Winter 2023
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 4, WINTER <strong>2023</strong><br />
WOMEN’S STORIES: TODAY AND THROUGH THE CENTURIES<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 1
Publisher<br />
Calliope Arts Foundation<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>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
From the Editor<br />
Today’s women, featured in this issue of Restoration Conversations, have done<br />
their share of searching, and that may well be the reason they find themselves<br />
pictured between these pages. Violinist Ruth Palmer and scholar Claudia Tobin<br />
seek – through their research and performance – to bring female composers and<br />
poetic-minded ‘freedom fighters’ to the fore. In her new book Women at Work<br />
from 1900 to Now, author and curator Flavia Frigeri leaves no field of female<br />
achievement unexplored. Conservator Eugenia Di Rocco strives to safeguard the<br />
Wulz sisters’ iconic images from Alinari Foundation for Photography – because<br />
photography can vanish, if not painstakingly protected, and English painter Cecily<br />
Brown seeks to translate the silent tribulations of a third-century saint into a<br />
language called ‘colour’ at Florence’s Museo Novecento.<br />
These women, and others found herein, perform, safeguard, uncover and share the<br />
achievements of their historic counterparts: Ethyl Smyth’s The March of Women,<br />
Lavinia Fontana’s Queen of Sheba, Maryla Lednicka-Szczytt’s Black Angel. Their<br />
stories are more relevant than ever. So, there’s reason to celebrate in the new year,<br />
not least because Artemisia’s censored allegory has her legs back (digitally) and is<br />
using them to get to her Genoa show come 2024!<br />
Fondly,<br />
Linda Falcone<br />
Managing Editor, Restoration Conversations<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 3
GRAZIE MILLE<br />
As the conversation around women’s achievements grows, we have more<br />
and more people to thank with every issue of the magazine. Not that we are<br />
complaining! It is wonderful to see this community expanding. Massive thanks to<br />
the people whose words fill these pages:<br />
Virtuosic violinist Ruth Palmer; curator, academic and author Claudia Tobin; Director<br />
of the Alinari Phototography Foundation Claudia Baroncini; members of the 5,000<br />
Negatives team Eugenia Di Rocco and Pamela Ferrari; National Gallery (London)<br />
curator Priyesh Mistry; Museo Novecento’s artistic director and curator Sergio Risaliti;<br />
National Gallery of Ireland’s curator Aoife Brady and conservator Maria Canavan; art<br />
historian and dean emerita of the National Gallery (Washington) Elizabeth Cropper;<br />
Towards Modernity co-curator Ilaria Sgarbozzo; Consuelo Lollobrigida, professor<br />
and art historian; the Opificio delle pietre dure’s senior paper conservator, Simona<br />
Calza; and Costantino D’Orazio, art historian and curator of Artemisia Gentileschi,<br />
Courage and Passion at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa.<br />
Thank you to all who enthusiastically participated in the ‘Palace Women’ project<br />
as artisans, photographers, tour guides, educators and otherwise, with special<br />
mention to institutional partners the British Institute in Florence and Il Palmerino<br />
Cultural Association, as well as co-sponsors Alice Vogler and Donna Malin.<br />
With the exhibition Artemisia in the Museum of Michelangelo drawing to a close,<br />
we would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to ‘Artemisia UpClose’ co-sponsor<br />
Christian Levett and to Casa Buonarroti’s Museum Director Alessandro Cecchi<br />
and Foundation President Cristina Acidini. Grazie mille also to designer Massimo<br />
Chimenti and his team at Culturanuova for creating the perfect showpiece for our<br />
‘Artemisia UpClose’ project. We are delighted that part of this exhibition will carry<br />
on in Genoa.<br />
4 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
CONTENTS WINTER <strong>2023</strong><br />
MUSIC AND A VOICE<br />
6 Close Encounters<br />
14 The Words We’d Like to Meet<br />
20 Notable Women<br />
24 You Oughta Be In Pictures<br />
AT WORK IN HISTORY<br />
32 Palace Women Find Common Ground<br />
36 5,000 Negatives<br />
42 Time Travel at Florence’s Opificio<br />
48 The Big Reveal<br />
54 Three Wishes<br />
58 Mission Accomplished<br />
FORERUNNERS PRESS FORWARD<br />
62 Trailblazer, Rule Breaker<br />
68 The Star of the Show<br />
74 Courage and Passion<br />
WOMEN INSPIRED<br />
80 The Colour is Brown<br />
86 The Painting in the Dining Room<br />
92 Women at Work<br />
98 Two New Books<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 5
Close<br />
Encounters<br />
A conversation with violinist Ruth Palmer<br />
Let’s begin at the end. The last work in the<br />
programme for ‘Scoring Suffrage’, a recital<br />
of music by women composers held at<br />
the Lyceum in Florence in September,<br />
was ‘Piece for Ruth’, by Venezuelan<br />
pianist and composer Gabriela Montero.<br />
The ‘Ruth’ in question is Ruth Palmer,<br />
the acclaimed violinist, and one half of<br />
‘Scoring Suffrage’s’ creative team, with<br />
whom I was now having a coffee at the<br />
Hayward Gallery on London’s South<br />
Bank. I asked her if any one of the pieces<br />
in the recital was more challenging than<br />
the others. “They all have their own<br />
challenges in different ways,” she said.<br />
For example, “the Montero has one tricky<br />
bit, but it was written for me, so I can<br />
do what I want with it.” Had she known<br />
that Montero was going to write it for<br />
her? “I asked her to write it for me,” she<br />
replied, and proceeded to recount the<br />
improbable story of their initial meeting.<br />
“I used to live not far from here on<br />
Fleet Street,” Ruth recalled. “One day,<br />
as I was crossing the road to go to the<br />
stationer’s, I was hit by a scooter that<br />
sent me literally flying horizontally<br />
over the bus lane.” The scooter driver,<br />
Richard, had been in a terrible hurry to<br />
get somewhere and had filtered down<br />
the wrong side of the road. Luckily, Ruth<br />
was fine but for a few scratches. As it<br />
happened, a police officer had witnessed<br />
the accident and asked if she wanted<br />
to press charges. Ruth declined, saying<br />
she wouldn’t press charges so long as<br />
6 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Richard agreed to come to her next Wigmore<br />
Hall recital. And even though he didn’t attend the<br />
recital, the two stayed in touch.<br />
Some two years later, Richard’s brother Sam<br />
wrote to Ruth, hoping to speak to her about a<br />
project he had been thinking about. He had<br />
seen In Search of the Messiah, a film in which<br />
Ruth starred as a violinist seeking out the world’s<br />
most prestigious violins, which had aired on arts<br />
networks throughout the world. “He was quite<br />
excited about it,” explained Ruth, “and wanted to<br />
discuss some ideas he had for his own project.”<br />
Ruth told Sam the conversation would have to<br />
wait, as she was on her way to visit her cousin in<br />
Lexington, Massachusetts.<br />
No problem, Sam replied. As it happens, I am<br />
going to Lexington myself. “And it turned out<br />
that he was living with Gabriela Montero around<br />
the corner from my cousin. So, I met her in her<br />
kitchen eating pumpkin pie. We got talking and<br />
eventually I said, ‘Will you write me a piece?’ She<br />
agreed, and we played it together a year later, in<br />
New York.”<br />
Earlier that morning, Ruth and I met to check<br />
out a venue for a reprise of ‘Scoring Suffrage’<br />
in London. Our destination was the 1901 Arts<br />
Club, a rehearsal and performance space created<br />
by philanthropist, conductor and violinist Joji<br />
Hattori. (As a young violinist Ruth won a Hattori<br />
Foundation prize which, in a further coincidence,<br />
was presented to her by the person who had<br />
recommended the 1901 Arts Club to me – a friend<br />
I met while we were both walking our dogs on<br />
Hampstead Heath.) The club occupies a lovingly<br />
restored schoolmaster’s residence in a street of<br />
small Victorian terraced houses and is decorated<br />
Above: Ruth Palmer in ‘Scoring<br />
Suffrage’ at Florence’s Lyceum.<br />
Photo by Marco Berni<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 7
Below: Ruth Palmer and<br />
pianist Alessio Enea in ‘Scoring<br />
Suffrage’ at Florence’s Lyceum.<br />
Photo by Marco Berni<br />
in the style of a European Salon. Its intimate<br />
size and salon-like atmosphere seem ideal for<br />
the nineteenth and early twentieth-century<br />
repertoire of ‘Scoring Suffrage’. Ruth had brought<br />
her violin with her and set about testing the<br />
space’s acoustics. We were soon rolling up two<br />
rugs on the original wooden floor and pulling<br />
back a heavy curtain behind the grand piano.<br />
After another sound check, Ruth seemed satisfied<br />
with the result, although the improvement in<br />
resonance was lost on my untrained ears.<br />
‘Scoring Suffrage’ was conceived not solely as<br />
a musical event, rather, it is a weaving together<br />
of the music, literature and personal stories of<br />
women whose lives and careers overlapped<br />
with women’s suffrage movements in Europe.<br />
Through the narration of letters, poetry and other<br />
writings, Ruth’s partner in this project, curator and<br />
academic Dr Claudia Tobin (see feature on p. 14),<br />
provides the context in which woman composers<br />
were working and creating the soundtrack that<br />
accompanied women’s growing political and<br />
expressive freedom. The third member of the<br />
team was London-based pianist Alessio Enea,<br />
who accompanied Ruth in the performance.<br />
On this day in the Hayward’s cafe, we would<br />
talk about the works of the six female composers<br />
featured in ‘Scoring Suffrage’: Fanny Mendelssohn<br />
(1805-1847), Clara Schumann (1819-1896), Ethel<br />
Smyth (1858-1944), Lili Boulanger (1893-1918),<br />
Florence Price (1887-1953) and Gabriela Montero<br />
(b. 1970). A single male composer, Maurice Ravel<br />
(1875-1937), made it on to the programme by virtue<br />
of the significance of two women to his work.<br />
The first piece in the programme was Fanny<br />
Mendelssohn’s ‘Adagio’, composed when she was<br />
just 18. Fanny is said to have excelled as a composer<br />
of short musical forms. This is not surprising<br />
