Grande Vallee XIV (For a Little While), Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne/Centre de création industrielle<br />
© The Estate of Joan Mitchell. Below: Claude Monet, 1916-1919. Les Agapanthes, Courtesy of Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris<br />
name by Frank O’Hara. Mitchell would say that,<br />
“music, poems, landscape and dogs make me<br />
want to paint. And painting is what allows me<br />
to survive.” Plowed Field, 1971, is an imposing<br />
triptych combining blocks of earthy greens and<br />
deep yellows. Highlights of pinks, maroon and<br />
teal unite the three panels in what Mitchell said<br />
was a “homage to Vincent perhaps …”<br />
When Mitchell moved permanently to Vétheuil,<br />
late in 1968, the landscape surrounding her large<br />
property had a dramatic effect on her work.<br />
Describing the huge sunflowers, almost three<br />
meters high, that surrounded the house, she<br />
said, “they look so wonderful when young and<br />
they are so moving when they are dying. I don’t<br />
like fields of sunflowers. I like them alone, or, of<br />
course, painted by Van Gogh.” Her admiration for<br />
him is evidenced in Two Sunflowers, 1980, a large<br />
diptych of brilliant golden yellows.<br />
The dialogue between the artists began on<br />
the upper levels. Monumental works by each<br />
of them, placed side by side, allowed visitors to<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 45
Left: Claude Monet, 1916-1919. Nymphéas, Huile sur<br />
toile, Courtesy of Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris<br />
Left, bottom: Installation views of Joan Mitchell<br />
Retrospective. Courtesy of Fondation Louis Vuitton<br />
Yellow diptych on the right is Two Sunflowers, 1980<br />
46 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
Above: Joan Mitchell, 1976. Quatuor II for Betsy Jolas, Paris, Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, en dépôt au musée de Peinture et de Sculpture, Grenoble<br />
Courtesy of Joan Mitchell Foundation © The Estate of Joan Mitchell<br />
draw comparisons between them, noting obvious<br />
similarities as well as areas of divergence. There<br />
was a familiar magnificence to Monet’s watery<br />
landscapes of blues, greens and violets – for who<br />
has not seen at least a reproduction of some of<br />
the many paintings of his gardens at Giverny?<br />
Monet worked for ten years on the huge canvases<br />
of his Agapanthus triptych, brought together here<br />
for the first time since 1956. He had been “wild<br />
with the need to put down what I experience. To<br />
render what I feel,” he said, “I totally forget the<br />
most basic rules of painting – if they even exist.”<br />
Monet’s last works, painted when his eyesight<br />
was failing, became ever more abstract. Though<br />
he could barely see, he continued to paint from<br />
memory and imagination. The influence on<br />
Mitchell’s works, in form and colour, is evident<br />
but, in her hands, the landscape dissolves into<br />
pure abstraction.<br />
The final room contained the dreamlike<br />
experience of Mitchell’s La Grande Vallee. Painted<br />
between 1983 and 1984, the cycle is made up of<br />
21 paintings. As curatorial notes explain, “they<br />
are characterised by the density of the pictorial<br />
surfaces. The sparseness of the whites and<br />
the lack of perspective are unique. The artist’s<br />
distinctive chromatic range is evident: cobalt<br />
blue and rapeseed yellow prevail alongside a<br />
multitude of greens, pinks and purples.” This<br />
series of works was exhibited in two stages by<br />
Mitchell’s gallerist, Jean Fournier, in 1984. It has<br />
never been shown in its entirety. At FLV, ten of<br />
the paintings had been assembled, making it the<br />
largest display since the cycle’s first presentation.<br />
The inspiration for these paintings was a<br />
memory twice removed from the artist. Mitchell<br />
had never seen ‘la grande vallee’ herself. It had<br />
been described to her by a friend as a special<br />
place she had visited in childhood with a cousin,<br />
who, shortly before his death, had longed to<br />
return there. “Painting is the opposite of death,”<br />
said Mitchell. “It permits one to survive. It also<br />
permits one to live.”<br />
For me, La Grande Vallee was the highest of the<br />
exhibition’s many highlights. To stand immersed<br />
in the colours bursting from Joan Mitchell’s<br />
canvasses was a life affirming experience.<br />
Nothing derivative about it. RC<br />
FURTHER READING:<br />
Gabriel, Mary, Ninth Street Women<br />
Little, Brown and Co., New York, 2018<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 47
Murders and<br />
marriages<br />
Catherine de’ Medici goes ‘full circle’<br />
By Linda Falcone<br />
Catherine de’ Medici, one of history’s<br />
most famous queen consorts, brought<br />
the fork to France, along with porcelain<br />
tableware, and imported new-world<br />
specialties the court had never seen,<br />
including chocolate, coffee, even<br />
potatoes. She introduced the wearing of<br />
underwear, donned the country’s first pair<br />
of high-heeled shoes on her wedding day,<br />
and brought in fads like perfumed gloves<br />
– which she was rumored to use against<br />
her enemies, when politics warranted a<br />
touch of poison.<br />
It took Catherine and Henry II nearly a<br />
decade to get pregnant, after the couple<br />
wed in 1533 – both at fourteen – while<br />
the boy was still the Prince of Orléans.<br />
When Catherine finally conceived, it was<br />
not thanks to the diviners, magicians and<br />
medics who worked for years to boost<br />
her fertility, borrowing from their gilded<br />
books of rules and remedies. The potion<br />
recorded as helping the queen was her<br />
chef’s bird-giblet broth, whose benefits<br />
were apparently enduring. Catherine<br />
ultimately produced ten children, seven<br />
of whom survived to ‘marriageable age’.<br />
When Henry II was accidently killed<br />
during a jousting match, in 1559, she<br />
served as regent for two of her kingly<br />
sons – Francis II and Charles XI – who<br />
ascended to the throne while underage,<br />
and would continue to exercise<br />
considerable influence over the French<br />
court, even after her third son Henry III<br />
was crowned, in adulthood.<br />
48 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
Above: Francesco Bianchi Bonavita,<br />
1627. Detail, The Wedding of<br />
Catherine de’ Medici to Duke Henri<br />
of Orleans, Private Collection<br />
Right: Il Volterrano, 1636-1646.<br />
Catherine de’ Medici and her Son<br />
Medici Villa, La Petraia, Tuscany<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 49
Left: Workshop of François Clouet, 1561<br />
Catherine de’ Medici and her Children,<br />
Strawberry Hill House<br />
Below: : Édouard Debat-Ponsan, 1880<br />
One Morning at the Gates of the<br />
Louvre, Musée d’Art Roger-Quilliot,<br />
Clermont-Ferrand, France<br />
Right: Yvan Lastes, 2012<br />
Château de Chenonceau, view from<br />
the northeast, showing the chapel and<br />
library, Wikimedia Commons<br />
50 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
In novels and films, including Alexandre<br />
Dumas’ La Reine Margot, Catherine is portrayed<br />
as supreme antagonist, who pushes her unwilling<br />
daughter Marguerite into a loveless marriage to<br />
Henri of Navarre, a prominent member of the<br />
Huguenots, a French Protestant group. Strangely,<br />
just days after the couple’s wedding, in 1572,<br />
Catherine is blamed as being the mastermind<br />
behind the Saint Bartholomew Day’s massacre<br />
– during which thousands of Protestants were<br />
brutally murdered in Paris, at the hands of<br />
Catholic nobles. Doubts remain regarding the<br />
extent of Catherine’s alleged involvement in this<br />
bloody incident, which is, in any case, indicative<br />
of the religious strife that plagued the country<br />
throughout her reign and regency.<br />
Partly heightened for fictional purposes,<br />
the scheming side of Catherine’s personality<br />
is downplayed or even disregarded, in her<br />
hometown today. Indeed, she is highly regarded,<br />
more for her cultural contributions, than for<br />
her political maneuvering. Catherine was a<br />
true Medici daughter, in her belief that the<br />
production of art, performances, architecture<br />
and fine artisanship would divert the French<br />
monarchy from its otherwise inevitable decline,<br />
already underway, prior to her arrival. One of<br />
her most notable achievements was her support<br />
of the development of ballet, brought to France<br />
through her patronage, following its debut in<br />
Italy. The Ballet Comique de la Reine, which<br />
she commissioned in 1581, is celebrated as the<br />
first-ever ballet de cour. Catherine’s passion<br />
for architecture, which she discovered after the<br />
age of 40, is also well noted, albeit much of her<br />
architectural legacy has since been destroyed.<br />
She designed the Tuileries herself, inspired by<br />
Florence’s Pitti Palace, and Chenonceaux, which<br />
she expanded, after booting her late husband’s<br />
mistress Diane De Poitiers from the chateau, is<br />
known as her ‘unfinished masterpiece’.<br />
Plots and patronage aside, another of Catherine’s<br />
legacies lies in her skillful marriage negotiations.<br />
Although the Medici never made good on the<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 51
Above: Salimbeni Ventura, XVI century. Wedding of Grand Duke Ferdinand I de’ Medici to Christine of Lorraine, National Archives of Siena<br />
Right: Orazio Scarabelli, c. 1589. Naumachia in the Court of Palazzo Pitti, documenting the wedding of Ferdinand I de’ Medici and Christine of Lorraine, the MET, New York<br />
52 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
dowry the French royals were promised when<br />
she tied the knot, Catherine knew that weddings<br />
were a highest-bidder business, and the oldest<br />
form of political strategy. In her world, wives<br />
were the way to guarantee generations of<br />
power. Though Catherine was unsuccessful in<br />
convincing England’s Queen Elizabeth I to marry<br />
one of her frail sons, she did manage to place<br />
two of her own daughters in strategic marriages<br />
meant to ensure the continuance of the House<br />
of Valois. Catherine’s daughter Elizabeth was wed<br />
to the ultra-powerful Philip II of Spain; Claude,<br />
her second-born – known as Claudia, in Italy –<br />
was given in marriage to Charles III of Lorraine.<br />
Their spirited daughter Christine was Catherine’s<br />
favourite.<br />
Like Catherine herself, little Christine lost her<br />
mother in infancy. To her grandmother’s delight,<br />
she was highly intelligent, and historians have<br />
made it a point to emphasize that she was<br />
not a beauty, at least by the standards of her<br />
contemporaries. Catherine, whom the French<br />
people had snubbed as a ‘shopkeeper’s daughter’<br />
before cluing into the resourcefulness of her<br />
character, knew that being a ‘beauty’ was not<br />
everything. She had gained the court’s respect<br />
eventually, and it had not been because of the<br />
gowns she’d brought, which were so-bejeweled<br />
no fabric was needed as lining. Pretty or not,<br />
her darling Christine was bred for Florentine<br />
marriage. Gaining a foothold in Catherine’s native<br />
city would allow the older woman to return ‘full<br />
circle’ to the land of her youth – at least in spirit.<br />
The opportunity they were waiting for presented<br />
itself following the death of Florence’s Grand Duke<br />
Francesco and his second wife Bianca Cappello.<br />
Catherine proposed Christine as ‘candidate’, when<br />
the late ruler’s brother, Cardinal Ferdinando, cast<br />
off ‘the cloth’, and began seeking a woman with<br />
whom to secure the dynasty’s continuance.<br />
Catherine was convinced the pair would get along<br />
well, ultimately. They did, in fact. Never mind that<br />
Ferdinando may have been the one to put the<br />
‘strange’ in the strange circumstances surrounding<br />
Francesco and Bianca’s death, possibly through<br />
arsenic poisoning.<br />
Christine de Lorraine married Ferdinando<br />
through proxy, and the conditions of that<br />
agreement were negotiated by Queen Catherine<br />
herself, but the bride did not arrive in Florence,<br />
until nearly two years after their union was<br />
made official, first due to her father’s death, and<br />
later, because she refused to leave the ailing<br />
Catherine’s bedside.<br />
Christine finally made the trip to Florence,<br />
in 1589, after her grandmother’s funeral. She<br />
entered Medici wonderland, fittingly prepared<br />
for a month-long nuptial celebration full of<br />
public festivals, of a scale and grandeur that<br />
only the Medici could muster. Pitti’s courtyard<br />
was purposely flooded for the reenactment of a<br />
naval battle in which Christian ships stormed a<br />
Turkish fort. The verses of Dante, Ovid, Plato and<br />
Plutarch were woven together in six ‘intermezzi’<br />
performances, whose overall message was<br />
meant to ward off evil and open the gates of a<br />
Golden Age made possible through a new Medici<br />
marriage. Their wedding can only be compared to<br />
the modern reader’s idea of a world fair. Christina<br />
was a French princess and a Medici – she had<br />
all the background she’d ever need to drive the<br />
Duchy forward. Poetry, pageantry, performance<br />
and craftsmanship – any media was worthy, when<br />
it came to welcoming a marriage whose destiny,<br />
was ‘written in the stars’, a good omen, many<br />
believed, for subjects and sovereigns alike. RC<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 53
Above: Stefano Della Bella, 1656. Galileo and Personifications of Astronomy, Perspective and Mathematics<br />
Frontispiece for the Works of Galileo Galilei, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin<br />
Inset: One of two extant telescopes used by Galileo, 1609. Galileo Museum, Florence<br />
54 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
The telescope,<br />
a thorny issue<br />
S<br />
A<br />
letter to Madame Christine<br />
SEEKING SOLUTIONS<br />
In a 1656 etching by Florentine artist Stefano<br />
della Bella, the personifications of Astronomy,<br />
Perspective, and Mathematics give their undivided<br />
attention to Galileo’s instruments, without so<br />
much as a glance towards the stars he strives<br />
to explain. This whimsical work, created for<br />
the frontispiece of The Works of Galileo Galilei,<br />
published some 14 years after the scientist’s<br />
death, shows Professor Galileo on bended knee.<br />
He may be seeking grace or recognition from the<br />
ladies before him, and his supplication would<br />
be no surprise. For a good four hundred years,<br />
from the Renaissance to the French Revolution,<br />
allegorical figures populated the higher spheres<br />
of scholarship, no matter the discipline. Virtues<br />
and Learning could transport humans to great<br />
heights and, to do so, they adopted the female<br />
form, like Liberty with her flag unfurled, or<br />
Justice, the blind but all-seeing lady who would,<br />
eventually, set things right.<br />
By nature, the lady allegories are inspirers,<br />
and they served the Pisan scientist well. Yet, in<br />
1615, Galileo, as a supporter of the sun-centred<br />
theories of Copernicus, needed more than<br />
inspiration – he needed protection. His studies,<br />
The Sidereal Message, authored five years earlier<br />
were ground-breaking for ‘the Earth revolves<br />
around the Sun’ idea, which displeased the<br />
Clergy who advocated the geocentric cosmos<br />
described in Biblical verses. With the rest of the<br />
world still believing in a geocentric Universe,<br />
Galileo needed friends in high places. Christine<br />
de Lorraine was one, Galileo thought, for science<br />
was among the Grand Duchess’s many interests.<br />
A PATRON, A PROFESSOR<br />
Galileo and Christine of Lorraine held each<br />
other in high esteem, perhaps they would have<br />
been friends – had their ranks, genders and<br />
era permitted it. It was she who had called him<br />
in from Padua – then part of another country<br />
– to tutor the Medici<br />
heirs. Overseeing<br />
the education of<br />
her children –<br />
and Christine<br />
produced ten<br />
of them with<br />
Ferdinando I –<br />
was a ‘duchess<br />
duty’ which<br />
she transformed<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 55
into an achievement. Her children were to have<br />
a classic education, yet it would also include<br />
modern languages and cutting-edge scientific<br />
theory. In some ways you could say that having<br />
Galileo as her staffer, starting in the summer of<br />
1605, was mutually beneficial.<br />
For Christine, as a seventeenth-century dynasty<br />
wife, astronomy was key. The boundless skies<br />
above her head was like landscape unclaimed,<br />
and what better way to live in perpetuity than<br />
to link her boys’ names to the stars? Galileo,<br />
on his end, wanted political protection (and<br />
economic security!) in a world fast approaching<br />
the Inquisition, and the discovery of Jupiter’s four<br />
moons helped to secure it, for he christened his<br />
moons the ‘Medicean stars’ and dedicated The<br />
Sidereal Message to Christine’s oldest son, the<br />
Grand Duke Cosimo II. As a boy of 14, Cosimo<br />
II had what Galileo considered a mathematical<br />
mind. The scientist gifted him his military compass<br />
and telescope, as a personal token. Incidentally,<br />
Cosimo II became Grand Duke at 19, but he would<br />
die young and without great popularity. One of<br />
the lasting legacies of his rule (1609 to 1621) was<br />
the protection he provided his former tutor, who<br />
despite the Inquisition, was allowed to continue<br />
to study in Tuscany relatively undisturbed.<br />
Cosimo II appointed Galileo “Philosopher and<br />
Mathematician” of the Medici court in Florence<br />
and supported his research in astronomy and<br />
physics.<br />
A letter for Madame Christine<br />
In addition to her love for the stars, Christine’s<br />
Catholicism made her a well-suited Medici wife<br />
– for issues of papal power, not faith – but as<br />
Dowager, she was criticised for her acquiescence<br />
to Roman power. Still, piety seems to have been<br />
a genuine personal concern, in addition to her<br />
real desire to understand how viable science<br />
could stand in contrast with Scripture. She<br />
asked Galileo’s pupils to elucidate this issue<br />
on several occasions, and ultimately, Galileo’s<br />
response came in letter form. “The Letter to the<br />
Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine” associates<br />
56 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
the Grand Duchess’ name with the thorny issue<br />
of the dialogue between science and religion,<br />
explains Natacha Fabbri, professor of History of<br />
Science and a project coordinator at Florence’s<br />
Galileo Museum, and an author of several books<br />
on Copernican theory. “One of the so-called<br />
‘Copernican letters’, it is a small treatise, in which<br />
Galileo claimed the autonomy of scientific study<br />
from religion, defending himself and the other<br />
Copernican astronomers from the charge of<br />
heresy. Galileo argued the need to distinguish<br />
two different fields: Biblical interpretation and<br />
scientific research. When discussing astronomical<br />
matters, research should be led by ‘sensory<br />
experience’ and ‘mathematical demonstration’,<br />
not by the traditional interpretation of the Bible<br />
provided by Church forefathers. In one famous<br />
line to Christine, he writes, ‘The Bible teaches how<br />
to go to heaven, not how the heavens go’.”<br />
CHRISTINE AND THE COSMOS<br />
The Grand Duchess Dowager never answered<br />
the letter,” Natacha says, “and perhaps her silence<br />
was wise.” Not long after the letter was penned,<br />
Copernicus’ book On the Revolutions of the Celestial<br />
Orbs (1543) was listed on the Index of Prohibited<br />
Books, with the clause “forbidden until corrected”,<br />
and Heliocentrism was declared heretical. Galileo’s<br />
trial was 16 years away, but his letter – which<br />
circulated in manuscript form for some 20 months<br />
before being published in Latin – would ultimately<br />
be a piece of ‘evidence’ used against him.<br />
As for Christine, the jury is still out on<br />
whether she is the bigot she was painted as,<br />
posthumously. Modern-day art historians like<br />
Adelina Modesti and Christina Strunck remind<br />
today’s ‘audiences’ that historical women who<br />
are not forgotten, are often remembered as weak<br />
or wily, or at best power-hungry and bigoted. As<br />
Left: Cristofano Allori<br />
c. 1609. Cosimo II, Grand Duke<br />
of Tuscany<br />
Museo del Prado<br />
Wikipedia Commons<br />
Above: Jacques Callot, c. 1614<br />
The Marriage of Ferdinand I<br />
de’ Medici and Christine of<br />
Lorraine<br />
National Museum of Western<br />
Art, Tokyo<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 57
Above: First intermezzo of the<br />
play La Pellegrina: Harmony<br />
of the Spheres, from 1589<br />
Medici wedding, stage design<br />
by Bernardo Buontalenti<br />
Grand Duchess and Dowager, Christine does not<br />
fit into the first categories and she may have<br />
been the latter, but, in this forum the question<br />
better posed is this: Did she actually have power<br />
enough to intercede in Galileo’s favour? Would a<br />
response letter from her have helped or further<br />
harmed her Pisan friend?<br />
We do know that a number of Galileo’s peers<br />
thought it inappropriate for him to address a<br />
scientific treatise-of-sorts to a lay person (and<br />
a woman) – whatever her political rank might<br />
be. They doubted the Grand Duchess’s ability<br />
to understand the content of his letter or fully<br />
grasp the repercussions of his science. Certainly,<br />
Christine was no mathematician, but it bears<br />
remembering that her introduction to the cosmos<br />
– or at least her day’s conception of it – did<br />
not begin with her employment of Galileo. The<br />
subject had intrigued her since that first lavish<br />
performance of ‘The Harmony of the Spheres’,<br />
staged at the Uffizi theatre on one of her many<br />
wedding days (celebrated over a month and a half<br />
in the spring of 1589). The show was one of her<br />
first lessons in cosmology. “Traditionally, Medici<br />
family weddings were celebrated with parades<br />
and performances representing planets, stars and,<br />
more generally, the heavens,” Natacha explains.<br />
“The Medici’s interest in the cosmos was rooted<br />
in the name of the dynasty’s founder Cosimo I,<br />
and reminiscent of the well-established tradition<br />
whereby the universe was seen as the perfect<br />
model for rulers and politicians to follow.” These<br />
set designs were crafted by none other than<br />
painter and draughtsman Bernardo Buontalenti,<br />
whose universe was largely allegorical. Natacha<br />
describes as it as an “apotheosis of deities and<br />
beautiful nature, surrounded by celestial sirens<br />
that moved circularly around the personification<br />
of Harmony, singing to recall the perfection and<br />
beauty of the heavens.”<br />
Sirens aside, Christine’s nuptials brought her<br />
close to the cosmos in another way as well.<br />
58 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
In addition to the never-ending wedding<br />
pageant he planned, Ferdinando I commissioned<br />
a ‘cosmological model’ that celebrates their<br />
union. The revered Antonio Santucci, Galileo’s<br />
predecessor as Chair of the Mathematics at<br />
the University of Pisa, designed the 3-meter<br />
high gilded beech wood model, which took five<br />
years to complete, from 1588 to 1593. Its outer<br />
celestial sphere contains seven inner spheres<br />
designed to rotate around the central planet<br />
Earth. The system moves through the sidereal<br />
belt – the 12 signs of the zodiac – decorated<br />
with mythological and astronomical symbols, a<br />
reminder that astronomers were also astrologers<br />
in Christine’s day.<br />
“Santucci’s cosmological model is a<br />
representation of the geocentric universe. It<br />
is also a ‘mechanical’ universe, as its planetary<br />
spheres could be set in motion with the crank<br />
on one side [now lost], and God the Father,<br />
depicted inside the sphere, supervises their<br />
perfect movements.” Santucci, Galileo writes<br />
in his 1615 letter to Christine, would become a<br />
convert to the Copernican theory late in life, and<br />
his model has become a feat of craftsmanship<br />
and engineering, not cosmology. Such are the<br />
Tuscan winds of change.<br />
In conclusion, the Letter to Madame Christine<br />
brings shifting viewpoints to the fore. Christine,<br />
a ‘pious woman’, in her time, was dismissed as<br />
a bigot, in the centuries that followed. Galileo,<br />
shunned in his day by most of the Catholics<br />
who counted, is now a ‘secular saint’. His relic on<br />
display in a glass case – his middle finger – is the<br />
most frequently visited ‘conversation piece’ at the<br />
Galileo Museum. RC<br />
Watch the Museo Galileo’s video:<br />
Representing the Harmony of the Sphere<br />
at the Medici Court: https://www.youtube.<br />
com/watch?v=uA7mTMMhLcU<br />
Above: Detail of Cosmological<br />
model by Antonio Santucci,<br />
Medici court cosmographer<br />
and the predecessor of Galileo<br />
Galileo Museum, Florence<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 59
60 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
‘Hidden in plain sight’<br />
Adrienne Fidelin, a quest for rediscovery<br />
By Wendy A. Grossman<br />
As cultural institutions grapple with their<br />
role in perpetuating racial inequality,<br />
reckoning with the many ways Black figures<br />
have been marginalized throughout art history<br />
has become an increasingly critical and timely<br />
undertaking. Such is the case of Guadeloupean<br />
dancer and model Adrienne “Ady” Fidelin, whose<br />
ubiquitous visual presence animating various<br />
accounts of Surrealism contrasts starkly with her<br />
glaring absence in accompanying written texts.<br />
Her erasure in modernist narratives lays bare art<br />
history’s implication in the societal devaluation<br />
of the lives and contributions of people of color.<br />
Celebrated in French avant-garde circles in<br />
the interwar period and heralded today as the<br />
first Black model to grace the pages of a major<br />
American fashion magazine, Fidelin nonetheless<br />
virtually disappeared from the public record for<br />
three-quarters of a century. She was also the<br />
previously unidentified subject of a striking 1937<br />
painting by Pablo Picasso, Femme assise sur fond<br />
rose et jaune, II.<br />
FINDING ADY<br />
The project of recovering Adrienne Fidelin’s<br />
story was sparked by my decades-long research<br />
on Man Ray, the white American artist who<br />
introduced his partner Ady to an international<br />
vanguard community. While her significance in<br />
the artist’s life was evident in his work during his<br />
last five years in Paris before fleeing the German<br />