given that, unlike her brother, the composer Felix<br />
Mendelssohn who travelled throughout Europe<br />
8 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
From left to right:<br />
Top row: Fanny Mendelssohn, 1842,<br />
by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim and<br />
Lithograph of Clara Schumann, 1839,<br />
by Andreas Staub<br />
Middle row: Ethel Smyth and her dog,<br />
Marco, 1891 and Henri Manuel’s Portrait<br />
of Lili Boulanger, originally published in<br />
Comœdia illustré, 1913<br />
Bottom row: Florence Price and<br />
Gabriela Montero<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 9
Above: Processing<br />
suffragettes, c. 1908, World’s<br />
Graphic Press Limited, 36-38<br />
Whitefriars Street, Fleet Street,<br />
London. ‘Women’s Social and<br />
Political Union’ teams draw the<br />
carriage of released prisoners<br />
away from Holloway, LSE<br />
Library. Source: Wikimedia<br />
Commons<br />
with his orchestral compositions, Fanny was<br />
expected to stay home playing salon concerts.<br />
“Fanny was allowed to play the piano, as long<br />
as it supported her brother and made her more<br />
attractive as a marriage prospect. Teaching the<br />
piano was also an acceptable occupation for<br />
women, at a time when most professions were<br />
closed to women,” notes Ruth. Fanny’s ‘Adagio’<br />
“is tricky to get right. It’s a delicate balance of a<br />
slightly naïve, sweet and pleasant [melody] with a<br />
[calming] meditation, and to try and find exactly<br />
the right tempo to let it be a dream, and to open<br />
with it, is difficult.”<br />
Fanny Mendelssohn’s near contemporary, Clara<br />
Schumann, had much greater freedom to travel,<br />
performing in concerts throughout Europe as<br />
a highly celebrated pianist. From childhood to<br />
middle age, she produced a good body of work but,<br />
following the early death in 1856 of her husband,<br />
the composer Robert Schumann, Clara largely gave<br />
up composing, leaving a legacy of just 23 published<br />
works. In preparing to perform Clara Schumann’s<br />
‘Three Romances’ Ruth found that “it took a lot of<br />
personal energy to discover the depth in it. But I<br />
had played the same piece for another recital in<br />
France in May, and I worked quite a lot on it then,”<br />
adding, “it has been a year where I’ve begun to play<br />
more women’s repertoire.”<br />
Although she is now recognised as an important<br />
composer of the Romantic era, Schumann herself<br />
seemed to have absorbed the prevailing view that<br />
women did not have the ‘genius’ to create great<br />
music. “I once believed that I possessed creative<br />
talent,” she claimed, “but I have given up this idea;<br />
a woman must not desire to compose – there has<br />
never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect<br />
to be the one?” No doubt Clara would have been<br />
able to put more energy into her composing if<br />
she did not have eight children to provide for<br />
and a husband whose health was precarious. As<br />
Ruth comments, “When it comes to women, the<br />
perception of competence is always the issue.<br />
Not just in music, but everywhere. And it’s not<br />
just men, women can be just as sexist without<br />
realising it.”<br />
The work of English composer Ethel Smyth<br />
(see feature on p.14) was new to Ruth. “Her ‘Violin<br />
Sonata’ required the most preparation because<br />
10 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Left: Winnaretta Singer’s selfportrait,<br />
c.1885, Foundation<br />
Singer-Polignac, Paris.<br />
Source: Wikimedia Commons<br />
it is thirty minutes long. It also has a significant<br />
emotional content because there is a discussion<br />
in it – it is more like an essay than a short soliloquy.<br />
And there’s a lot to get together with the piano<br />
as well, the score is complicated.” Ruth continues,<br />
“As a musician, what I am always looking for is<br />
a musical challenge, regardless of who wrote it.<br />
I was really glad to get to know Smyth’s sonata,<br />
because it is an interesting piece of music that I<br />
can include in any programme or any situation.”<br />
Lili Boulanger’s ‘D’un matin de printemps’ was a<br />
piece that Ruth learned during the pandemic but<br />
had not performed. “It is the one that surprised<br />
me. The difficulty arises from the fact that it is so<br />
short – it’s there and then suddenly … it’s gone!”<br />
Sadly, this could also describe its composer’s life.<br />
A child prodigy, Lili Boulanger was the first female<br />
winner of the Prix de Rome composition prize<br />
in 1913. Between 1911 and 1918 she composed<br />
some two dozen works but, having suffered with<br />
chronic ill health throughout her life, she died at<br />
just 24 years of age.<br />
For Florence Price’s ‘Fantasie in G minor’<br />
(see feature on p.20), Ruth referred to ‘Roots’,<br />
a recording of Black US classical music by the<br />
young American violinist Randall Goosby.. “He<br />
plays it beautifully,” she says. “When I came to<br />
play it, I couldn’t make sense of it at first. But<br />
when you put it together with the poetry of<br />
Georgia Douglas Johnson, it suddenly comes<br />
alive. When you contextualise it, it sort of pops.”<br />
French composer Maurice Ravel snuck on<br />
to the programme in part because his career<br />
owes a huge debt to Winnaretta Singer, the<br />
sewing machine heiress, who was one of the<br />
most passionate supporters of his work. From<br />
1905 until 1931, Ravel performed and sometimes<br />
premiered his works in her salon. For ‘Scoring<br />
Suffrage’ Ruth performed Ravel’s ‘Tzigane’, which<br />
she describes as “an amazing piece.” It was both<br />
inspired by and dedicated to British-Hungarian<br />
violinist Jelly D’Aranyi who was one of the few<br />
celebrated women in the male-dominated world<br />
of classical violinists of the time. ‘Tzigane’ was<br />
just one of many pieces written especially for her.<br />
In 1922, and at the height of his career, Maurice<br />
Ravel met d’Aranyi in London at a private concert<br />
where she and Hans Kindler performed Ravel’s<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 11
Top: Riverside view of Florence on opening<br />
night. Photo by Marco Berni<br />
Above Jelly d’Aranyi in 1923.<br />
Source: Wikimedia Commons<br />
Right: Ruth Palmer testing acoustics at the<br />
1901 Arts Club in London,<br />
-Calliope Arts Archive<br />
‘Duo sonate’. Ravel persuaded d’Aranyi to stay<br />
on and play what were then popular Romani<br />
melodies for him, which she did well into the<br />
early hours of the morning. He was so taken with<br />
her performance that he promised to compose a<br />
concert piece for her and wrote “you have inspired<br />
me to write a short piece of diabolical difficulty,<br />
conjuring up the Hungary of my dreams. Since it<br />
will be for violin, why don’t I call it Tzigane?” The<br />
piece is indeed a challenge for the violinist and<br />
demands to be played by throwing caution to the<br />
wind. Ruth was certainly up to the task, showing<br />
off the range of her instrument as well as her<br />
own virtuosity.<br />
Winnaretta Singer enjoyed introducing her<br />
friends to each other and starting cultural<br />
collaborations across the arts. For Ruth, “the<br />
opportunity to collaborate with Claudia was<br />
probably the biggest draw on this project.<br />
Claudia is so knowledgeable, and she has an<br />
artistic character that allows her to connect the<br />
dots in a way that is instinctual. When I suggested<br />
pieces from the repertoire, she was able to find<br />
the connections among the various writers and<br />
poets and activists at the time. There was an<br />
12 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
organic process to the way we found the links<br />
together. I learned that I could discover things as<br />
well. So that was fun.” The enjoyment that Claudia<br />
and Ruth experienced working in partnership on<br />
‘Scoring Suffrage’ recalls the final words of ‘The<br />
March of Women’, the suffrage anthem written by<br />
Cicely Hamilton and composed by Ethel Smyth:<br />
March, march, many as one<br />
Shoulder to Shoulder and friend to friend.<br />
MARGIE MACKINNON<br />
‘Scoring Suffrage’ was performed as part of the<br />
‘Palace Women’ programme organised by The<br />
British Institute of Florence, Il Palmerino Cultural<br />
Association and Calliope Arts This project is made<br />
possible thanks to the support of Enjoy, Respect<br />
and Feel Florence, funded by Italy’s Ministry<br />
of Tourism, the Fund for Development and<br />
Cohesion, the Municipality of Florence and Feel<br />
Florence. Special thanks to donors Alice Vogler,<br />
Donna Malin, Margie MacKinnon and<br />
Wayne McArdle.<br />
Described as ‘the most distinctive violinist<br />
of her generation’ (The Independent),<br />
violinist Ruth Palmer is praised for her<br />
‘intensity’ and ‘poetic grandeur’ (The<br />
Guardian).<br />
Her Direct-to-Disc LP of Bach is available<br />
on Berliner Meister Schallplatten. Earlier<br />
recordings’ critical acclaim includes<br />
‘impeccable astringent Bartók and warm,<br />
profound Bach’ (The Observer), while her<br />
Shostakovich recording won a Classical<br />
BRIT.<br />
She’s performed with James Ehnes,<br />
Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, Yutaka<br />
Sado, Carlo Rizzi, BBC Philharmonic,<br />
and at the British Embassy’s British<br />
Week in Havana, and for King Charles<br />
III (then Prince of Wales) and Queen<br />
Elizabeth II. She’s appeared on radio and<br />
television internationally. When Ruth<br />
collaborated with Rambert and Sydney<br />
Dance Companies, ‘it was sometimes<br />
a struggle to concentrate on the dance<br />
when the violinist was so compelling’<br />
(Sunday Telegraph).<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 13
Above: Scholar Claudia Tobin performs ‘Scoring Suffrage’ in Florence.<br />
Photo by Marco Berni<br />
Right: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s portrait of his sister Christina, 1866,<br />
private collection. Source: Wikiart<br />
14 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
The Words We’d<br />
Like to Meet<br />
Scholar Claudia Tobin on ‘Scoring Suffrage’<br />
CChristina Rossetti, Constance Smedley, Ethel Smyth, Vernon Lee,<br />
Cicely Hamilton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emmeline Pankhurst,<br />
Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akmatova are just some of the<br />
women writers and social reformers forming part of Florence’s<br />
“Scoring Suffrage” performance. This brief conversation with<br />
British scholar Claudia Tobin will send you to the book shelf,<br />
to re-read ‘old friends’ or to reach for new voices you’ve never<br />
heard before. Amidst plays, poems, novellas, essays and letters,<br />
Claudia’s interview is an invitation to seek out the words of<br />
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women. Their hopes,<br />
whether shattered or still shining bright, are awaiting discovery<br />
– in their own words.<br />
Were all the women featured social activists?<br />
The starting point for the Florence performance was the suffrage<br />
moment, but I think it’s important to note that these women are<br />
united by an extraordinary commitment to their art and the<br />
causes they supported, but they didn’t share the same political<br />
persuasions, and that message – even by itself – is relevant to<br />
today’s world. They were all ‘fighting spirits’ and they fought for<br />
suffrage or the right to express themselves, but they do not belong<br />
to one side of the political spectrum or a single political party,<br />
which became clear as our research unfolded. Christina Rossetti<br />
(1830-1894), for instance, was devoted to poetry – to the point<br />
that she didn’t marry to pursue it. She was religiously devout and<br />
supported humanitarian causes, striving to follow the Florence<br />
Nightingale model, and her poems are full of redemptive female<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 15
Left: Cover of Vernon Lee’s<br />
The Ballet of The Nations.<br />
1915 edition, from the library of<br />
Il Palmerino Cultural Association.<br />
Above: Constance Smedley,<br />
undated.<br />
Source: Wikimedia Commons<br />
Right: The Ballet of The Nations<br />
performed at Il Palmerino Cultural<br />
Association, 2019.<br />
Source: Il Palmerino Archive<br />
figures, but she was not in favour of votes for<br />
women, although she does concede that “mothers<br />
would make good members of Parliament”.<br />
Tell us about a highlight from ‘Scoring<br />
Suffrage’ that combines spoken word and<br />
music.<br />
In the performance, we explore the figure of<br />
the wanderer, the gypsy. So, we looked at the<br />
archetypal artist, the wandering minstrel – a<br />
figure of freedom and free movement - in a<br />
few different works of poetry and music. As a<br />
complement to Maurice Ravel’s ‘Tzigane’, I read<br />
Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s ‘Our Sweet<br />
Companions – Sharing Your Bunk and Your<br />
Bed’. She was an exile, and suffered greatly in<br />
early twentieth-century Russia, and was deeply<br />
influenced by Pushkin’s narrative poem ‘The<br />
Gypsy’.<br />
Another piece I’d like to include in the future,<br />
on this same theme, is The Minstrel, which<br />
Constance Smedley collaborated on, in 1915,<br />
with her husband Maxwell Armfield. It features<br />
a wandering musician, in a country destroyed<br />
by war. Both Smedley and Armfield were<br />
committed pacifists, and in that same period,<br />
they set up experimental theatre companies<br />
in London, providing body-movement scripts.<br />
They had a vision of really strict choreography<br />
in their productions, for which Smedley<br />
provides drawings, envisioning them as a<br />
rhythmic structure.<br />
16 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
From your description, Smedley’s experience<br />
sounds akin to that of Vernon Lee, also a pacifist,<br />
interested in aesthetics and the psychological<br />
implications of physical expression.<br />
Yes, their interests are very much related. Smedley<br />
and Lee shared the pacifist outlook – in the<br />
First World War. [Armfield wrote the introduction<br />
to Lee’s satirical play, The Ballet of the Nations,<br />
published in 1915, before The Minstrel.] Lee,<br />
Smedley’s circle, Virginia Woolf’s circle were well<br />
travelled. They had friends in Belgium, Germany,<br />
France and England. The nations were at war but<br />
they wanted their friendships to remain. In reality,<br />
Lee’s loss of popularity as an author is often said<br />
to be linked to the letters she wrote to friends<br />
advocating peace.<br />
‘Scoring Suffrage’ includes snippets of<br />
letters and essays by women, in addition<br />
to their poetry. How did these women’s<br />
correspondence contribute to their quest for<br />
freedom of expression?<br />
Ethyl Smyth and Vernon Lee became friends and<br />
ended up dedicating work to each other. Lee<br />
dedicated the play Ariadne in Mantua to Smyth,<br />
thanking her for her work and begging her for<br />
music. They were what Smyth called ‘female<br />
labourers in the field of art’ and they moved in<br />
the same circles.<br />
Their correspondence crossed to America<br />
too, to involve another figure Charlotte Perkins<br />
Gilman – a friend of Smyth’s. She was an American<br />
suffragette and writer who wrote political verse<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 17
18 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
and songs for suffrage. Perkins Gilman cofounded<br />
The Women’s Peace Party, in 1915. Her<br />
novella The Yellow Wallpaper is haunting and<br />
vividly told. It speaks of a woman on the brink<br />
of madness, prescribed bed rest by her husband.<br />
She is not allowed to work and is held prisoner in<br />
her room, watching the peeling yellow wallpaper.<br />
In the programme, we cite a letter she wrote to<br />
Vernon Lee, thanking her for helping to spread<br />
the ideas she felt were important… not that they<br />
always agreed. They didn’t, because these women<br />
were complex figures.<br />
As an author and exhibition curator, you’ve<br />
often worked with the mixing of various<br />
media. How did this play out in the time<br />
period studied as part of the ‘Scoring<br />
Suffrage’ grant?<br />
There are instances in which music inspires<br />
words, and other cases in which words give way<br />
to silence, that then becomes sound or music.<br />
Virginia Woolf’s relationship with music is one<br />
interesting case study. In the late Nineteenth<br />
Century, many artists were interested in the<br />
intermingling of the senses, and started exploring<br />
fields like Synaesthesia. Kandinsky claimed to<br />
‘hear colours’, and French artist Sonia Delaney<br />
discusses the issue at length as well. The idea<br />
of [the brain processing information through<br />
unrelated senses] leads to the discussion of<br />
where one art form ends and the other begins. In<br />
this very fruitful period – in the late nineteenth<br />
and early twentieth century – there was the<br />
idea that music had the power to offer a sense<br />
of companionship. It was an invisible presence,<br />
a powerful voice… which reminds me of Russian<br />
poet Anna Akhmatova, who personified music as<br />
female, in her poem titled ‘Music’. I’m interested<br />
in where the different art forms begin and end<br />
and where they fuel and inspire other media,<br />
and it’s clear that music and poetry are natural<br />
companions and have been for a long time.<br />
Left, clockwise from top left: Vernon Lee by John Singer Sargent, 1881; Anna Akhmatova by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin,<br />
1922; Ethyl Smyth by John Singer Sargent, 1901; Charlotte Perkins Gilman by Frances Benjamin Johnston, c. 1900.<br />
Source: Wikimedia Commons<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 19
Notable Women<br />
AComposers Florence Price and Ethel Smyth<br />
A supermoon illuminated the sky over the Arno as<br />
the music of women composers filled Florence’s<br />
Lyceum Club for the inauguration of ‘Palace<br />
Women – Oltrarno and Beyond’. Serendipity?<br />
Perhaps, but there is no doubt that the presence<br />
of this symbol of female energy added to the<br />
sense that ‘Scoring Suffrage’ (as the recital was<br />
called) was an exceptional event. Below, we take a<br />
closer look at two of the composers whose work<br />
featured in the recital.<br />
Near contemporaries from opposite sides<br />
of the Atlantic, Florence Price (1887-1953) and<br />
Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), fought against prejudice<br />
to have their compositions recognised and<br />
performed. The body of work they left behind is<br />
testament to their talent and perseverance.<br />
Portrait of Florence Price<br />
Looking at the Camera,<br />
undated, Papers Addendum<br />
(MC 988a). Special Collections,<br />
University of Arkansas<br />
Libraries, Fayetteville<br />
FLORENCE PRICE<br />
Florence Beatrice Smith was born into a<br />
prominent family in the Black community of<br />
Little Rock, Arkansas. Her mother was a talented<br />
singer and pianist who quickly recognised her<br />
daughter’s musical gifts and sent Florence to<br />
Boston to study at the New England Conservatory.<br />
In addition to excelling at her piano and organ<br />
studies, she took private lessons in composition<br />
with the school’s director. That Florence<br />
encountered discrimination along the way is<br />
evidenced by the fact that, in her final year at the<br />
Conservatory, she falsely registered as a Mexican<br />
resident in an effort to avoid harassment from<br />
segregationist Southern white students, not an<br />
unusual occurrence for students of colour. In<br />
fact, Florence’s background included a mixture<br />
of French, Indian, Spanish and African American<br />
ancestry, and she would draw from this “racial<br />
melting pot” in composing her music.<br />
Florence returned to Little Rock after<br />
graduation and married Thomas Price, an upand-coming<br />
lawyer. When racial tensions in the<br />
city later erupted in violence, the couple, with<br />
their two young daughters, joined the Great<br />
Migration of Blacks fleeing northward, eventually<br />
settling in Chicago. Florence continued to study<br />
composition, publishing four pieces for piano<br />
in 1928. When her marriage ended in divorce in<br />
1931, she supported her family by working as an<br />
organist for silent film screenings and composing<br />
jingles for radio advertisements.<br />
Her ‘break’ came when she won the 1932<br />
Rodman Wanamaker Award, a competition for<br />
Black composers, with her entry ‘Symphony<br />
No 1 in E minor,’ which was performed by the<br />
Chicago Symphony Orchestra as part of the<br />
World’s Fair in 1933. The Chicago Daily News’<br />