occupation in 1940, her story was nowhere to be<br />
found when I began my quest. No trace of her<br />
birth or death dates or record of her arrival in<br />
France. No evidence documenting her dancing<br />
and modeling aspirations or how and when<br />
the two lovers met. No information about what<br />
became of her once she disappeared from the<br />
avant-garde spotlight. All that existed were a<br />
smattering of archived correspondence and a<br />
plethora of mesmerizing images compelling me<br />
to learn more about her.<br />
Clues about Fidelin’s story emerged slowly<br />
over the course of years of investigation. My<br />
launching point was a photograph by Man Ray<br />
Left: Man Ray, 1937.<br />
Adrienne Fidelin<br />
Collection Marion Meyer, Paris<br />
© Man Ray 2021 Trust / ADAGP,<br />
Paris<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 61
Left: Pablo Picasso, 1937<br />
Femme assise sur fond jaune et rose II (Portrait de femme)<br />
© 2021 Estate of Pablo Picasso / ADAGP, Paris<br />
Above: Pablo Picasso, 1937. Portrait de Lee Miller en<br />
Arlésienne, © 2021 Estate of Pablo Picasso / ADAGP, Paris<br />
Right, top: “The Bushongo of Africa sends his hats to Paris”<br />
Text: Paul Eluard; Photographs: Man Ray, Harper’s Bazaar,<br />
September 15, 1937. Collection of the author<br />
© Man Ray 2021 Trust / ADAGP, Paris<br />
Right, bottom: Roland Penrose, 1937. Four Women Sleeping<br />
(Lee Miller, Adrienne Fidelin, Nusch Eluard and Leonora<br />
Carrington). Print from colour reversal film<br />
© Roland Penrose Estate, England 2021<br />
in which the model is posed in an exoticized<br />
manner sporting a Congolese headdress.<br />
Reproduced in a 1937 spread in Harper’s Bazaar,<br />
this image unceremoniously positioned her as<br />
a transgressor of the intransigent racial barriers<br />
in the fashion industry. The image, an exemplar<br />
of Man Ray’s Mode au Congo series of similarly<br />
adorned European models, opened a window into<br />
the avant-garde’s fascination with African art and<br />
diasporic culture that inflected the way in which<br />
they envisioned and represented this figure.<br />
In piecing together the puzzle of Fidelin’s<br />
life, I examined hundreds of photographs in<br />
private and public collections, combed through<br />
biographies and memoires of prominent<br />
individuals with whom she interacted, and<br />
mined various archives. I subsequently joined<br />
forces with Sala E. Patterson, a writer and<br />
equally indefatigable researcher who shared my<br />
preoccupation with this lost figure. Together we<br />
unearthed records in Guadeloupe enabling us<br />
to confirm her birth date of March 4, 1915. This<br />
led to other facets of her life falling into place:<br />
her lineage in the family tree of one of the oldest<br />
Creole families on the island, her transit to France<br />
in the wake of the 1928 cyclone that devastated<br />
the Caribbean and killed her mother, her passion<br />
for traditional Antillean dance as a devotee of the<br />
vibrant diasporic entertainment scene in Paris,<br />
and her dedication during the occupation of Paris<br />
in protecting property and artwork Man Ray was<br />
forced to leave behind. Uncovered records traced<br />
the arc of her estrangement from the avantgarde<br />
and her relocation to Albi in the South of<br />
France, where she spent the last decades of her<br />
life in obscurity. The timing of our discoveries<br />
62 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
was serendipitous, aligning as they did with<br />
the groundbreaking exhibition at the Musée<br />
d’Orsay in 2019, Le modèle noir. Ady’s inclusion<br />
in this endeavor dedicated to illuminating the<br />
significance of the Black figure in Western art<br />
brought renewed attention to her story.<br />
CAPTURED ON CANVAS<br />
Roland Penrose’s Four Women Sleeping, which<br />
places Ady nestled between three prominent<br />
figures in the history of Surrealism, was one<br />
of the first images I selected to feature in the<br />
d’Orsay exhibition. The British Surrealist created<br />
this theatrically staged photograph during a<br />
summer retreat of a group of select friends in<br />
Cornwall, England in July 1937. In this tightly<br />
framed composition, the four women are<br />
captured in a somnambulant state of suspended<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 63
animation, illustrating the centrality of the<br />
female muse and dreams in Surrealist thought<br />
and practice. It should be noted, however, that<br />
all these women were more than just ‘muses’.<br />
Nusch Eluard was a French performer, model,<br />
and artist who later became active in the French<br />
Resistance during the war. The American Lee<br />
Miller had a multifaceted photographic career,<br />
highly-regarded for her avant-garde, fashion,<br />
and war correspondent work. The British born<br />
artist Leonora Carrington had a long and prolific<br />
career as a painter and novelist and is credited<br />
with bringing a female perspective to the maledominated<br />
Surrealist movement.<br />
Selecting images of Fidelin to showcase in the<br />
d’Orsay exhibition provided a catalyst for my<br />
pursuit of a long-held suspicion that somewhere<br />
in the trove of Picasso’s work an unidentified<br />
image of this striking woman awaited discovery.<br />
I came to this notion based on a rich cache<br />
of photographs chronicling the gathering of<br />
an avant-garde group of friends in the small<br />
hamlet of Mougins near Cannes in Southern<br />
France during August and September, 1937. Ady<br />
is a vivacious presence in a significant number<br />
of these images by Man Ray and other fellow<br />
vacationers Penrose, Miller, and the photographer,<br />
artist, and Picasso’s partner, Dora Maar. Copious<br />
images illustrate the warm reception this<br />
newcomer received by members of this elite<br />
circle. Ady also appears in playful photographs<br />
alongside Picasso, suggesting the intimacy long<br />
associated with this hedonistic community of<br />
creatives. It was thus unfathomable to me that<br />
she would not have inspired the Spanish artist<br />
to portray her, as he did with the other women<br />
present during this sojourn.<br />
My efforts to confirm this hunch were aided<br />
by Picasso’s propensity to date his canvases<br />
not just by year, but also by specific month and<br />
64 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
Left: Man Ray, 1937, Roland Penrose, Adrienne Fidelin, Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar<br />
Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI AM 1994-394 (4424). © Man Ray 2021 Trust / ADAGP, Paris<br />
Below: Man Ray, 1937. Adrienne Fidelin with washboard (with his framing marks)<br />
Collection Musée Picasso. © Man Ray 2021 Trust / ADAGP, Paris<br />
day. This meant that I could narrow the search<br />
to works created in Mougins between August<br />
and September 1937, the intersecting time frame<br />
of Man Ray and Ady’s visit. Colleagues in the<br />
archives at the Musée Picasso in Paris helped<br />
limit possible candidates to a handful of portraits<br />
of unattributed sitters. I immediately recognized<br />
Ady in Femme assise sur fond jaune et rose, II,<br />
due to several elements. Picasso’s distinctive<br />
rendering of the figure’s hair texture, her<br />
complexion, and the tonality of the torso beneath<br />
the colourful overlay are all markers of racial<br />
difference indicating that a woman of colour<br />
was the inspiration for this painting. Moreover,<br />
the manner in which the subject is depicted<br />
clearly contrasts with the way in which the artist<br />
represented the white women in other portraits<br />
he created during the 1937 Mougins gathering.<br />
I thus determined that Ady, as the only person<br />
of colour present at this assembly—or, for that<br />
matter, evidently elsewhere in Picasso’s personal<br />
orbit during this period—was indisputably the<br />
prime candidate to be this painting’s model.<br />
MAN RAY’S PHOTOGRAPH<br />
As enticing as these clues were in attributing<br />
Fidelin as the subject of Femme assise, the<br />
most compelling evidence substantiating<br />
this identification came from Man Ray’s<br />
contemporaneous photograph. In this image,<br />
Ady holds a washboard as she stands against the<br />
backdrop of the stark white wall of the Hôtel Vaste<br />
Horizon where they all resided. I subsequently<br />
discovered a small print of the image on<br />
cardstock in the correspondence archives at<br />
the Musée Picasso, accompanied by a note<br />
from Man Ray to Picasso on the verso. Although<br />
this correspondence postdated the painting, it<br />
established an acknowledged link between the<br />
two artists’ interests in the subject and their<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 65
Man Ray, 1937. Adrienne Fidelin, Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI AM 1994-394 (4428) © Man Ray 2021 Trust / ADAGP, Paris<br />
respective representations. This association was<br />
further reinforced with the confirmation that<br />
Picasso owned an enlarged, vintage print of this<br />
work, one of many Man Ray photographs in his<br />
personal collection now housed in Paris at the<br />
Musée Picasso.<br />
My continued perusal of auction records would<br />
result in the discovery of the most compelling<br />
evidence supporting my case: on a narrowly<br />
cropped version of this composition sold at<br />
auction in 2015 Man Ray had inscribed “Arr.<br />
Picasso” on the bottom of the photographic frame<br />
alongside his signature. Presumably shorthand<br />
for “Arrangement Picasso,” this annotation draws<br />
a definitive line between the subject of Man<br />
Ray’s photograph and Picasso’s portrait. Whether<br />
implying that Picasso himself posed Ady for the<br />
photoshoot or that the artist employed a copy of<br />
the photograph as an aide-mémoire in composing<br />
his painting, the annotation corroborated my<br />
proposition that she is the subject of the canvas<br />
in question, translated into paint with the aid Man<br />
Ray’s photographic efforts.<br />
CONNECTING THE DOTS<br />
How did Adrienne Fidelin’s identity as the<br />
subject of a portrait by Pablo Picasso—one of<br />
the most prodigious, prestigious, and thoroughly<br />
scrutinized artists of the twentieth century— go<br />
unnoted for so long? Several considerations factor<br />
into this dynamic. First is the relative obscurity of<br />
a painting that remained in the artist’s personal<br />
collection until his death in 1973. Rarely exhibited<br />
and infrequently reproduced, it has been out of<br />
the public’s eye since last seen in a travelling<br />
exhibition of the collection of Maya Ruiz-Picasso<br />
66 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
in Japan in 1985. Moreover, the erasure of Fidelin<br />
in major writings about Man Ray, Picasso, and<br />
other artists whose lives she touched has played<br />
a significant role in her disappearance.<br />
As Denise Murrell pointedly observed in the<br />
catalog for Posing Modernity, the provocative<br />
exhibition that helped generate a resurgence<br />
of interest in the history of the Black model in<br />
Western art: “In the absence of narratives that<br />
animate viewer curiosity and interest, [Black<br />
figures] become invisible even while in plain<br />
view.” Ady’s story is a quintessential case in point.<br />
Recovering her neglected story has taken on<br />
added significance in the context of magnifying<br />
struggles today for racial equality and efforts to<br />
give voice to those whose stories have gone<br />
untold. Bringing attention to Picasso’s painting—<br />
and establishing its current location—will amplify<br />
efforts to ensure that Adrienne Fidelin is no<br />
longer hidden in plain sight. RC<br />
Independent scholar Wendy A. Grossman,<br />
Ph.D. is an art historian, writer, educator,<br />
and curator affiliated with The Phillips<br />
Collection in Washington D.C. She has<br />
taught at The University of Maryland,<br />
George Washington University, NYU<br />
Washington DC Campus, and Middlebury<br />
College.<br />
She has lectured internationally and<br />
published widely on topics in the history<br />
of photography, twentieth-century.<br />
European and American Modernisms, the<br />
intersections between non-Western and<br />
Western art, Dada, Surrealism, contemporary<br />
art, the artist Man Ray and his partner, the<br />
Guadeloupean dancer and model Adrienne<br />
Fidelin.<br />
From 2021-2022, Dr. Grossman was<br />
an Andrew Mellon Senior Fellow at the<br />
Metropolitan Museum of Art advancing her<br />
research on Fidelin. An article and video<br />
she completed during her fellowship titled<br />
“Mode au Congo: Travails of the Traveling<br />
Hats” is featured on the Museum’s website.<br />
READ THE FULL STORY<br />
“Unmasking Adrienne Fidelin: Picasso, Man<br />
Ray, and the (In)Visibility of Racial Difference”<br />
in Modernism/modernity 5, April 24, 2020:<br />
https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0142 and follow<br />
the campaign to find Picasso’s painting.<br />
@findingady on Instagram.<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 67
A Moveable Feast<br />
Abstraction Expressionists: The Women<br />
Above: Amaranth Ehrenhalt, 1962. Jump in and Move Around, the Levett Collection, Florence<br />
68 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
“Painting is inconvenient. It is slow and may<br />
require a whole life,” Pat Passlof once wrote.<br />
There is no doubt the New York-based<br />
painter was referring to the life of an artist, but<br />
her axiom could also apply to the collector, the<br />