music critic described it as “a faultless work<br />
… that speaks its own message with restraint<br />
and yet with passion … worthy of a place in the<br />
regular symphonic repertoire.”<br />
20 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
In explaining how Price went from relative<br />
obscurity to being showcased by a major<br />
orchestra, pianist and music historian Dr<br />
Samantha Ege notes that, “there’s this idea that<br />
this all-white, all-male orchestra just sort of<br />
magically took an interest in Price’s music, but<br />
actually it was Maude Roberts George working<br />
behind the scenes, supporting Price in getting the<br />
score finished and making sure the world could<br />
hear it.” Ege explains that both Price and George<br />
were part of an active network of Black women,<br />
many with conservatory training, who supported<br />
a growing musical community during the 1920s<br />
and 1930s. George’s support for Price extended to<br />
personally underwriting the cost of the Chicago<br />
Symphony performance.<br />
Even as she tirelessly composed new pieces,<br />
Price continued formal studies in harmony,<br />
orchestration and composition at the Chicago<br />
Musical College and the University of Chicago.<br />
Her music was performed by at least nine<br />
major orchestras, and her vocal and instrumental<br />
chamber music and piano compositions were<br />
sung by some of the great soloists of her day<br />
– including Marian Anderson who famously<br />
performed Price’s arrangement of a spiritual on<br />
the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, when<br />
she was barred on racial grounds from appearing<br />
in Washington’s Constitution Hall. Price also<br />
taught piano and mentored young composers.<br />
While she succeeded in publishing some of her<br />
scores, most were still in manuscript form at the<br />
time of her death.<br />
Price’s compositions clearly reflect the influence<br />
of her classical training. For those familiar with<br />
this repertoire, echoes of Brahms, Liszt and<br />
Chopin are evident in her work. Musicologists<br />
cite Dvorak’s ‘New World Symphony’ as the<br />
primary model for her first symphony. But what<br />
sets her compositions apart is the way in which<br />
she integrated musical idioms from outside the<br />
traditional orchestral world. In particular, she<br />
drew on the African American soundscape of<br />
church spirituals, plantation and folk songs with<br />
which she would have been familiar from her<br />
Southern childhood. Written descriptions cannot<br />
hope to capture the emotion of this music and<br />
encountering it for the first time is a pleasure that<br />
awaits the uninitiated. Ege, who has recorded<br />
many of Price’s pieces, says, “I wanted to recreate<br />
for the listener that sense of wonder I had when<br />
I first heard the music … It was a real invitation<br />
to listen … to enter this world with her … and I<br />
think it’s the way she treats African folk songs<br />
with such respect and sensitivity …” Ege adds that<br />
Price would have been aware that touring groups<br />
in the late Nineteenth Century had made the<br />
Negro spiritual an art form. Music that had once<br />
been denigrated because of its origins was seen<br />
in a new light in the concert hall.<br />
In 1943, Price wrote a letter to Serge Koussevitzky,<br />
the conductor of the highly regarded Boston<br />
Symphony Orchestra, hoping to encourage him<br />
to read some of her scores. Explaining her style,<br />
she told him, “I believe I can truthfully say that I<br />
understand the real Negro music. In some of my<br />
work I make use of this idiom undiluted. Again,<br />
at other times it merely flavors my themes. I<br />
have an unwavering and compelling faith that a<br />
national music very beautiful and very American<br />
can come from the melting pot just as the nation<br />
itself has done.” Unfortunately, Koussevitzky was<br />
not interested in programming any of her work.<br />
Price’s ‘Fantasie No. 1 in G minor’, which was<br />
performed as part of ‘Scoring Suffrage’, is a<br />
wonderful example of her ability to seamlessly<br />
insert recognisable African American themes<br />
into the highly structured form of classical<br />
European concert music. It is one of four<br />
‘Fantasies’, which at one time had been<br />
presumed lost. Fortunately for music lovers, in<br />
2009, a cache of dozens of boxes containing<br />
the composer’s letters and manuscripts was<br />
discovered in a long-neglected house in Illinois<br />
that had been Price’s summer refuge. That<br />
discovery heralded a renaissance in Price’s work<br />
and a renewed interest in performances and<br />
recordings of her extensive catalogue. Her “very<br />
beautiful and very American” music deserves to<br />
be heard by a much wider audience.<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 21
English composer and<br />
suffragette Ethel Smyth<br />
(1858-1944). Image from<br />
the United States Library<br />
of Congress’s Prints and<br />
Photographs division<br />
ETHEL SMYTH<br />
Her Majesty’s Prison Holloway is perhaps London’s<br />
most famous institution for women. In March 1912,<br />
it was the venue for an exceptional performance<br />
of the Suffragette anthem ‘The March of Women’.<br />
The chorus was sung by inmates marching in the<br />
quadrangle, while the anthem’s composer, Ethel<br />
Smyth, leaned out of her prison cell window to<br />
conduct them with her toothbrush. Smyth had<br />
been arrested two months earlier, along with her<br />
friend Emmeline Pankhurst, for throwing stones<br />
at the houses of politicians who opposed votes<br />
for women. Smyth herself took credit for teaching<br />
Pankhurst how to throw stones and practiced with<br />
her by aiming stones at trees near the home of a<br />
fellow activist. At the age of 52, Smyth had joined<br />
the Women’s Social and Political Union, founded<br />
by Pankhurst in 1903, to campaign for women’s<br />
suffrage. She took two years out from her musical<br />
career, by then well-established, to devote herself<br />
to the cause. This was typical of the passion and<br />
fearlessness with which Smyth approached every<br />
aspect of her life.<br />
Her determination not to be bound by social<br />
convention was apparent early on. Born in 1858<br />
into a well-to-do family in Victorian England – a<br />
time when it was unseemly for women of her class<br />
to have their own profession – Smyth overcame<br />
her father’s objections to her unshakeable desire<br />
to study music by locking herself in her room and<br />
refusing to eat or leave it until he relented. She<br />
was admitted to the Leipzig Conservatory in 1887<br />
and met some of the most renowned composers<br />
of the day, including Johannes Brahms, Clara<br />
Schumann, Antonin Dvorak and Pyotr Tchaikovsky.<br />
The latter would eventually recognise Smyth as<br />
“one of the few women composers whom one<br />
can seriously consider to be achieving something<br />
valuable in the field of musical creation.”<br />
Tchaikovsky’s backhanded compliment typifies<br />
the prejudice faced by female composers. Her<br />
work was not evaluated on its own merits but as<br />
that of a “woman composer”. While some critics<br />
praised the “masculinity” of her more powerful<br />
compositions, others complained that her work<br />
was lacking in the feminine charm to be expected<br />
of woman, whatever her other accomplishments.<br />
Following her formal education, Smyth<br />
travelled throughout Europe, mainly in Germany<br />
and Italy, refining her style, falling in and out of<br />
love and cultivating friendships with patrons,<br />
musicians and other intellectuals who were part<br />
of the artistic milieu of the time. She returned<br />
to London in 1889 where she composed works<br />
ranging from choral arrangements and chamber<br />
music to orchestral pieces and operas. Her<br />
first of six operas, ‘Fantasio’, debuted in 1898 in<br />
Weimar, Germany. Despite the insidious prejudice<br />
against women as composers, Smyth was able<br />
to get many of her works performed, thanks to a<br />
combination of talent, support from conductors<br />
such as Sir Thomas Beecham, and her own<br />
formidable ambition.<br />
Smyth’s ‘Sonata for Violin and Piano in A<br />
minor’, composed in 1887 and dedicated to her<br />
friend, Lili Wach, the daughter of composer Felix<br />
22 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Mendelssohn, was the centrepiece of ‘Scoring<br />
Suffrage’. A review of its first performance in 1887<br />
praised the musicians while declaring that the<br />
work itself lacked originality and was a slavish<br />
copy of Brahms, a critique that Smyth dismissed<br />
in her memoir Impressions that Remained saying,<br />
“A listen to the piece will prove just how wrong<br />
the reviewers were!” When violinist Ruth Palmer<br />
(see feature on p. 6) first looked at Smyth’s violin<br />
sonata, she thought, “There’s so much Brahms<br />
here. Where’s the Smyth? But when you get to<br />
know it, you realise, actually, she’s got so much<br />
personal power and narrative in that piece.<br />
She is not Brahms at all. It’s just that that is the<br />
vernacular that she was speaking in because<br />
that’s what was going on in Europe at the time.<br />
But she brings her own voice to the music and<br />
she says something original with it.”<br />
In 1912, Smyth began to lose her hearing,<br />
eventually giving up composing as a result. She<br />
turned from music to writing, completing ten<br />
mostly autobiographical volumes. In them, she<br />
writes openly about her love affairs, many with<br />
famous women, including Emmeline Pankhurst,<br />
writers Virginia Woolf and Edith Somerville, and<br />
the heiress Winnaretta Singer. Her only male<br />
lover is said to have been Henry Brewster, the<br />
librettist of some of her operas, with whom she<br />
had a lifelong friendship. It is disappointing (if<br />
not surprising) to discover that, according to<br />
biographer Dr Leah Broad, Smyth held bigoted<br />
opinions about race, subscribing to the belief in<br />
white English superiority, despite having faced<br />
prejudice throughout her life because of her<br />
gender and sexuality. In this, she went along with<br />
views that were prevalent at the time.<br />
Yet there is no denying Smyth’s many<br />
accomplishments. She was the first woman to<br />
have an opera (‘The Forest’) staged at the New<br />