art historian, and the art connoisseur – whose<br />
lives become intertwined with that of an artist,<br />
through the artworks they acquire, study and<br />
enjoy. The 2,000-piece Levett Collection, a<br />
labour of love, comprises some 120 sculptures<br />
and paintings by American Women Abstract<br />
Expressionists. This Florentine collection,<br />
which we had the honour of featuring during<br />
a Restoration Conversations broadcast with<br />
collector Christian Levett, last September, is now<br />
the subject of a notable new book, Abstraction<br />
Expressionists: The Women, by Ellen G. Landau<br />
and Joan M. Marter (20<strong>23</strong>, Merrell Publishers,<br />
New York-London).<br />
If you manage to start this book at the<br />
beginning, then kudos for the self-control. Those<br />
without it, will start in the middle, opening to the<br />
section called ‘The Women’, just like the tome’s<br />
subtitle. That’s where the celebration is already<br />
underway. Even those late to the party will have<br />
time to savour it, as the section’s ‘moveable feast’<br />
lasts 125 pages. Therein, all curtains are pulled<br />
aside, and the artists’ flying colours are fully<br />
revealed. The term ‘flying’ is used literally here,<br />
and the idiom can be paired with a quote by East<br />
Coast artist Amaranth Ehrenhalt, “I try to create<br />
that which does not sleep, but rather looks like<br />
it is constantly in motion: Dancing, vibrating,<br />
gyrating, shimmering, stretching, jumping.”<br />
Ehrenhalt ‘tries’ and succeeds, as with Jump In<br />
and Move Around, which poet laureate and art<br />
critic John Ashbery reviewed at the American<br />
Centre in Paris’ New Forces exhibition, in 1962,<br />
describing the artist’s “fluent brushwork, fluid<br />
colours and bustling composition” – only to<br />
tell her later, at a chance meeting, that her<br />
cryptic name had fooled him. He would not<br />
have “singled her out, had he known she was<br />
a woman”.<br />
Most of the works pictured are full-page; many<br />
are spread over two. Such utter generosity is a<br />
banquet for the senses, but it’s also an editorial<br />
choice that stems from sound historical<br />
reasoning. The Levett Collection’s Abstract<br />
Expressionist paintings were ‘American-born’,<br />
often by artists of European background or<br />
birth, who had lived through the devastation of<br />
the war years, whether first-hand or indirectly.<br />
From the 1950s onwards, after decades of lacking<br />
supplies, and centuries of mostly small easelwork<br />
and delicate miniatures, women conquered<br />
canvases that were bigger than themselves, in<br />
every way. Abstract Expressionism is dynamic,<br />
innovative, and large-scale, and although a<br />
book is not built to provide a sense of scale,<br />
somehow, this one manages it, enabling us to<br />
access the period’s landscape from a woman’s<br />
perspective. We can wander in freely, with no<br />
need to hoist ourselves ‘over the fence’, like<br />
these artists did.<br />
‘The Women’ section is generous in both word<br />
and deed. Artist quotes accompany each image,<br />
as these women speak of their quest, successes,<br />
challenges and vocation. French-born painter<br />
Yvonne Thomas’ description of the creative<br />
process provides a memorable example: “I<br />
found it easier to paint large pictures than<br />
small ones. It was the case with most of the<br />
painters, their gestural expression took a heroic<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 69
Above, left: Grace Hartigan, 1951<br />
Cedar Bar (originally Aries)<br />
The Levett Collection, Florence<br />
Above, right: Betty Parsons, 1957<br />
Looking Out<br />
The Levett Collection, Florence<br />
Left: Michael Corinne West, 1949<br />
Nihilism<br />
The Levett Collection, Florence<br />
Right, top: Michael (Corinne) West, 1962<br />
Dancing Figure<br />
The Levett Collection, Florence<br />
Right, below: Louise Bourgouis, 1978<br />
Nest of Five<br />
The Levett Collection, Florence<br />
70 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
stand. Strong feeling — always wanting to be<br />
expressed through color, form, tension, impulse,<br />
spontaneity, and recognition of the accident —<br />
was very much a part of it. Meaning comes from<br />
many combined elements… the painting itself,<br />
at a certain point seems to acquire an identity<br />
of its own. When it happens, I know it is time<br />
to stop.”<br />
In a world so short of words, as far as<br />
pioneering women are concerned, these artists’<br />
musings make the heart sing, almost as loud as<br />
their paintings do. After ‘The Women’ section,<br />
the book’s authors make a well-pondered stop<br />
into the black-and-white world of ‘Chronology’,<br />
where Landau and Marter explore 30 years of<br />
historical context, in a nutshell.<br />
A few notes from that section to whet the<br />
appetite: In 1936, Corrine Michelle West is<br />
urged by Armenian-American painter Arshile<br />
Gorky to change her name to Michael, to avoid<br />
sounding “too much like a debutant’s daughter”.<br />
She took his advice, but ultimately refused his<br />
many marriage proposals. In 1937, Lee Krasner<br />
and Mercedes Carles (later Matter) would meet<br />
in jail after being arrested for protesting Work<br />
Projects Administration policies, devised under<br />
the New Deal. In 1946, Betty Parsons opened<br />
her gallery – thankfully. Just three years earlier,<br />
James Stern from Time magazine had refused<br />
to cover the ‘Exhibition by 31 women’ – held at<br />
Peggy Guggenheim’s new Manhattan venue ‘Art<br />
of This Century’ AoTC – because “there would<br />
never be a first-rate woman artist and women<br />
should stick to having babies.” Parsons was a<br />
respected artist in her own right, and her gallery<br />
(which stayed open until 1982) was a trendsetter<br />
on the New York scene, with ample room for<br />
the likes of Perle Fine, I. Rice Pereira and Janet<br />
Sobel, to name a few of the many trailblazing<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 71
women she featured. Her insight into art<br />
trading, is another of the book’s many gems: “I<br />
was born with a gift of falling in love with the<br />
familiar… I have never made money because I<br />
saw things too far in advance. Actually, being<br />
an artist gave me the jump on other dealers<br />
– I saw things before they did. I have always<br />
been lucky enough to be in the right place at<br />
the right time… Most dealers love the money. I<br />
love the paintings… I have a gift for friendship,<br />
my friends don’t forget me… Painting is a<br />
compulsive thing with me; it’s a way of keeping<br />
alive… I have lived many lives and have enjoyed<br />
all of them.”<br />
Next, the authors share Artist Biographies,<br />
not too short, not too long, and rigorously<br />
accompanied by pictures of the period’s<br />
foremost female painters and sculptors, who<br />
by now are friends – not just with each other,<br />
but with the reader as well, for this volume is<br />
a bridge – or at least a solid stepping stone<br />
– between their world and our own. Yet, once<br />
all their stories are told, do take a moment<br />
to appreciate the final section, an index list<br />
at the back of the book labelled “Exhibitions,<br />
History and Publications”. Therein, you’ll find<br />
everywhere the Levett Collection’s works have<br />
been shown, and even if back matter doesn’t<br />
72 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
Far left: Helen Frankenthaler, 1951<br />
Circus Landscape<br />
The Levett Collection, Florence<br />
Left: Perle Fine, 1958-59<br />
<strong>Summer</strong> I<br />
The Levett Collection, Florence<br />
usually excite you, it should start to, for we need all<br />
the records we can get: artworks, and the women<br />
who author them, are best valued and remembered<br />
when their art is seen. The book’s copious index<br />
is also a testimony to the life of each painting…<br />
for art is not a static asset. The more it moves, the<br />
more fertile ground it has for growing.<br />
After you’ve explored the book’s belly to your<br />
heart’s content, make sure to back track and<br />
appreciate the two essays at the front: Ellen G.<br />
Landau’s “Working in a Different Way: Women<br />
and Abstract Expressionism” and “Abstract<br />
Expressionist Women in the Third Dimension” by<br />
Joan M. Marter. Both provide insight into these<br />
artists’ lives and times, including an overview on<br />
contemporary exhibitions and scholarship and<br />
a brief discussion of the movement’s New York<br />
and Bay Area contingents. Marter’s essay tackles<br />
the largely undiscovered world of mixed media<br />
women’s sculpture from the period, with familiar<br />
names and others to be discovered: Louise<br />
Bourgeois, Jeanne Reynal, Claire Falkenstien and<br />
Dorothy Dehner, among others.<br />
“The artists [in the Collection] were wild characters,<br />
their talent was enormous, their lives often a roller<br />
coaster, and their positivity against the social odds,<br />
something to behold. The Abstract Expressionist<br />
period began as one of immeasurable poverty,<br />
inhuman misery, and global devastation – but<br />
was then immediately followed by hope, change,<br />
optimism, joie de vivre, huge economic recovery<br />
and the birth of the modern-day art scene,” says<br />
Levett, in the book’s preface. “While US law at the<br />
time tried, socially and financially, to cajole women<br />
to stay at home and to push men out to work, these<br />
women really did not care about that and thought<br />
of themselves purely as artists. They wanted to<br />
excel, solely in that regard, and they did – at least<br />
at that time. All of these seemed to culminate in<br />
women creating some of the greatest artworks of<br />
the modern period, and for me now to be able to<br />
collect, research and live among these works can<br />
only be described as exhilarating.”<br />
The final word of Levett’s preface brings us to<br />
the book’s true beginning – perhaps its whole<br />
raison d’etre. The word itself seems a sigh of<br />
relief. Women were painting with their whole<br />
bodies. They were finding that creative space<br />
that made Helen Frankenthaler exclaim, fresh<br />
out of a Jackson Pollack show, ‘I wanted to live in<br />
this land’. Exhilarating – five syllables long and a<br />
key to understanding the period. The word is an<br />
invitation to reread the book once more – this<br />
time, from the beginning. RC<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 73
Three women, many moons<br />
A new book by Natacha Fabbri<br />
WWe met Natacha Fabbri – author, scholar and<br />
historian – at Florence’s Museo Galileo, in the<br />
autumn of 2022, just weeks before she sent her<br />
most recent publication to press. The volume’s<br />
title, Profiles of Women on the Moon, evokes space<br />
travel and lunar dreamscape, but its subtitle brings<br />
us back to Earth again: ‘Reflections of Science,<br />
Philosophy and Literature’. We couldn’t wait to<br />
hear more about the ‘moon book’ Dr Fabbri would<br />
dedicate to her 11-year-old daughter Clotilde, “in<br />
whose face, I reflect my own, every day”.<br />
At Calliope Arts, our mission is to advance<br />
interdisciplinary knowledge on women’s<br />
achievements, and this quest, in Florence and<br />
London, has opened a pathway in which many<br />
disciplines converge. The organisation is not<br />
yet two years old, and the world of women<br />
astronomers is wholly uncharted territory, despite<br />
operating in a region that birthed both Antonio<br />
Santucci and Galileo. Natacha Fabbri, as an author,<br />
is the third woman referenced in this article’s<br />
title. In this piece, she is referred to by both her<br />
first and last names, just like the historical women<br />
she studies – in their case, to differentiate them<br />
from their fathers. However, it is both a privilege<br />
and ‘artistic licence’, to refer to all three women<br />
as friends.<br />
In Dr. Fabbri’s words, the first part of her<br />
book explores cosmic allegories and “female<br />
personifications of the Moon, as they appear in<br />
Renaissance codices and in places of worship<br />
or public gathering, or as they are portrayed<br />
on scientific instruments, in lunar and celestial<br />
cartography, […] or in artistic and literary works.”<br />
We find Urania – both goddess and muse –<br />
with her cloak of stars and cosmic globe. She<br />
is the source of all souls, the Queen of Heaven.<br />
Depictions of the Moon include the goddess<br />
Diana, born minutes before her Sun-god twin<br />
Apollo, and the ivy-crowned, boot-wearing lunar<br />
muse Thalia, whose smiling attribute is the mask<br />
of comedy.<br />
In addition to exploring the allegories, Natacha<br />
also aims to highlight historic flesh-and-blood<br />
“women who, following discoveries via the<br />
telescope and the establishment of the idea of<br />
the Moon as ‘another Earth’, contributed to the<br />
dissemination of a new image of the universe<br />
and strengthened the association between the<br />
Moon and women.” Maria Clara Eimmart and<br />
Nicole-Reine Lapaute are just two of sixteen<br />
scientists and astronomers the author references,<br />
as operating in Europe in the seventeenth and<br />
eighteenth centuries.<br />
Right: Maria Clara Eimmart, late seventeenth<br />
century. Depictions of celestial phenomena (Full<br />
Moon, the Appearance of Comments, Phases of<br />
Venus), Museo della Specola, Bologna<br />
74 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 75
Above: Maria Clara<br />
Eimmart, late seventeenth<br />
century. Depictions of<br />
celestial phenomena (Full<br />
Moon, the Appearance<br />
of Comments, Phases<br />
of Venus), Museo della<br />
Specola, Bologna<br />
Right: Nicole-Reine<br />
Lepaute, 1764<br />
Map of solar eclipse,<br />
Bibliothèque Nationale de<br />
France, Paris<br />
Maria Clara Eimmart (1676-1707) is best known<br />
for her 350-plus watercolours and drawings of<br />
the Moon’s phases, and well as for depictions of<br />
comets and the planets, especially Venus. Active<br />
in her teens and throughout her twenties, the<br />
young astronomer and artist made good use of<br />
the observatory her ‘eccentric’ father had built<br />
on the walls of Nuremberg, their native city. As<br />
the story goes, Georg Christoph Eimmart the<br />
younger – who served as director of the Maler-<br />
Akademie (Academy of Art) – spent most of his<br />
sizable earnings on scientific equipment. Even<br />
more importantly, he was not stingy with it. The<br />
young Maria Clara, a talented artist and engraver<br />
had the equipment at her disposal. Her artistic<br />
talents, at least, may not have surprised him, for<br />
his father and namesake, had been a painter and<br />
engraver as well.<br />
While nearly all of Maria Clara’s documented<br />
nature drawings have been lost to history, her<br />
moon-phase series, which she called Micrographia<br />
stellarum phases lunae, is often appreciated for<br />
its artistic merit. Dr Fabbri, however, discusses<br />
the collection from the viewpoint of its scientific<br />
accuracy and poses the questions it continues<br />
to conjure: “Maria Clara Eimmart’s panels depict<br />
various degrees of terrestrial brightness reflected<br />
on the Moon’s surface: the brightest being her<br />
depiction of the small crescent. However, it<br />
remains difficult to assert that Eimmart was<br />
familiar with Galileo’s research. More likely, the<br />
many accurate observations she made with a<br />
telescope at her father’s observatory, coupled<br />
with her great artistic talent, enabled her to<br />
reproduce an accurate depiction of the Moon’s<br />
varying degrees of brightness.”<br />
For Natacha, Eimmart’s ‘change in perspective’,<br />
is extremely relevant: “The precision with<br />
which Eimmart reproduced the celestial bodies<br />
under observation, benefiting, on the one hand,<br />
from a far more powerful telescope than those<br />
adopted by Galileo and, on the other, aided by her<br />
uncommon skill as a painter, led her to develop,<br />
what would have been – in the hands of Galileo –<br />
an argument supporting the Copernican System.<br />
Indeed, the changes in light Eimmart observed<br />
76 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
on the Moon show the movement of the Earth<br />
around the Sun. While the telescope could reveal<br />
the phases of Venus and Mercury (and later, those<br />
of Mars as well) visual evidence of what was<br />
happening on Earth was not possible, except by<br />
using the Moon as its mirror. Maria Clara Eimmart,<br />
more or less consciously, accomplishes this task.”<br />
As Profiles of Women on the Moon suggests,<br />
Eimmart is not the only woman astronomer whose<br />
farsightedness and skill led future generations<br />
to approach astronomical study from varying<br />
perspectives. The same could be said of French<br />
astronomer Nicole-Reine Lepaute (17<strong>23</strong>-1788), the<br />
daughter of a valet under the service of Marie<br />
Louise Élisabeth d’Orléans, Duchess of Berry. Born<br />
in the Palais du petit Luxembourg, Nicole-Reine<br />
continued to live there, even after she married<br />
court clockmaker Jean-André Lepaute, in 1748,<br />
whose pendulum models were a fixture in French<br />
observatories. He had been tasked to build an<br />
‘astronomical clock’ capable of calculating one’s<br />
latitude at sea, by pinpointing the departure point<br />
and determining how much of the Earth’s rotation<br />
a ship had travelled. Nicole-Reine’s calculations<br />
in support of her husband’s clockwork, brought<br />
her talents to the attention of up-and-coming<br />
astronomer Jérôme Lalande, commissioned to<br />
create a palace-top observatory.<br />
The problem Lalande presented to Nicole-Reine<br />
was to calculate the gravitational pull Saturn and<br />
Jupiter had on Halley’s comet. Together with<br />
Lalande, and another colleague, mathematician<br />
Alexis Clairault, she was able to determine the<br />
date of the comet’s approach, more accurately<br />
than Halley himself. “For six months we made<br />
calculations from dawn to dusk, sometimes even<br />
during the meals … The help given by Mme.<br />
Lepaute was such that, without her, I would not<br />
have been able to complete such a colossal<br />
enterprise,” Lalande would later write, in his 1803<br />
treatise Bibliographie Astronomique.<br />
The comet was not Madame Lapaute’s sole<br />
preoccupation over the course of her 25-year<br />
career. In the journal Connaissance des temps,<br />
she published calculations plotting the 1764<br />
solar eclipse and its journey through Europe, at<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 77
Above: Georg Christoph<br />
Eimmart, c. 1720<br />
Planisphaerium Coeleste,<br />
celestial map<br />
Private collection<br />
Wikimedia Commons<br />
15-minute intervals, and calculated the transit of<br />
Venus across the solar disk three years earlier<br />
(now lost). A century after her death, Madame<br />
Lapaute’s work on the Moon would earn her<br />
a lunar crater as namesake, and Dr. Fabbri’s<br />
book emphasises the revolutionary nature of<br />
her research. Lapaute did not only look, she<br />
foresaw. “Galileo and all seventeenth- and<br />
eighteenth-century scholars who dealt with<br />
the phenomenon of cinereous light – the light<br />
with which the Earth illuminates the Moon by<br />
reflecting the rays of the Sun – had, in one way<br />
or another, observed the Earth on the face of the<br />
Moon Nicole-Reine Lepaute, on the other hand,<br />
is concerned with shadows,” Natacha writes.<br />
“She observes not only the Moon, but its<br />
connection to the Earth’s surface, and therefore,<br />
the Moon’s effect on the Earth’s face. The chart<br />
and the eclipses documented in her work do not<br />
represent a reproduction of what she observed,”<br />
the author continues. “Indeed, they are not a<br />
report of something that had already happened.<br />
Hence, her research is not a history-of-sorts<br />
intent on describing celestial events. Rather,<br />
Lepaute’s studies are a prediction, established<br />
based on calculations she made, which turned<br />
out to be correct.”<br />
Profiles of Women on the Moon – for now, in<br />
Italian only – is not a book for the beachside<br />
or the bedside table. The copious research it<br />
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contains was developed as part of the Wallace<br />
Fellowship at I Tatti, the Harvard University Study<br />
Center of the Italian Renaissance, and it was<br />
designed for desktop reading with pen in hand<br />
and highlighter ready. Indeed, the sheer amount<br />
of study involved could pave the way to the Moon<br />
and back again. That said, Natacha, who may well<br />
be the smartest woman still on the planet, will be<br />
interested to know that the book left me feeling<br />
‘hopeless’ and hopeful at the same time. How<br />
little the average Josephine knows about science!<br />
Plato’s mermaids move us, yet we know virtually<br />
nothing of their antics. Algorithms have moved<br />
the stars, long before they dictated social media.<br />
The universe moves to the rhythm of math; alas,<br />
I am deaf to its music.<br />
There is hope too, however, and here is the<br />
source of it: there are women in this world who<br />
hear and speak the language of the stars – and<br />
their cosmic literacy is not a new phenomenon.<br />
Eimmart and Lepaute are just two of the many<br />
historic women Natacha brings to the fore, in<br />
myths and stories, and as pivotal members of lofty<br />
literary salons, and stringent scientific academies<br />
throughout the whole of Europe. They climbed<br />
city walls and they conjured dizzying sums on<br />
royal terraces. These women could interpret the<br />
light and shadow of celestial bodies the way you<br />
and I interpret a cloud crossing a friend’s face<br />
in a moment of misery. These women knew how<br />
to calculate columns of numbers that stretched<br />
for miles. They were human computers to whom<br />
‘technology’ meant sleepless nights and a mindsupported<br />
struggle. Therefore, it seems fitting for<br />
this ‘book review’ conclude with a telling quote<br />
by Jérôme Lalande, who describes his savant<br />
colleague as follows: “Madame Lepaute […] was<br />
too smart not to have the curiosity”. A point<br />
proven, Natacha, and so may it be for all of us. RC<br />
Dr. Natacha Fabbri is an historian of<br />
science and philosophy. She received<br />
her PhD from the Scuola Normale<br />
Superiore of Pisa and the National Scientific<br />
Habilitation for Associate Professor in<br />
History of Science. She also graduated in<br />
piano from the Conservatory of music in<br />
Florence.<br />
Postdoctoral fellow at several national<br />
and international research institutions,<br />
she is currently scientific coordinator<br />
of the section ‘Science’ for the Digital<br />
Ecosystem of Culture of Regione Toscana.<br />
She collaborates with Stanford University<br />
in Florence and is coordinator of several<br />
projects at the Museo Galileo.<br />
She has published books on the<br />
relationships between Science and<br />
Music and on the condemnation of<br />
Copernicanism. Her recently published<br />
book is titled Profili di donne sulla Luna<br />
(Pisa, Edizioni della Normale 2022).<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 79
The Other Side:<br />
A journey into women,<br />
art and the spirit world<br />
A conversation with author Jennifer Higgie<br />
By Margie MacKinnon<br />
T<br />
“The word ‘spiritual’ is such a broad church, excuse<br />
the pun. It can encompass so many things,” says<br />
Jennifer Higgie. In the same vein, Higgie’s justpublished<br />
book, The Other Side encompasses an<br />
array of topics: art from pre-historic times to the<br />
present, a range of religious beliefs and spiritual<br />
practices; it also combines a variety of literary<br />
genres, from personal memoir to art history and<br />
philosophy. It is to her credit that she covers all<br />
this territory in a thoroughly engaging style that<br />
sweeps the reader along with her from Australia<br />
to London to Greece. She introduces a cast of<br />
fascinating characters and covers topics from the<br />
creative process to the meaning of abstraction<br />
and the relationship between spiritualism and<br />
women’s suffrage.<br />
Not so much a Covid book as a book that<br />
coincided with Covid, The Other Side was written<br />
after Higgie stepped down from 20 years as editor<br />
of frieze magazine in 2019, just before Covid hit.<br />
“I had been working at an incredible pace and<br />
was totally exhausted. I wanted to focus on<br />
writing and was really looking for a kind of reenchantment.<br />
Covid forced me not to travel and<br />
to get back to nature. I think I walked every inch<br />
of Hampstead Heath … It was a time of reflection<br />
in my life and [writing the book] was how I made<br />
sense of the last few years.”<br />
Having studied art in Australia in the 1980s<br />
and ’90s, Higgie recalls that talking about the<br />
relationship between spiritualism and art would<br />
then have been frowned upon. “Artists who used<br />
mediums or contacted the spirit world were<br />
dismissed for so long. But, in a way, that’s always<br />
been the artistic process. For some reason, some<br />
people grow up and want to make images, and<br />
there’s no rational explanation for it. The act of<br />
making art is alchemical, in that it is transforming<br />
one thing into another, be that an idea into an<br />
image or a globule of paint into something<br />
different. It is a magical process.”<br />
While one form of spiritualism or other has<br />
80 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
inspired art for centuries, from cave paintings<br />
to Renaissance frescoes, the book focusses<br />
principally on the ways in which arcane beliefs<br />
have influenced the art made by women over<br />
the past 150 years. The Victorian era in particular<br />
was an environment in which unexplained<br />
phenomena set imaginations racing, with rapid<br />
advancements in science – X-rays, electricity, the<br />
discovery of the atom - making almost everything<br />
seem possible. What other unseen forces might<br />
be at work?<br />
In 1871, Georgiana Houghton, a devout Christian<br />
who had taught herself to be a medium (possibly<br />
driven by the desire to contact the many family<br />
members who had pre-deceased her), rented The<br />
New British Gallery on Bond Street in London to<br />
display 155 of her ‘Spirit Drawings’, created on the<br />
advice of her spirit guides. “What an extraordinary<br />
woman,” says Higgie. “These pictures are like<br />
a cosmic Jackson Pollock. They must have<br />
seemed like a spaceship landing in the middle<br />
of London.” Contemporary critics described them<br />
as “tangled threads of coloured wool” and “like<br />
a canvas of Turner’s over which troops of fairies<br />
have been meandering, dropping jewels as they<br />
went.” Another claimed that the exhibition would<br />
“disgust all sober people with the follies which<br />