York Metropolitan Opera, in 1903. In 1922, She<br />
was named Dame Commander of the Order of<br />
the British Empire, the first female composer<br />
(and possibly the only one with a criminal<br />
record!) to be given the title of Dame. She was<br />
the first woman to receive an honorary degree<br />
in music from Oxford University, in 1926. More<br />
recently, Smyth was the first woman composer to<br />
have an opera staged at Glyndebourne, in 2022.<br />
Their production of Smyth’s 1906 magnum opus,<br />
‘The Wreckers’, attracted rapturous reviews (and<br />
favourable comparisons to Benjamin Britten’s<br />
‘Peter Grimes’) for the staging and for the work<br />
itself, with the Financial Times critic claiming,<br />
“there is no English opera written before or after<br />
‘The Wreckers’ that can match Smyth’s openhearted,<br />
unapologetic, no-holds-barred passion.”<br />
Smyth’s final major work, a choral symphony<br />
called ‘The Prison’ was first performed in 1930 but<br />
only recorded 90 years later. That recording, by<br />
Chandos, won a Grammy in 2021.<br />
Among her many accolades, I like to think<br />
that Dame Ethel would have been particularly<br />
‘chuffed’ to have been given a seat at Judy<br />
Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974-79). In this groundbreaking<br />
installation artwork, a triangular table<br />
with place settings for 39 significant women<br />
from history and myth, Smyth finds herself in the<br />
company of Sojourner Truth, Georgia O’Keefe,<br />
Artemisia Gentileschi and her dear friend,<br />
Virginia Woolf, among others. Representing her<br />
work as both a composer and a champion of<br />
women’s rights, Smyth’s place setting includes<br />
musical motifs such as a plate in the form of<br />
a grand piano, a treble clef incorporating her<br />
initials and a metronome. On the runner, a tweed<br />
suit has been laid out, as if being tailored. This<br />
is a reference to Smyth’s preference for dressing<br />
in a ‘masculine’ style, and, perhaps, to her wish<br />
to be considered as worthy a composer as any<br />
of her male counterparts.<br />
Passionate composer, radical activist, prolific<br />
writer and non-conforming lover of women (and<br />
at least one man), Dame Ethel Smyth would be<br />
a fascinating guest at any fantasy dinner party.<br />
MARGIE MACKINNON<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 23
24 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
“You oughta be<br />
in pictures”<br />
Banca d’Italia showcases 75 years of women in art<br />
Towards Modernity [Verso la Modernità] is a survey show that encompasses<br />
75 years of shifting culture. All but six of its works are painted by male<br />
artists who echo the winds of social change affecting female representation<br />
in art. From the iconic mother figure, to the ‘new nude’ and the burgeoning<br />
‘modern woman’, this show at Florence’s Banca d’Italia, on via dell’Oriolo,<br />
is open for free guided tours through on-line appointment, until 10 March<br />
2024. Curated by Ilaria Sgarbozza and Anna Villari, the exhibition<br />
displays paintings and sculpture that reflected and shaped the female<br />
experience in Italy from 1871 to the mid-1900s...<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 25
Angel of the Hearth?<br />
The stairwell of the Banca d’Italia building is<br />
impressive to say the least – an imposing<br />
upward-moving swirl of marble that rises<br />
slowly, like the triumphant notes of an Italian<br />
march for unification. The Black Angel at the<br />
foot of the stairs stands out as a small but<br />
striking contrast to this otherwise stone-white<br />
world. “We chose to begin the Towards<br />
Modernity exhibition with this wonderful<br />
example of the Ritorno all’ordine movement,”<br />
says exhibition co-curator Anna Villari. “By the<br />
1920s, artists in Italy were already responding to<br />
what they considered the destruction of<br />
figurative art by the avant-garde currents,<br />
and were calling for a return to the human<br />
figure, which was cleaner and sharper than in<br />
previous decades, as with The Black Angel.”<br />
In 1922, Polish sculptor Maryla Lednicka-<br />
Szczytt – who eventually made her living<br />
carving decorative figureheads for the bow of<br />
cruise ships – debuted in Paris during the city’s<br />
heyday, and while there, she worked<br />
with designer Adrienne Gorska, whose more<br />
famous sister is Tamara de Lempicka.<br />
Following Lednicka-Szczytt’s move to Italy and<br />
her solo exhibition in Milan, in 1926, she was<br />
highly acclaimed by critics and collectors. The<br />
Black Angel was purchased by entrepreneur<br />
Riccardo Gualino, whose enviable collection was<br />
later acquired by the Banca d’Italia.<br />
Lednicka-Szczytt’s sculpture is thought to be<br />
a nod to the ballet Les Sylphides, which was<br />
performed in 1909 by Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes,<br />
featuring Chopin’s music. While in Italy, the<br />
artist frequented the ‘Novecento Group’, brought<br />
together by art critic Margherita Sarfatti, one of<br />
Mussolini’s lovers. A supporter of the Fascist<br />
Regime, Sarfatti was a friend to artists seeking<br />
what she called “modern classicism”. [Incidentally,<br />
Sarfatti – as a woman of Jewish ancestry – was<br />
later a victim of Mussolini’s 1939 Racial Laws and<br />
forced to flee to the United States. Her passage<br />
out of Italy was not blocked by government<br />
officials]. Despite Maryla Lednicka-Szczytt’s<br />
popularity between the two world wars, the<br />
sculptor met a regrettable end. After fruitlessly<br />
pursuing her art in New York in the early 1940s,<br />
she sank into poverty and oblivion. Unable to<br />
26 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Opposite page: Maryla Lednicka-Szczytt, 1922.<br />
The Black Angel,<br />
Banca d’Italia Collection, Florence<br />
Above, left: Monumental staircase at Banca<br />
d’Italia on via dell’Oriolo<br />
Above, right and Left: Stairwell with The Black<br />
Angel.<br />
Photos courtesy of Florence’s Banca d’Italia<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 27
Below, left: Silvestro Lega’s<br />
Maternity (1881-82)<br />
Below, right: Luciano Ricchetti’s<br />
Two Little Mothers (c. 1940)<br />
maintain her previous success, Lednicka-Szczytt<br />
committed suicide in 1947. Lednicka-Szczytt’s<br />
authorship of The Black Angel – which for<br />
decades was as overlooked as the artist herself<br />
– was rediscovered in 2013 by scholar Gioia Mori,<br />
after being incorrectly attributed to De Lempicka<br />
in the 1990s.<br />
Mothers and matrons<br />
The show’s more traditional section ‘Domestic<br />
Dimensions’ starts with a lovely 1881 work called<br />
Maternity. Salvatore Lega portrays his sister-inlaw<br />
and nephew, drawing on one of Western Art’s<br />
most iconic themes: mother and child. Although<br />
the lady pictured has all the traditional sweetness<br />
of a Madonna, the discreet movement of her<br />
hand, as she re-fastens her collar post breastfeeding,<br />
brings the work into the modern realm<br />
of discrete realism.<br />
Le due mammine, authored by Luciano<br />
Ricchetti in 1940, is interesting from a historical<br />
perspective. Its protagonist looks like an ancient<br />
Roman matrona in modern garb, holding a wellfed<br />
infant on her lap. This matron and child<br />
share the scene with a much younger little<br />
mamma – as the painting’s title suggests – who<br />
is sitting in the lower left corner, caring for her<br />
baby doll. Ricchetti’s painting is best read in<br />
the context of the Battle for Births [1925-1938],<br />
a propaganda-based operation and economic<br />
incentives campaign spearheaded by Mussolini,<br />
which strove to increase Italy’s population<br />
from 40 million, in 1927 to 60 million by 1950.<br />
A nation, to be strong, needed many men; and<br />
women could participate in Italy’s new-fangled<br />
imperial expansionism by bringing many souls<br />
into the world.<br />
28 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Not far away, is another matronly figure, this<br />
time with no child in tow. Ardengo Soffici’s Water<br />
Girl, an imposing and very successful painting,<br />
fits well into the Ritorno all’ordine movement. “In<br />
this period, there was also a return to depicting<br />
Italic or Etruscan women. Artists focused on Italy’s<br />
peasant culture and its attachment to the land,”<br />
Vallari explains. “Even the ceramic wares and the<br />
jug in this painting highlight Italian traditions,<br />
albeit in a modern way.”<br />
In this section we also find the exhibition’s<br />
‘posterchild’, A Girl Sewing. Villari admits<br />
that the decision to make this 1927 oil the show’s<br />
keynote image sparked debate. Was the picture too<br />
traditional? In the end, they went with it. Leonetta<br />
Pieraccini Cecchi’s delightful, faceless rendition<br />
can be compared to Vanessa Bell’s Portrait of<br />
Virginia Wolf. Pieraccini Cecchi was an artist and<br />
tongue-in-cheek writer whose published diaries<br />
immortalised the top intellectuals of her day –<br />
she was even married to one, Emilio Cecchi.<br />
Starting in 1902, Pierracini Cecchi studied with<br />
iconic Macchiaioli painter and Accademia di Belli<br />
Arti professor Giovanni Fattori – just as women<br />
were starting to unbar the academy’s doors.<br />
“Fattori taught freedom,” Villari says. That is<br />
precisely why the anti-academy master was<br />
relegated to teaching the Women’s Section, which<br />
was seen as a punishment – by administrators,<br />
not necessarily by Fattori himself. In A Girl<br />
Sewing, viewers can revel in the figure’s bare feet<br />
– women had conquered the domestic sphere<br />
many centuries earlier, but finally, they were<br />
allowed to feel at home there.<br />
Above: Installation shot of<br />
Towards Modernity. Banca<br />
d’Italia Collection, Florence.<br />
Photos courtesy of Florence’s<br />
Banca d’Italia<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 29
Left: Felice Casorati’s Clelia (1937) and Marisa<br />
Mori’s Study of a Nude (1928).<br />
Below: Nella Marchesini’s Sleeping Woman<br />
(c. 1920)<br />
The nudes in the room<br />
It is impossible to explore art by women in<br />
twentieth-century Italy without wandering<br />
through Felice Casorati’s somewhat eerie<br />
moonscape. His desexualised, almost robotic<br />
nude on show evidences a huge change from<br />
more traditional portrayals of female nudes in<br />