it is intended to promote”. If the artist of these<br />
radical pictures had been excluded from the arthistorical<br />
canon, Higgie wondered, who else was<br />
left out?<br />
As she journeyed into the nineteenth-century<br />
spiritual realm, Higgie soon encountered the<br />
concept of ‘Theosophy’. A fusion of the Greek<br />
‘theos’ (god) and ‘sophia’ (wisdom), it is best<br />
described as a movement that defies definition.<br />
Originating in 1875 in America, its overriding<br />
emphasis was on the study of the laws that govern<br />
the universe. “One of the many good things about<br />
Theosophy was it didn’t discriminate in terms of<br />
gender, race or creed,” Higgie points out. “It was<br />
the first Western belief system that took a great<br />
Above: Georgiana Houghton,<br />
1862. The Eye of God<br />
Victorian Spiritualists’ Union<br />
Melbourne, Australia<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 81
Above, left: Hilma af Klint, 1907. The Ten Largest, Group IV, No. 7, Adulthood. Courtesy of The Hilma af Klint Foundation, on show at the Tate’s exhibition: Hilma af Klint<br />
and Piet Mondrian (20 April –3 September 20<strong>23</strong>). Above, right: Piet Mondrian, 1909–1910. Red Amaryllis with Blue Background. Private Collection, on show at the<br />
Tate’s exhibition: ‘Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian’ (20 April –3 September 20<strong>23</strong>)<br />
interest in Eastern religions. It was the<br />
beginning of a New Age movement. And<br />
that’s why artists were so interested in<br />
it. It was saying, ‘the world as we’ve been<br />
taught to make sense of it is perhaps<br />
more complex than that. Maybe there<br />
are other belief systems that can help us<br />
understand that there are different ways<br />
of representing this world.’”<br />
One of the founding members of<br />
the Theosophical Society was Madame<br />
Blavatsky, a Russian emigree to the United<br />
States. Not an artist herself, she is by far<br />
the most colourful character in the book.<br />
A woman who re-invented herself many<br />
times over, she was the subject of several<br />
biographies, all of which tell a different<br />
story of her life. “In one of her own pieces<br />
of writing,” notes Higgie, “she claimed that<br />
she was a virgin, despite having had two<br />
husbands, many lovers and at least one<br />
child.” All of which seems contradictory<br />
to Theosophy’s motto that “there is no<br />
religion higher than the truth”, yet it is<br />
important to consider that Blavatsky’s<br />
words and works are often symbolic.<br />
Although lacking credibility with<br />
respect to her own life, Madame<br />
Blavatsky’s writings on Theosophy<br />
and the search for the ‘eternal truth’<br />
that underpinned the material and<br />
spiritual worlds were widely read by<br />
the intelligentsia on both sides of the<br />
Atlantic, including Thomas Edison,<br />
evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel<br />
Wallace, Marie Curie, Mohandas Gandhi,<br />
Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats.<br />
In the art world, her acolytes included<br />
Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and<br />
Hilma af Klint. Science and spirituality –<br />
and art – were not seen as distinct from<br />
each other, but as disciplines that were<br />
overlapping and intertwined. Mondrian<br />
and Kandinsky would go on to be<br />
championed as pioneers of European<br />
abstraction. Kandinsky himself would<br />
claim that a painting he produced in<br />
1911 (since lost) was the world’s first<br />
ever abstract picture. Meanwhile,<br />
Hilda af Klint, who Higgie describes<br />
as “my gateway drug into this spiritual<br />
world” had been making what might<br />
objectively be considered ‘abstract’ art<br />
as early as 1906. Her large egg-tempera<br />
work, Adulthood from the series the<br />
‘Ten Largest’ is filled with unidentifiable<br />
shapes – a large yellow balloon-like<br />
figure occupies the centre of the picture,<br />
surrounded by geometric shapes and<br />
delicately curving forms that bring to<br />
mind botanical specimens. Af Klint “had<br />
no idea what the painting was supposed<br />
to depict,” she said, but the process of<br />
82 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
Above, left: Hilma af Klint, c. 1890. Botanical Drawing. Courtesy of The Hilma af Klint Foundation, on show at the Tate’s exhibition: Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian<br />
(20 April –3 September 20<strong>23</strong>). Above, top right: Vasily Kandinsky, 19<strong>23</strong>. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection<br />
© 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Above, right: The author, Jennifer Higgie and her the cover of her book<br />
making it was an exchange between her<br />
and her spirit guide.<br />
While Kandinsky and Mondrian were<br />
seen as having revolutionised the<br />
history of art, af Klint was overlooked<br />
during her lifetime and only received<br />
wider recognition in the 1980s. The split<br />
between the male ‘abstract ‘painters<br />
and the female ‘spiritual’ painters was<br />
reinforced by men such as Alfred<br />
Barr who became the first director<br />
of New York’s Museum of Modern<br />
Art. Barr and the art critic Clement<br />
Greenberg were extremely influential in<br />
framing the discourse around modern<br />
art. According to Higgie, “they saw<br />
modernity as something that should<br />
be shaped by rationalism. Discussions<br />
around abstraction tended to focus on<br />
a painting’s formal qualities: its texture,<br />
colour, light, line and so on. If esoteric<br />
or religious beliefs were acknowledged,<br />
they were framed as youthful<br />
aberrations.” In the 1970s, the eminent<br />
and influential critic Rosalind Krauss<br />
(a follower of Greenberg) confessed to<br />
finding it “indescribably embarrassing<br />
to mention art and spirit in the same<br />
sentence.”<br />
Happily, as Jennifer Higgie says, “with<br />
this new generation of artists, as well as<br />
the recognition of a lot of historic women<br />
artists, there is a much greater openness<br />
to different ways of being in the world<br />
and different ways of representing it<br />
through art. Each of the artists that I<br />
talk about in the book has a unique<br />
relationship to spiritualism. Some of<br />
them privilege dreams, some are very<br />
religious, then others are interested in<br />
the idea of different realms with different<br />
energies. It is a really positive thing.”<br />
A new show at the Tate Modern,<br />
entitled ‘Forms of Life’ brings together<br />
the works of Hilma af Klint and Piet<br />
Mondrian. The curators do not shy<br />
away from acknowledging that both<br />
artists shared an interest in new ideas<br />
of scientific discovery, spirituality and<br />
philosophy, and that both invented their<br />
own languages of abstract art rooted in<br />
nature. These artists found a new way of<br />
seeing the world – and now the world<br />
is finding a new way to see their art. RC<br />
Jennifer Higgie, The Other Side: A Journey<br />
into Women, Art and the Spirit World,<br />
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 20<strong>23</strong><br />
Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian, Forms of<br />
Life is at Tate Modern from 20 April to<br />
3 September 20<strong>23</strong><br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 83
84 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
‘Inclination’ update<br />
Artemisia, algae and structural support<br />
Our ‘Artemisia UpClose’ restoration team<br />
continues its conservation of Artemisia<br />
Gentileschi’s Allegory of Inclination at<br />
Casa Buonarroti, a 360-degree project supported by<br />
Calliope Arts and Christian Levett, in collaboration<br />
with Casa Buonarroti Museum and Foundation. As<br />
its final act begins, we’d like to shine a spotlight<br />
on a fundamental but lesser-known element of<br />
conservation: structural restoration.<br />
An art aficionado’s untrained eye is usually<br />
drawn to a painting’s ‘right-side up’, naturally<br />
focusing on restoration of the artist’s image<br />
and the painstaking techniques used to clean<br />
the paint layers and improve picture readability.<br />
Yet image aside, conservators pose a number of<br />
questions that may not occur to those not in the<br />
know: how does a painting’s strainer influence its<br />
overall health? Does improving canvas tension<br />
play a role in protecting a painting for posterity?<br />
Artemisia’s Inclination has spent hundreds of<br />
years ‘belly-down’, inside the ceiling framework<br />
of the museum’s gallery – has the sheer force of<br />
gravity affected the painting’s condition?<br />
With these questions in mind, the team’s head<br />
conservator Elizabeth Wicks provides insight on<br />
protecting Artemisia’s work from a structural<br />
perspective.<br />
“All of the Gallery ceiling paintings present<br />
similar problems – the canvases are sagging in the<br />
middle and the paint and preparation layers show<br />
extreme cracking and cupping of the surface. We<br />
know from documents in the Casa Buonarroti<br />
Archives that Michelangelo the Younger asked<br />
his carpenter to prepare supports for the artists<br />
commissioned, from old pieces of recycled wood.<br />
In the case of the Inclination, the wood support<br />
for the canvas is a strainer, made of five pieces<br />
of unfinished soft wood nailed together, rather<br />
than a stretcher, which has joins and corner keys<br />
allowing the stretched canvas to be placed into<br />
tension. This is important, especially for paintings<br />
placed on the ceiling which have ‘lived’ for over<br />
four hundred years with their canvas fibers<br />
continuously moving, due to their exposure to<br />
the constant flux of temperature and humidity.<br />
Since preparation and paint layers are rigid and<br />
cannot move at the same rate as the canvas,<br />
they end up cracking and cleaving away from<br />
the canvas support. Eventually, if the structural<br />
problems aren’t addressed, the paint will flake<br />
away from the canvas.<br />
Different factors are taken into account when<br />
deciding whether to substitute an original part<br />
of the painting – in this case the strainer. In<br />
Left: Protecting the painting’s brushwork before its<br />
placement inside the vacuum envelope<br />
All photographs: Olga Makarova, Calliope Arts Archive<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 85
Clockwise from top left: Conservators Elizabeth Wicks and Lorenzo Conti attach strips of artificial<br />
silk to the edges of Artemisia’s original canvas<br />
Creating protective layers around the painting before placing it inside the vacuum envelope<br />
Lorenzo and Elizabeth’s ‘high five’ with Artemisia<br />
Conservator Lorenzo Conti attaches the canvas to the new custom-made stretcher<br />
86 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
Left: Using the precision conservation mat with the vacuum envelope<br />
Above: Coordinator Linda Falcone, Foundation president Cristina Acidini,<br />
Sponsors Margie MacKinnon, Wayne McArdle and Christian Levett<br />
with conservators Elizabeth Wicks and Lorenzo Conti<br />
Artemisia’s case the original wood support was<br />
weak and out of plane and would have required<br />
major revamping to enable it to function properly.<br />
In the end, the decision reached has to reflect<br />
what is best for the health of the painting, so<br />
we decided to replace the old strainer with a<br />
new expandable stretcher, custom-built from a<br />
template of the original strainer, which will be<br />
kept in the Casa Buonarroti Archives.”<br />
Elizabeth worked with Lorenzo Conti, structural<br />
conservator of paintings on canvas, to develop<br />
Artemisia’s structural ‘make-over’. Here, while still<br />
in the midst of the process, Lorenzo describes the<br />
many steps involved:<br />
“The structural problems affecting the<br />
canvas had also caused very visible cracking<br />
and cupping of the paint layers, which was<br />
extremely pronounced, thereby hindering the<br />
correct reading of the image. As one of our<br />
first steps aimed at addressing this problem,<br />
we attached strips of polyester canvas to the<br />
edges of the original, in order to attach it to a<br />
working stretcher. At this point, with the painting<br />
in gentle tension, we applied a solution of Jun-<br />
Funori to the canvas reverse and let it evaporate<br />
[Editor’s note: In Japanese, Jun means ‘pure’ and<br />
funori is a glue-like substance made with red<br />
algae.] Already at this stage of the process, we<br />
saw a definite improvement in the canvas which<br />
relaxed, causing the distortions of the paint layers<br />
to improve. After this preliminary phase, we<br />
addressed the problem of loss of cohesion in the<br />
paint layers and their adhesion to the support.<br />
For this process, we used an acrylic resin brushed<br />
onto the reverse of the canvas and reactivated<br />
it with moderate heat. Next, we created a semirigid<br />
vacuum envelope around the painting and<br />
the gentle heat was applied with a precision<br />
conservation mat pad, which transfers controlled<br />
heat to the artwork.<br />
The precision mat placed on the canvas reverse<br />
was heated to 55 degrees Celsius, reactivating the<br />
resin so that it would re-adhere the preparation<br />
and paint layers to the support. Then, to retain the<br />
tension of the canvas obtained with the working<br />
stretcher on the final stretcher, we applied a<br />
second edge lining, using strips of artificial silk.<br />
The next stage involves placing the painting<br />
face-down on a cushioned and protected surface.<br />
The final stretcher is positioned along the<br />
perimeter of the silk edge strips. Once they are<br />
and attached to the stretcher, we’ll be ready to cut<br />
the canvas strips from the working stretcher and<br />
to attach the painting to the final stretcher.” RC<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 87
Left, above,: Allegory of Inclination, detail in<br />
raking light before conservation<br />
Photo: Ottaviano Caruso<br />
Left: Allegory of Inclination, detail in raking<br />
light after structural conservation treatment<br />
Photo: Elizabeth Wicks<br />
88 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
What pigments<br />
made up<br />
Artemisia’s palette?<br />
An interview with chemist Dr. Barbara Salvadori<br />
Chemist Dr. Barbara Salvadori, a member of the ‘Artemisia UpClose’ team, is a researcher at Italy’s<br />
National Research Council (CNR), the country’s largest public research institution. In this interview,<br />
she shares ‘colourful’ discoveries.<br />
You are working at the millimetre level, in<br />
your detective work on Artemisia’s Allegory<br />
of Inclination. Can you tell us about your<br />
team’s initial discoveries?<br />
Our work comprises a multi-technique approach,<br />
which combines non-invasive and micro-invasive<br />
analyses, including Fibre Optics Reflectance<br />
Spectroscopy, Fourier-Transform infrared<br />
spectroscopy, X-ray fluorescence and Scanning<br />
Electron Microscopy. The combination of these<br />
techniques provides important information about<br />
Artemisia’s painting, including how the canvas<br />
was prepared, how she executed the paint layer,<br />
and most specifically, the pigments she used.<br />
Because of our analysis of Artemisia’s blue, we<br />
now know that, for her blue skies, she used<br />
ultramarine, a pigment made with lapis lazuli.<br />
In this case, the pigment has to be ground from<br />
hard stone, into granules that were more or less<br />
fine, depending on the shade being sought. Our<br />
Above: Detail of Artemisia’s sky. The background is painted using ultramarine blue, a pigment derived<br />
from lapis lazuli. Note its small blue grains mixed with lead white. The yellow-coloured streaks are<br />
attributable to old varnish<br />
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Left, top: Dr Barbara Salvadori performing the chemical<br />
analysis of samples with a FTIR microscope<br />
Photo: Olga Makarova<br />
Left, bottom: Cooling of the FTIR array detector with<br />
liquid nitrogen, necessary for chemical imaging<br />
Photo: Olga Makarova<br />
Note: All CNR pigment pictures represent highmagnification<br />
(50x) images of certain fields in<br />
Artemisia’s Allegory of Inclination at Casa Buonarroti,<br />
obtained using a digital microscope<br />
analysis of her blue also revealed that it contains<br />
white lead, a lead carbonate. She used it with the<br />
blue to achieve the exact hue she was looking for.<br />
Next, we have the earths. They were sold as<br />
pigments, which Artemisia used, harmonising<br />
her browns and reds. Painters would mix the<br />
earths, like ochre pigments, to achieve shading<br />
effects, as in the case of skin tones. We’ve also<br />
conducted analyses to help us better understand<br />
the painting’s yellows, a study which captured the<br />
attention of Barbara Berrie, Head of the Scientific<br />
Research Department at National Gallery of Art<br />
in Washington, who visited the restoration site at<br />
Casa Buonarroti this spring, with curators, restorers<br />
and tech managers from the US museum. We’ve<br />
found that Artemisia’s yellows not only contain<br />
lead and tin, but antimony. The presence of this<br />
element is surprising and was unexpected, and<br />
what it means is still under discussion. Our team<br />
– comprised of Donata Magrini and Sofia Brizzi,<br />
in addition to myself – generates data that is not<br />
solely for conservators, but it is most relevant<br />
to them, as they need information about the<br />
artist’s palette of colours, as well as ‘intel’ about<br />
the kind of varnish found on a canvas. Having<br />
this feedback helps conservators determine what<br />
agents to use during the cleaning process, or<br />
how to best proceed when old, yellowing varnish<br />
needs to be lessened or removed entirely.<br />
90 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
Right, top: The varnish, yellowed by time, is made of a<br />
natural terpene resin<br />
Right, middle: Detail of the figure’s mouth, made with red<br />
ochre (an iron oxide) mixed with lead white. Some grains<br />
of red pigment are clearly visible<br />
Right, bottom: Detail of the drapery covering the figure’s<br />
flesh. The pictorial layer is made using yellow ochre<br />
How did you become a researcher in the field<br />
of art conservation science?<br />
I am a chemist, and since my university days and<br />
research doctorate, I was interested in a variety<br />
of materials, from metals to paint. Since the<br />
beginning of my career, I have looked for ways<br />
to put my knowledge at the service of cultural<br />
heritage. I was able to do so, first at the Opificio<br />
delle Pietre Dure’s scientific laboratory, and now,<br />
with the National Research Council, where I<br />
have worked as a researcher since 2009. For me,<br />
curiosity is a guiding force because, in this type<br />
of work, we are ‘detectives’. One of our team’s<br />
commitments is to find out how to treat artworks<br />
in need, by developing methodologies for<br />
conservation and using investigative techniques<br />
that allow experts to use the process best suited<br />
for an artwork’s conservation. That is our research<br />
in brief. That’s the soul of it!<br />
The information that emerges through our<br />
work invites interaction with conservators, and<br />
this ‘conversation’ is aimed at finding solutions<br />
to specific problems. With Artemisia, my curiosity<br />
was more than technical! While working on the<br />
painting, I have been reading about her life,<br />
which has made it even more exiting to work<br />
‘with’ her. I had never met her before, so to speak<br />
– the Buonarroti painting is the first opportunity<br />
I’ve had to study her work close-up.<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 91
Left, top: Detail of the figure’s hair, made with a<br />
mixture of yellow ochre (hydrated iron oxide) and<br />
earth<br />
Left, middle: Detail of the compass, yellow pigment.<br />
The pictorial layer contains lead, tin and antimony;<br />
Left, bottom: Detail of the clouds, made with lead<br />
white<br />
From an interview by filmmaker Olga<br />
Makarova, Artemisia UpClose<br />
“Based on our non-invasive analysis, we decided<br />
to proceed by executing the stratigraphic analysis<br />
of two micro-samples, taken selectively from<br />
fields of particular interest. The micro-samples<br />
were truly minimal – less than a millimetre each<br />
– and they were embedded in resin, polished<br />
and observed under an optic microscope and<br />
analysed using the FTIR technique. The instrument<br />
we have in the lab is fitted with a microscope,<br />
enabling us to execute chemical imaging using<br />
an array detector. Chemical imaging involves<br />
constructing a map showing the distribution of<br />
compounds found in each sample. It has high<br />
spatial definition and is extremely sensitive.<br />
Using this method, we were able to reconstruct<br />
the stratigraphy of the samples taken, which shed<br />
light on the artist’s execution techniques, through<br />
the characterisation of her preparatory layer, paint<br />
layers and how she distributed binding agents.”<br />
Italy’s National Research Council (CNR) is a<br />
multidisciplinary organisation that operates<br />
under the Ministry of Research performing studies<br />
in its own Institutes throughout the country. It<br />
employs more than 8,000 people, of whom half<br />
are researchers and technicians, in addition<br />
to training thousands of young researchers<br />
annually, during their post-graduate studies.<br />
Sesto Fiorentino, on the outskirts of Florence,<br />
hosts the branch of CNR’s Institute of Heritage<br />
Science (ISPC), in which Dr Salvadori works. RC<br />
92 Restoration Conversations • Autumn / Winter 2022
CRASH COURSE ON COLOUR: THE HISTORY BEHIND PIGMENTS<br />
WHITE LEAD,<br />
THE ‘DEADLY PIGMENT’<br />
The first-ever synthetic white<br />
pigment was made with white lead.<br />
Used since the Fourth Century BC, by<br />
the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans,<br />
it was made by exposing lead to an<br />
acidic fluid, which transformed it into<br />
alkaline lead carbonate. This white<br />
deposit was scraped off and made<br />
into a powder. Its opacity, density and<br />
‘warm glow’, when mixed with oil, was<br />
beyond compare.<br />
Its highly toxic dust particles<br />
caused the common ailment<br />
‘Painter’s Colic’, known today as<br />
lead poisoning. Despite disrupting<br />
the nervous system and being a<br />
trigger for mental illness, it was the<br />
only white pigment used in Europe<br />
until the 1800s. Also an ingredient<br />
of cosmetics and ointments, it was<br />
banned in art supplies surprisingly<br />
late – in the 1970s.<br />
BLUE SKIES AHEAD,<br />
LAPIS LAZULI<br />
In his fifteenth-century art treatise,<br />
Book of the Arts, Tuscan painter<br />
Cennino Cennini describes<br />
ultramarine as “a noble colour,<br />
beautiful, the most perfect of all<br />
colours”. This pigment, from the semiprecious<br />
stone lapis lazuli, made the<br />
most lavish paint on the palette,<br />
which was usually saved for ‘special’<br />
segments of religious paintings, like<br />
the blue of the Madonna’s robes.<br />
Transported to Europe through<br />
Venetian ports – from ‘beyond the sea’<br />
as its name suggests – ultramarine<br />
was more precious than gold, and its<br />
main ingredient was extracted from<br />
the mountains of Badakhshan, in<br />
Afghanistan, amongst other hard-toreach<br />
locations. ‘Wordies’ will know<br />
that lapis is ‘stone’ in Latin, while<br />
lazuli is a Latin derivation of the<br />
Persian term lājevard, meaning ‘sky’<br />
or ‘heaven’.<br />
EARTHS AND OCHRES,<br />
THE OLDEST OF ALL<br />
First used some 250,000 years ago,<br />
earth pigments continue to be<br />
common today. The Greek term<br />
‘ochros’ means ‘yellowish’ but shades<br />
can range from yellow to red and<br />
brown, depending on the amount of<br />
iron oxide in this natural pigment –<br />
brown being at the top of the scale.<br />
‘Spanish red’ and ‘Naples yellow’ are<br />
familiar earth pigments, although the<br />
latter is no longer in use, because<br />
poisonous.<br />
Prior to 1990, every child with<br />
a serious crayon box was familiar<br />
with the colours ‘burnt sienna’ and<br />
‘raw umber’ (from Umbria), which are<br />
reminiscent of Italy’s art traditions<br />
and landscape. The colour ‘raw<br />
umber’ was retired from the Crayola<br />
crayon box in 1990, whereas in<br />
20<strong>23</strong>, consumers voted to ‘Save the<br />
Shade’, rescuing ‘burnt sienna’ from<br />
being replaced with more modernsounding<br />
shades, like ‘mango tango’<br />
and ‘jazzberry jam’ – now also in the<br />
crayon box.<br />
Above, left to right: Greek wall painting with white and red lead, Tomb of the Diver, 470 BC, Area Tempa del Prete in Paestum, Italy<br />
Lapis lazuli to flaunt papal wealth. Matteo Giovanetti, 1340s. Ceiling of the Saint-Martial Chapel, Saint John Tower, Palais des Papes, Avignon, Vaucluse, France. Photo: Jean-Marc<br />
Rosier; Detail of one of the Rock Paintings in the Serra da Capivara National Park, Piauí, Brazil, with early pigments. Photo: Artur Warchavchik. All images: Wikipedia Commons<br />
Autumn / Winter 2022 • Restoration Conversations 93
Palace Women:<br />
Oltrarno and Beyond<br />
Project grants for artists and artisans<br />
As Florence continues to enjoy the Uffizi Galleries’<br />
impressive show at Palazzo Pitti, Eleonora di<br />
Toledo and the Invention of the Medici Court<br />
in Florence, we at Calliope Arts are gearing up<br />
for the third annual edition of ‘Oltrarno Gaze’,<br />
with our co-organisers Cultural Association Il<br />
Palmerino and the British Institute of Florence.<br />
The project, whose past editions were conceived<br />
and funded in conjunction with Advancing<br />
Women Artists and its Legacy fund, will expand<br />
its scope in 20<strong>23</strong> to shed light, not only on female<br />
artists, but on notable women from various<br />
disciplines working in government, the arts,<br />
patronage, literature and philanthropy who lived<br />
or sojourned in the Oltrarno district and beyond,<br />
over the course of centuries. This year’s theme<br />
‘Palace Women’ places historic women in their<br />
physical context, and focuses on the ‘room of<br />
their own’ idea by associating female forerunners<br />
with the monumental venues in which they lived,<br />
worked and built their legacy.<br />
Eleonora de Toledo’s (1522-1562) purchase of<br />
the Pitti Palace triggered the emergence of the<br />
Oltrarno artisan district, as she needed expert<br />
craftsman to make a fitting and ‘healthy’ home for<br />
her growing family. The neighbourhood’s prestige<br />
grew and handcrafted industries flourished from<br />
the palace outwards, as other noble families<br />
sought over-the-river real estate, on which to<br />
build their own palazzi. The Grand Duchess’<br />
initial support would give rise to a bustling<br />
neighbourhood known for its dynamic creativity<br />