Italy. This 1937 canvas is displayed in comparison<br />
with a softer but still modern nude, created in 1928,<br />
by his former student Marisa Mori, a Florentine<br />
painter best known for her ‘art affairs’ with shortlived<br />
Futurism and its second iteration Areal<br />
Painting – in a world where flight was new and<br />
speed a path to follow. Casorati’s Scuola Libera<br />
di Pittura in Turin – set up in 1927, largely thanks<br />
to Gualino’s funding – was quite the opposite<br />
of speed, however. In the exhibition catalogue,<br />
Sgarbozza describes Casorati’s work, “His cold,<br />
suspended atmospheres in elementary and<br />
geometrical settings, along with his intellectual<br />
rigour, present a modernity that is a far cry from<br />
the changeability of the Impressionists and the<br />
dynamism of the Futurists.” In person,<br />
Anna points to what is arguably the most<br />
exciting nude in the room. It is by Nella<br />
Marchesini – Casorati’s first pupil, who was<br />
eventually asked to manage the school for a<br />
period, along with fellow-artist Lalla Romano.<br />
Displayed on a table at eye-level, Marchesini’s<br />
bold nude, from 1928, was a practice piece. “She<br />
was exercising her hand,” Villari explains,<br />
“She painted on both sides, because she was<br />
saving on materials. The nude on the front recalls<br />
Mantegna’s Dead Christ [in Milan’s Pinacoteca<br />
di Brera] and the woman on the verso is a nod<br />
30 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Above and right: Woman Sitting on the Ground<br />
(1928). Banca d’Italia Collection, Florence.<br />
Photos courtesy of Florence’s Banca d’Italia<br />
to Giorgione’s Tempest.” Interestingly, the flipside<br />
is painted upside-down and made more<br />
easily viewable thanks to a large mirror set on<br />
the table. It makes for a simple but ingenious<br />
solution, in a show where, overall, the works fit<br />
well in their space.<br />
Marchesini achieved considerable acclaim at<br />
the Venice Biennale and Rome’s Quadriennale<br />
during her time and, like many women painters<br />
of her day, she modelled for other artists. In the<br />
words of her painter friend Enrico Paulucci, “She<br />
looks like she just stepped out of a Piero della<br />
Francesca panel”. As far as her own reflections<br />
on life and painting are concerned, Marchesini<br />
writes, “Art is the polar star, one of constant<br />
devotion, defended from the burdens of everyday<br />
life, and in harmony with our lives’ affections.”<br />
LINDA FALCONE<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 31
‘Palace Women’<br />
Find Common Ground<br />
Photographers and Crafters Tribute<br />
Historic Women in Tuscany<br />
32 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
What does Eleonora Toledo, a Spanish-born<br />
WDuchess with eleven children, have in common<br />
Wwith an ex-patriot poet who called her sole son<br />
W‘Pen’, a name referencing the instrument both<br />
WBrownings loved best? What does Cosimo I’s<br />
Wfavourite daughter, Isabella – who until very<br />
Wrecently was thought to have been murdered in<br />
Wbed by her jealous husband – have in common<br />
with Elizabeth Brewster Hildebrand, who lived<br />
and painted in idyllic San Francesco di Paola,<br />
some five centuries later? What common ground<br />
is shared by seventeenth-century French Princess<br />
Cristina di Lorena – who built a paradise of sorts<br />
at Villa La Petraia – and British writer and pacifist<br />
Vernon Lee, who sought to escape an outbreak<br />
of cholera, at the turn of the last century, by<br />
settling at Il Palmerino, the country house where<br />
the ‘Palace Women’ exhibition was featured in the<br />
autumn of <strong>2023</strong>?<br />
This small-scale show, forming part of the<br />
‘Palace Women’ programme, organised by the<br />
British Institute of Florence, Calliope Arts and<br />
Il Palmerino, was imagined for this Florentine<br />
colonica once frequented by the twentiethcentury’s<br />
sharpest minds, including Oscar Wilde,<br />
Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf. The show<br />
featured photographs and handmade objects by<br />
modern-day crafters inspired by the female icons<br />
who lived and worked in the monumental venues<br />
of Cerreto Guidi, Villa La Petraia, Villa La Quiete,<br />
San Francesco di Paola, Palazzo Pitti and Poggio<br />
Imperiale.<br />
Palace Women’s ‘common ground’ is that all of<br />
the historic women featured were ‘creators of<br />
culture’, in a world where moveable property –<br />
not necessarily property itself – formed part of<br />
women’s realm of power. Grand Duchess Vittoria<br />
della Rovere is one of the most significant<br />
examples. A Medici by birth and by marriage,<br />
she was betrothed while still in the cradle, as<br />
heir to the coveted Duchy of Urbino. However, in<br />
an easily anticipated twist of history, Ferdinando<br />
II’s marriage to the twelve-year-old girl did not<br />
enable her land to be annexed to the Tuscan<br />
Opposite page: Medici Villa La Petraia by Carmen Cardellicchio.<br />
Above: Workshop Students by Viola Parretti<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 33
Below, from left to right: Negar<br />
Azhar Azari by Olga Makarova;<br />
Kirstie Mathieson by Valentina<br />
Bellini; Brenda Luize Roepke<br />
by Carmen Cardellicchio, Ayako<br />
Nakamori by Valentina Bellini.<br />
All photos courtesy of Gruppo<br />
Fotografico Il Cupolone and<br />
Calliope Arts Archive<br />
Grand Duchy. Before the cousins tied the knot,<br />
Vittoria’s properties were swooped up by the Papal<br />
powers, because a girl heir made manoeuvring of<br />
this sort easy. But the young Vittoria did keep her<br />
‘moveable properties’, which included pictures by<br />
Titian and Rafael, now at the Pitti Palace. Perhaps<br />
posterity is lucky that her marriage ended up being<br />
unhappy, because the ‘separate life’ she led from<br />
her paedophilic husband engendered one of the<br />
earliest ‘colonies’ devoted to women’s creativity, up<br />
at Poggio Imperiale. While there, Vittoria sought out<br />
talented women in the fields of painting, literature,<br />
embroidery, music and more. In a word, she<br />
provided women painters, poets and composers<br />
with training, as well as the commissions they<br />
needed to build their own legacies.<br />
Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici, raised by her<br />
grandmother Vittoria, was also a final heir – this<br />
time of the Medici clan. The value of moveable<br />
property and the need to carve out one’s place in<br />
the future were two of her grandmother’s most<br />
valuable lessons. As an adult, Anna Maria Luisa<br />
conceived and signed the famous ‘Family Pact’,<br />
which barred Medici property from ever leaving<br />
Florence, independent of the ruling families that<br />
took over the territory through the centuries.<br />
For this genius gesture, locals and travellers are<br />
eternally grateful. Florence is Florence thanks to<br />
her foresight.<br />
Considering how objects of cultural value were<br />
paramount to these women’s stories, was it not<br />
fitting to conceive grants for artisans using their<br />
palazzi as a starting point? Three grants were<br />
awarded to members of Florence’s international<br />
artisans’ community for this purpose. The ‘Intreccio<br />
Creativo’ collective combined wood, cord, fabric,<br />
grès and watercolour woodblock prints to create<br />
an installation called Tablescape, worthy of<br />
Elizabeth Browning’s guests at Casa Guidi; Negar<br />
Azhar Azari, a Florentine artist of Persian descent,<br />
created a ring and pendant inspired by the many<br />
windows of Poggio Imperiale’s façade. Brenda<br />
Luize Roepke designed jewellery fit for Cristina di<br />
Lorena, in white gold and diamonds. Our student<br />
grant project, which funded hands-on workshops<br />
at the Liceo Artistico Statale di Porta Romana e<br />
Sesto Fiorentino, took inspiration from the figure<br />
of Eleonora di Toledo, as students designed<br />
‘wallpaper’ for the Grand Duchess’s chambers, reinventing<br />
the pomegranate motif embroidered<br />
on several of Eleonora’s most memorable gowns.<br />
Another noteworthy part of the ‘Palace<br />
Women’ programme involved a grant awarded<br />
to the amateur photography association Gruppo<br />
34 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Fotografico Il Cupolone, whereby thirteen women<br />
photographers spent a month visiting key villas<br />
and palaces whose identity is closely linked to<br />
women’s history. For instance, photographers<br />
Daniela Giampa and Sabina Bernacchini were<br />
commissioned to immortalise scenes from the<br />
former convent of San Francesco di Paola, where<br />
German sculptor Adolf Von Hildebrand educated<br />
his five daughters (and one son) in an early version<br />
of what we’d now call ‘home schooling’. Of course,<br />
most non-villa homes do not have the likes of<br />
Richard and Cosima Wagner to supper, invite Clara<br />
Schumann or Henry James for tea, or befriend<br />
the likes of Helen Gladstone, the British Prime<br />
Minister’s daughter. Von Hildebrand’s daughters<br />
made the most of their unique education and<br />
were artistically inclined: Irene Georgii Hildebrand<br />
became a sculptor, whilst Eva and Lisl (Elizabeth<br />
Hildebrand Brewster) were painters.<br />
Photographer Paola Curradi captured corners<br />
of Villa La Quiete, where Anna Maria Luisa de’<br />
Medici chose to live towards the end of her life, as<br />
part of the Montalve Community, a laic sisterhood,<br />
and one of the earliest examples of non-ordained<br />
communities for educated women. Their Ricordi,<br />
or log books, date from the congregation’s<br />
founding in 1650 to the late 1980s and represent a<br />
‘quiet’ but extremely important page in women’s<br />
history. These volumes contain intimate snippets<br />
of life from Medici family visits, including stories<br />
of Anna Maria Luisa playing innocent jokes on<br />
the Montalve sisters. According to one note, she<br />
brings them chocolate – a New World delicacy,<br />
the likes of which they had likely never seen.<br />
The stories ‘brought back’ by the project’s<br />
photographers are far too numerous to explore<br />
here, but each picture they authored has its own<br />
story to tell – from Curradi’s Red-walled Pharmacy<br />
at Villa La Quiete, to Bernacchini’s Deep-blue<br />