and revolutionary ideas. Several women settled<br />
in the district and became influencers – long<br />
before the word was invented.<br />
Before becoming Grand Duke Francesco I’s<br />
second wife, Venetian aristocrat Bianca Cappello<br />
(1548-87) had a home built for her on Via Maggio<br />
26, to be closer to her lover at the Pitti. Its façade’s<br />
motifs, exquisitely created by master Bernardino<br />
Poccetti, using the sgraffito technique, were<br />
an idealist’s version of Venetian marine life, in<br />
honour of Cappello’s lagoon city (a tribute that<br />
makes the Florentines feel snubbed, even today).<br />
On Via degli Serragli, artist Félicie de Fauveau<br />
(1801-1886) sought self-imposed exile from France<br />
and founded an atelier that became a magnet for<br />
travellers on the Grand Tour, where she marketed<br />
herself as a ‘vestal of sculpture’ combining fine<br />
art and craftsmanship, on a model developed by<br />
Benvenuto Cellini. Just a few block away, at much<br />
the same time, English poet Elisabeth Barrett<br />
Browning (1806-1861) settled at Casa Guidi, a<br />
home she decorated in red, white and green, to<br />
support a cause she held dear: Italian unification.<br />
The ‘Palace Women’ trail continues past Porta<br />
Romana, and leads to Villa del Poggio Imperiale<br />
another interesting case study, since the estate<br />
passed into the hands of several Medici women,<br />
through the generations, after being gifted to<br />
Isabella de’ Medici Orsini (1542-1576), Eleonora’s<br />
di Toledo’s and Cosimo I’s daughter. Maria<br />
Maddalena of Austria (1589-1631) and famed art<br />
patron Vittoria della Rovere (1622-1694) are two<br />
94 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
Above: View of ‘Eleonora di Toledo and the Invention of the Medici<br />
Court in Florence’, the Uffizi Galleries’ show, open at Palazzo Pitti,<br />
until May 14, Bronzino’s portraits of Eleonora di Toledo and Cosimo I<br />
in the foreground. Photo: Uffizi Galleries, installation<br />
Left: Ary Scheffer, 1829. Portrait of Fèlicie de Fauveau, Musée du<br />
Louvre. Photo: Wikimedia Commons<br />
of its most famous owners. On the slopes of<br />
Bellosguardo – also on the ‘other side of the river’<br />
– is the Hildebrand villa in San Francesco di Paola,<br />
which British musicians, artists and suffragettes,<br />
like Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) and Constance<br />
Smedley (1876-1941), considered their creative<br />
haunt in Florence, at the turn of the last century.<br />
Expect a unique calendar of events – including<br />
tours, lectures and a final exhibition, during this<br />
September-to-December programme which<br />
includes several grants in support of local culture<br />
and education. Co-funded by Margie MacKinnon,<br />
Wayne McArdle, Alice Vogler and Donna Malin,<br />
the project is also sponsored by the Municipality<br />
of Florence, as part of the programme ‘Enjoy,<br />
Respect and Feel Florence’, financed by the<br />
Ministry of Tourism, the Fund for Development<br />
and Cohesion of the Municipality of Florence and<br />
‘Feel Florence’. For our complete calendar visit:<br />
www.calliopearts.org.<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 95
Below: Villa di Poggio<br />
Imperiale, frescos from Maria<br />
Maddalena of Austria’s<br />
reception room, with scenes<br />
of historic ruling women,<br />
apartments frescoed<br />
by Matteo Rosselli<br />
MUSIC RESEARCH GRANT AND<br />
PERFORMANCE<br />
A ‘Palace Women’ research grant has been<br />
awarded to writer and curator Claudia Tobin, with<br />
violinist Ruth Palmer and her pianist Alessio Enea.<br />
Together, they will set out to uncover and reveal<br />
“how music underscored the swell of women’s<br />
increasing liberties at the turn of the twentieth<br />
century”. According to Dr Tobin, they will focus<br />
on “the musical sisterhood between a network of<br />
European women artists, writers and music critics<br />
who took inspiration from Florence, including<br />
suffragette composer Dame Ethel Smyth (still<br />
best known for her ‘March of Women’ anthem);<br />
her friend, the writer and activist Vernon Lee<br />
(1856-1935); and suffragette, critic and playwright<br />
Constance Smedley.<br />
These pioneers demonstrated the transformative<br />
power of music on the mind and body, and paved<br />
the way for the freedom of expression women<br />
enjoy today.” Awardees will bring together material<br />
which connects archives in the UK and Florence,<br />
including at the Villa I Tatti Harvard Centre for<br />
Renaissance Studies, the Lyceum Club archive,<br />
the British Institute of Florence; and at Somerville<br />
College Oxford and the British Library in the<br />
UK. The first iteration of this combined lecture<br />
and recital, scheduled for September 29, 20<strong>23</strong><br />
will be presented at the Lyceum in Florence, of<br />
which these women were members; with further<br />
iterations planned for the Cambridge Festival<br />
of Ideas in the UK and inclusion at academic<br />
conferences on Vernon Lee.<br />
PHOTOGRAPHY GRANT<br />
Thanks to a photography grant and a good measure<br />
of buona volontà, award-winning Florentine<br />
photography association ‘Gruppo Fotografico<br />
Il Cupolone APS’ is already poised to capture<br />
each phase of our 20<strong>23</strong> programme. Ten women<br />
photographers, both professional and amateur,<br />
will continue the quest they began with last year’s<br />
edition of ‘Oltrarno Gaze’, whose photographs<br />
on women artists and artisans at work are<br />
immortalised in the book Florence in the Making<br />
(The Florentine Press, 2022). Via photo reportage<br />
an artistic images, the team is committed to the<br />
creation of a photographic archive spotlighting<br />
creativity linked to the ‘Palace Women’ theme,<br />
as artisans and art students find inspiration in<br />
96 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
Left: Façade of Bianca<br />
Cappello’s palace in the<br />
Oltrarno<br />
Photo: Wikimedia Commons<br />
the Florence palazzi (and gardens!) that female<br />
pioneers designed, developed and ‘populated’,<br />
according to their unique perspectives. From<br />
riverside to countryside, they will start with<br />
Oltrano sites and female-run workshops, before<br />
moving on to explore villas in other areas, once<br />
summer homes to Medici women, like Villa La<br />
Quiete – a favourite site of Anna Maria Luisa de’<br />
Medici (1667-1743), the last Medici heir – which<br />
also provided education opportunities for secular<br />
and religious women for centuries, including the<br />
Montalve congregation and their order’s founder<br />
Eleonora Ramirez de Montalvo (1602-1659). The<br />
team’s photographs will be exhibited, together<br />
with works of craftsmanship produced during the<br />
project, at ‘Palace Women’ a photography show at<br />
Cultural Association Il Palmerino, from October 15<br />
to November <strong>23</strong>, 20<strong>23</strong>.<br />
TRAINING AND PRODUCTION GRANTS FOR<br />
STUDENTS AND PROFESSIONAL ARTISANS<br />
One of the Oltrarno’s most renowned public<br />
secondary schools dedicated to the arts is<br />
recipient of our Palace Women Students’ Grant.<br />
One fourth-year class of 18 students, and one<br />
post-high school programme of seven students<br />
at the Liceo Artistico Statale di Porta Romana<br />
e Sesto Fiorentino will benefit from a special<br />
programme focused on papermaking, art<br />
production, serigraphs and printing on textiles.<br />
This grant offers students the opportunity to<br />
attend workshops and visit the atelier of a sector<br />
professional. “Both hands-on, and theoretical,<br />
it focuses on conservation and project making<br />
– from conception to conclusion, in addition<br />
to providing students a unique exhibition<br />
opportunity,” says Paola Lucchesi, professional<br />
artisan who developed grant content, together<br />
with the Liceo Artistico’s professors Silvia<br />
Coppetti and Aude Vanriette.<br />
‘Palace Women’ also foresees a ‘production grant’<br />
for three local professional artisans inspired by<br />
the theme. Artisans who would like to apply to<br />
participate are invited to visit www.calliopearts.<br />
org to apply via our application form on-line.<br />
The three finalists will receive 500 euro each,<br />
for materials expenses, to produce an original<br />
work of craftsmanship, in their preferred media<br />
– stone, leather, metals, ceramics, glass, paper,<br />
fabrics and more. Finalists will be featured at Il<br />
Palmerino’s exhibition, in the book Palace Women<br />
(The Florentine Press, ed. L. Falcone, for release<br />
in October 20<strong>23</strong>) and a documentary short of the<br />
same name by Florence-based Russian videomaker<br />
Olga Makarova. RC<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 97
Calliope Arts news in brief<br />
CALLIOPE DEBUTS ON BLOOMBERG CONNECTS<br />
Calliope Arts is happy to announce its debut on ‘Bloomberg Connects’, an app<br />
expanding access to art and culture by providing free digital guides to cultural<br />
organisations around the world. Calliope Arts is in good company; the Bloomberg<br />
Connects portfolio includes over 150 museums, historic sites, parks, gardens,<br />
galleries, public art, in cities and towns across four continents.<br />
Here’s a sampling of partners: Anne Frank House (Netherlands), The Courtauld<br />
(UK), Georgia O’Keefe Museum (US), Guggenheim Museum (US), La Biennale di Venezia (Italy), The<br />
Little Museum of Dublin (Ireland), MoMA | The Museum of Modern Art (US), Museum of Art &<br />
Photography (MAP) (India), The New York Public Library, Rembrandt House Museum (Netherlands)<br />
and many more. Download the app for free!<br />
A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN…<br />
In 20<strong>23</strong>, Calliope Arts kicked off its first lecture series at the<br />
British Institute of Florence, which aims to share insight<br />
and research into female achievement in the fields of art,<br />
literature, science and more.<br />
In March, BIF Art History Director Jeremy Boudreau<br />
discussed women artists and the Grand Tour, in the lecture ‘A League of their own’. From the Uffizi<br />
Gallery’s opening in 1770, to the mid-1800s, their starting point was a petition to copy the Old<br />
Masters, and roughly 10% of painters copying in Florence during this period were female. Élisabeth<br />
Vigée Le Brun, Irene Duclos and Violante Siries Cerroti are just a sampling of the artists featured.<br />
Scholar Angela Oberer continued the series with a lecture on Rosalba Carriera, sharing the ‘secrets’<br />
of the painter’s success: “Carriera knew how to profit from foreigners’ presence in Venice, cultivating<br />
special relationships with intellectuals, artists, aristocrats, jewelers and their agents.”<br />
In May, art historian Lisa Kaborycha will introduce us to Brigida Balldinotti, “the most celebrated<br />
unknown writer of the Quattrocento”, whose epistles circulated widely in Florentine manuscript<br />
collections during the fifteenth century. This June, we look forward to a talk by ‘Artemisia UpClose’<br />
head conservator Elizabeth Wicks who will discuss the ‘rescue’ of Gentileschi’s Inclination (partially<br />
described on pp. 88-93). To view past lectures, please visit Calliope Arts’ YouTube channel.<br />
ARTEMISIA IN THE MUSEUM OF MICHELANGELO<br />
From September 27 to January 8, Casa Buonarroti will<br />
play host to the much-awaited show ‘Artemisia in the<br />
Museum of Michelangelo’, centred on the artist’s soonto-be<br />
restored Allegory of Inclination. The exhibition,<br />
sponsored by Calliope Arts and Christian Levett, will focus<br />
on Artemisia’s debut as a professional painter in the Florentine context, exploring the development<br />
of her social networks and the painting’s commission.<br />
Curated by museum director Alessandro Cecchi, it is also designed to provide an in-depth look at<br />
the painting’s restoration, shedding light on the extensive range of diagnostic techniques used to<br />
map the artist’s original life-sized nude figure and composition, as well as identifying later additions<br />
to the work. The exhibition catalogue will reveal the painting’s symbolism and its relevance to<br />
Artemisia, in forging her own identity as a painter, in addition to uncovering connections between<br />
Artemisia and ‘Michelangelo the Divine’. Catalogue authors include: Cristina Acidini, Sheila Barker,<br />
Alessandro Cecchi, Elizabeth Cropper, Mary Garrard, Margie MacKinnon and Elizabeth Wicks.<br />
(Ed. Linda Falcone. The Florentine Press, for release September 20<strong>23</strong>).<br />
98 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong>
A day in the life...<br />
The hands of Artemisia UpClose head conservator Elizabeth Wicks, as she<br />
protects the thickest brushwork of Artemisia’s Allegory of Inclination (mostly<br />
spots on Il Volterrano’s added veil), by brushing thin gesso fills over the<br />
brushstrokes to protect them during the ‘vacuum process’, which is critical to<br />
consolidating the painting’s layers, thereby protecting it from future damage.<br />
(Image: Olga Makarova)<br />
Front cover: Salimbeni Ventura, XVI century.<br />
Wedding of Grand Duke Ferdinand I de’ Medici to Christine of Lorraine,<br />
National Archives of Siena<br />
Back cover: Detail of Cosmological model by Antonio Santucci, Medici court cosmographer<br />
and the predecessor of Galileo. Galileo Museum, Florence<br />
<strong>Spring</strong> / <strong>Summer</strong> 20<strong>23</strong> • Restoration Conversations 99
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