Bedroom, where Rosa Vercellana, King Vittorio<br />
Emanuele II’s ‘middle-class’ morganatic wife, slept<br />
at La Petraia,. The project ‘Palace Women’, and the<br />
pictures it engendered, are like seeds for future<br />
conversations on the women of Tuscany and how<br />
their legacy takes root and blooms in our own<br />
lives today.<br />
LINDA FALCONE<br />
The ‘Palace Women’ project was made possible<br />
with the generous support of Alice Vogler, Donna<br />
Malin, Margie MacKinnon and Wayne McArdle,<br />
with the support of the Municipality of Florence,<br />
‘Enjoy Respect and Feel Florence’, the FCS and<br />
Italy’s Ministry of Culture.<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 35
“5,000 Negatives”<br />
Safeguarding the Wulz sisters’ legacy at FAF<br />
Above: The digitalisation process of ‘5,000 Negatives’ at Art Defender, October <strong>2023</strong><br />
36 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Like many women artists of centuries<br />
past, the Wulz sisters, Wanda (1903-1984)<br />
and Marion (1905-1993), followed in their<br />
grandfather and fathers’ footsteps (photographers<br />
Giuseppe and Carlo Wulz, respectively). Both girls<br />
showed precocious talent behind the camera<br />
lens, at a time when photography was still largely<br />
considered a craft, not an art form in its own<br />
right. Often represented as twins, Wanda and<br />
Marion were Carlo’s models from the cradle<br />
onwards. When his photo-ready babies grew<br />
into intriguing young women, Wanda and Marion<br />
became two of Carlo’s Three Graces. To say the<br />
sisters were photogenic is an understatement.<br />
In their household, photography was a game, a<br />
constant switching of costumes and scenes, and<br />
they had several ‘life-changing’ opportunities to<br />
stand behind the camera rather than in front of it.<br />
Wanda is celebrated as a top exponent of<br />
futurist photography, for her experimental flair<br />
and daring overlays, like the ultra-famous Cat and<br />
I. Marion, who has become a centre of attention<br />
only recently, was interested in photo reportage,<br />
capturing historic WWII liberation scenes from<br />
the window of the Wulzs’ flat, in the manner of<br />
Elizabeth Browning and Casa Guidi Windows.<br />
Although Marion produced photography rather<br />
than poetry, her historical images were poetic,<br />
in their own way. When the sisters took over the<br />
family’s successful photography studio in Trieste<br />
in 1928, they continued the family’s portraiture<br />
business, adding to an exceptional archive that<br />
features top figures of their day, from celebrity<br />
athletes and entertainers, to nobility and top<br />
exponents of fashion and culture.<br />
October <strong>2023</strong> marked the start of a new<br />
collaborative project called ‘5,000 Negatives’,<br />
aimed at safeguarding the sisters’ legacy, through<br />
the creation of an inventory and the restoration,<br />
digitalisation and improved archive accessibility<br />
of the Wulz Photographic Studio Archive of<br />
Trieste, a treasure trove of negatives, prints and<br />
archival documentation acquired by Fondazione<br />
Alinari per la Fotografia (FAF) in 1986. This project,<br />
developed by FAF, is made possible thanks to a<br />
grant from Fondazione CR Firenze and Calliope<br />
Arts Foundation.<br />
In a recent interview, FAF Director Claudia<br />
Baroncini shares the project’s raison d’être.<br />
“Photographic archives need to be digitised, in<br />
order to preserve captured images, which are<br />
extremely fragile. We need to remember that<br />
images can actually disappear. They can vanish!<br />
Our ambition is to preserve them forever. On<br />
another level, digitalisation is important because<br />
it allows for accessibility. Let’s face it, negatives<br />
are not immediately understandable. They<br />
are not readable the way prints are. So on the<br />
one hand, digitalisation allows us to faithfully<br />
reproduce an object – in this case ‘a negative’ –<br />
using technology.<br />
But enjoyment is also a critical factor when it<br />
comes to preserving culture. Therefore, during<br />
the digitalisation process, we transform the<br />
negative into its positive image – otherwise, all<br />
you would see of the collection are ‘little black<br />
stamps’. Cultural preservation is not just about<br />
preserving an object, it involves making that<br />
object available to the public – and not just to a<br />
circle of specialists. This transferral respects and<br />
reflects the negatives’ original use. Historically,<br />
the purpose of a negative was to be printed in<br />
the positive. Analysis and sharing of the positives<br />
we acquire is phase two of this project.”<br />
Spring / Summer <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 37
Coincidently, an all-woman team is involved<br />
in this multi-faceted endeavour and Restoration<br />
Conversations had the opportunity to talk with<br />
two of its players, in addition to Dr Baroncini. For<br />
several months, Pamela Ferrari, head of digital<br />
acquisitions at the Florence-based company<br />
Centrica, set up ‘shop’ at Art Defender, a vast,<br />
high-security art vault in Calenzano, where a<br />
plethora of Florence museums and institutions,<br />
including FAF, hold their most precious instorage<br />
works. Ferrari describes her work in<br />
lay terms, “We created a photographic set up<br />
on site, fitted with a 100-megapixel camera to<br />
acquire 5,200 Wulz negatives, through retroillumination<br />
using a lit panel.”<br />
Right. The reasoning behind the project and<br />
the basics of its execution sounded simple<br />
enough so far. We were ready to speak with<br />
photography restorer Eugenia Di Rocco, and<br />
zero in on what she and the ‘5,000 negatives’<br />
team have learned about the Wulz’s process.<br />
Aboe: Wanda and Marion Wulz photographed as children by their father Carlo<br />
We know the Wulz sisters – particularly<br />
Wanda – frequently manipulated negatives<br />
to achieve ‘futuristic effects’ like movement,<br />
or used overlay with very successful<br />
results. Were the Wulzs pioneers as far as<br />
image editing is concerned?<br />
Eugenia di Rocco: The Wulz sisters worked<br />
largely with portraiture and heavily modified<br />
their photographs in the post-production phase.<br />
They were not the only photographers to do so,<br />
of course. For the whole of the 1900’s, prior to the<br />
advent of digital equipment, dry-plate negatives<br />
were altered by adding varnishes, temperas<br />
and graphite. The Wulzs would add or subtract<br />
elements to and from their images, applying cutout<br />
silhouettes in black or red paper to areas<br />
they wanted to cover. They would also ‘make<br />
38 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
up’ their sitters, so to speak, with a preparatory<br />
varnish, using either a greasy coloured impasto<br />
or a transparent solution. They would improve<br />
people’s skin, in tone and smoothness, by using<br />
these colouring agents, which addressed the<br />
negatives’ colour contrasts. Another option was<br />
for them to use a yellow, red or orange filter, on the<br />
negatives’ glass side. The sisters often marked up<br />
their negatives with a soft pencil – to cancel out<br />
wrinkles, improve a person’s profile, or eliminate<br />
puffy cheeks, baggy eyes or a double chin. Today,<br />
we use Photoshop digitally, but they did their work<br />
in the dark room. All of this intervention aimed to<br />
improve the ‘positive’ and make their clients happy.<br />
Could you describe what the negatives look<br />
like and tell us more about the kinds of<br />
materials the Wulz sisters used?<br />
EDR: In this restoration, we had to be very<br />
careful. To the non-expert eye, the patina on the<br />
Wulzs’ negatives could be confused with a dirt<br />
layer. Again, through analysis, we learned how<br />
they developed a masking system for purposes<br />
of contrast, on the glass support side. Most of<br />
the collection’s objects are dry-plate negatives,<br />
which differ from an earlier technique, namely<br />
the collodion wet-plate process. With dry-plate<br />
negatives image is created using gelatine and<br />
silver salts on glass. Dry-plate negatives are<br />
Above, left: Wanda and<br />
Marion Wulz pictured with a<br />
friend while leafing through a<br />
book (c. 1920), photo by Carlo<br />
Wulz<br />
Top right: Wanda Wulz,<br />
Marion Wulz and Bianca<br />
Baldussi as the Three Graces<br />
(c.1920), photo by Carlo Wulz<br />
Above, right: Portrait of<br />
Wanda Wulz at the mirror<br />
(c. 1950), photo by Marion<br />
Wulz<br />
All photos © Archivi Alinari,<br />
Florence<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 39
larger than film negatives, which came later. They<br />
are typically postcard size, and the Wulz sisters<br />
used three sizes [9 x 12 cm, 10 x 15 cm and 13 x<br />
18]. These plates were industrially produced and<br />
sold in standard dimensions. The technique’s<br />
heyday was from 1880 to 1950, but it continued<br />
to be used until the 1970’s. Despite being heavy,<br />
inconvenient and fragile, photographers were<br />
slow to give up the dry-plate technique because<br />
of the high quality images it rendered.<br />
Can you tell us about the restoration<br />
process? How do the Wulzs’ materials affect<br />
your work today?<br />
EDR: I restored the collection’s broken negatives<br />
by reassembling their glass plates, worked on<br />
those that were bent – to correct image distortion<br />
– and revisited negatives that had been poorly<br />
restored in the past. Fortunately, the Wulz Archive<br />
is in good condition, so most of my work involved<br />
cleaning. Because of their patinas, it was mostly<br />
a ‘dry clean’ using soft brushes, controlled air jets<br />
and microfiber cloth. All the products we use,<br />
including the paper in which the dry plates are<br />
packed and stored, have to be verified as being<br />
compatible with photographic materials. I have<br />
a degree in Mathematics and Physical Sciences,<br />
but my training is mostly chemical. Photographic<br />
restoration is largely a question of chemistry.<br />
40 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Opposite page: Trieste: Yugoslavian tank with<br />
some partisans in Via Dante (2 May 1945), photo<br />
by Marion Wulz © Archivi Alinari, Florence<br />
Left: First procession dedicated to Corpus Christi<br />
after the war, in Trieste. The photograph, taken<br />
from above, frames the intersection of Via<br />
Dante and Corso Italia (20 June 1946), photo<br />
by Marion Wulz; Marion and Wanda Wulz with<br />
Bianca Baldussi (c. 1920), photo by Carlo Wulz<br />
All photos © Archivi Alinari, Florence<br />
Why did you decide to become a photography<br />
conservator?<br />
EDR: I have always been interested in photographic<br />
manipulation of the negative and in the manual<br />
skills involved. Despite its inherent science, this<br />
is a very emotional job, and I find it very exciting,<br />
independent of the importance attributed to<br />
a certain photographer. Pictures are a window<br />
onto the past, and whoever found themselves<br />
behind a camera lens was actually ‘there’, living<br />
that moment. That person’s presence can be felt,<br />
along with the image they are recording. I am<br />
very happy when I work. Of course, there are<br />
times when fear or doubt edges its way into my<br />
mind, but I have a team to turn to – from those in<br />
the dark room with me, to the experts working to<br />
acquire the image digitally, and even the scholars<br />
and administrators at Fondazione Alinari per la<br />
Fotografia. Photographs are dear to people. They<br />
encapsulate our affections and our history. They<br />
bear witness to our experiences, and all those<br />
factors are what make this project pure joy.<br />
LINDA FALCONE<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 41
Time travel at<br />
Florence’s Opificio<br />
Artist Maria Luisa Raggi and the restoration of art on paper<br />
Above: Senior paper conservator Simona Calza and Linda Falcone watch the restoration process<br />
The Opificio delle Pietre Dure is a fortress<br />
palace that now protects nothing but<br />
artwork. Its conservators restore canvas<br />
and panel paintings, polychrome wood statuary,<br />
photography and art objects in paper, parchment<br />
and leather. I have visited its paintings section<br />
on several occasions over the past 15 years, and<br />
never leave without remembering what intrepid<br />
Zen warriors conservators are. Who else has the<br />
guts to give new gold to Giotto? A body like me<br />
would get goose bumps about it, but in their<br />
world, the only hair that stands on end is that of<br />
their wild boar brushes. I’ve seen them remove<br />
the weight of the 1966 flood from Vasari’s Last<br />
Supper and watched them restore Da Vinci’s<br />
Adoration of the Magi, while laying belly-down on<br />
a mattress suspended above the work, to better<br />
reach its mid-section. In their space, a Jackson<br />
Pollock is made to wait its turn alongside the likes<br />
of Beato Angelico, because even Action Painting<br />
has to turn passive prior to Opificio healing.<br />
42 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Above: A Maria Luisa Raggi<br />
tempera from the Museo Civico<br />
di Prato, under restoration<br />
The mission in mind, for our June 13 Restoration<br />
Conversations broadcast on site, had little to do<br />
with grand religious themes or the greatest alltime<br />
revolution in painting. We were there, in<br />
search of a woman artist who created miniatures<br />
on paper, and I was fresh from a phone call with<br />
Roman art historian and university professor<br />
Consuelo Lollobrigida, who provided generous<br />
clues to understanding Maria Luisa [Luigia] Raggi<br />
(1742-1813). Since 2016, the Opificio has restored<br />
36 works by Raggi, of the over 80 attributed<br />
to her – including many by Consuelo – who<br />
chanced upon several works she recognised<br />
as Raggi’s at an antique dealer’s. Thanks to that<br />
fortuitous encounter, Raggi met her champion,<br />
and Consuelo published the artist’s seminal<br />
monograph, Maria Luigia Raggi. Il Capriccio<br />
Paesaggistico tra Arcadia e Grand Tour, in 2012.<br />
The artist once noted as ‘eighteenth-century<br />
landscape artist’, in a number of institutional<br />
collections, now has a name and a story.<br />
Consuelo recounts the vicissitudes of this<br />
Genovese nun who escaped from her convent<br />
to live in Rome with a sympathetic uncle, where<br />
she spent several years painting scenes strewn<br />
with ruins for Grand Tour travellers. It is likely she<br />
worked in a tiny workshop in vicolo Cacciabove,<br />
near Palazzo Raggi, and that her upper-echelon<br />
uncle Ferdinando’s generous gifts to the local<br />
parish dissuaded its priest from reporting her<br />
presence in the neighbourhood, when conducting<br />
the annual ‘census of souls’ required of him by<br />
the Catholic church.<br />
“Maria Luisa Raggi is a simple figure, at first<br />
glance,” Lollobrigida says, “She repeatedly paints<br />
a series of similar landscapes and capprici,<br />
for the whole of her career, reproducing the<br />
landscape as she saw it. These joy-filled scenes<br />
are brimming with life, but they also express her<br />
spiritual perspectives; they are works of light and<br />
illustrate the quest for freedom – even mental<br />
freedom. Through her landscapes, this cloistered<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 43
Top: A pentimento by Il Volteranno from a Roberto<br />
Longhi Foundation drawing<br />
Above: Leticia Montalbano and Alessia Bianchi examine<br />
drawings under restoration<br />
Turchine nun – who, in her youth, was forced into<br />
one of the strictest cloistered orders of all time –<br />
travels through the ‘open spaces’ of her dreams.<br />
To use a term from modern-day psychology, Maria<br />
Luisa Raggi’s artworks were a form evasion.”<br />
It was with those words in mind that the RC<br />
crew alit upon the Opificio delle Pietre Dure.<br />
Once a Medici workshop for inlaid semi-precious<br />
stone work or mosaico fiorentino, the Opificio<br />
was founded in 1588 by Grand Duke Ferdinando I.<br />
It took on the mantel of its modern-day vocation,<br />
as one of the top three restoration laboratories in<br />
the world, after being used as an ‘emergency room<br />
for art victims’ of the 1966 flood, as desperate city<br />
administrators sought out a large space in which<br />
to collect and protect the over 14,000 artworks<br />
damaged by 600,000 tons of rubble and mud that<br />
invaded the city, with the Arno’s historic flooding<br />
on November 4. The flood was like no siege the<br />
city had ever seen.<br />
Today, the Opificio, which operates under the<br />
Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage, is also<br />
a Higher Education Research Centre whose<br />
programme lasts five years. Headed by director<br />
and senior conservator Letizia Montalbano, it<br />
also involves a year-and-a-half thesis project,<br />
post course. Three of Montalbano’s five student<br />
restorers were on site for the broadcast – all<br />
44 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
of them young women, with wise hands and<br />
daunting problems to solve.<br />
We are led through their workstations by<br />
senior paper conservator Simona Calza and, on<br />
some level, it is an exercise in time travel. One<br />
student, Sabrina, grinds yellow pigment into<br />
egg yolks, according to a fourteenth-century<br />
recipe by painter Cennino Cennini, because she<br />
needs to recreate a binding agent similar to the<br />
one used on the tempera work she is restoring,<br />
which once served as a stone mosaic pattern for<br />
a wardrobe door. Her peer Alessia is conducting<br />
microscopic analysis – alongside Dr Montalbano.<br />
They examine charcoal, red-chalk and ink<br />
preparatory drawings by renowned fresco artist<br />
Baldassarre Franceschini, from the Church of<br />
Santissima Annunziata and Fondazione Roberto<br />
Longhi. The artist’s acidic, iron-based ink is eating<br />
holes through the 370-year-old paper. Therein lies<br />
Alessia’s dilemma.<br />
Nearby, a third student restorer, Giorgia, is<br />
grappling with a spine-less codex from the early<br />
Above: Mixing pigments for the restoration of a<br />
Florentine mosaic pattern at the Opificio delle<br />
Pietre Dure (below)<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 45
Above: A post-grad student<br />
restores codex from<br />
Florence’s National Library<br />
1300s, in parchment – the support used for writing<br />
in Europe before the arrival of paper. Parchment,<br />
you’ll remember, is made from animal skin, not<br />
plant fibres, hence its recognisable thickness.<br />
“She is unsure whether these pages were<br />
made from a lamb or an adult sheep, but its fur<br />
follicles are still visible, despite the parchment’s<br />
smoothness,” Calza explains. “We chose to show<br />
you these choir-book pages which contain Laude,<br />
or sung praises, honouring history’s holy women.<br />
This codex is from Florence’s National Library<br />
and was once part of Santa Spirito’s collection,”<br />
Calza adds. “Rather than in Latin, it was written<br />
in ‘the vulgar tongue’, since it was produced not<br />
long after Dante made his revolutionary decision<br />
to write his Divina Commedia in the volgare [the<br />
Florentine dialect that later became the national<br />
language of Italy.]”<br />
During our journey through the centuries, this<br />
all-woman team of experts and students have one<br />
challenge in common: paper and parchment are<br />
among the most delicate artworks ever produced.<br />
46 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Their extreme reactivity is culprit. Temperature<br />
changes, humidity and the lack of a ground layer,<br />
as with painting, makes organic paper highly<br />
susceptible to cupping and cracking.<br />
Finally, we reach Maria Luisa Raggi’s 21<br />
temperas from the Museo Civico di Prato, set out<br />
on a high table. Their attributions are new, from<br />
2012. The growing number of Raggi attributions<br />
is largely thanks to Lollobrigida’s copious<br />
research. “The grand tour was fashionable in<br />
Raggi’s time and noble persons at the time would<br />
start their Grand Tour of the Mediterranean in<br />
Rome, before travelling further, even as far as the<br />
northern shores of Africa,” Calza explains. “They<br />
would immerse themselves in the landscape of<br />
Rome, fascinated by its wealth of ruins. Using<br />
very immediate brush stokes, Raggi was able<br />
to create a sense of gentleness, but also reality,<br />
because this is probably how people lived at<br />
the time, merging with nature, which was very<br />
‘Arcadian’, in that they depict that idyllic world<br />
known as ‘Arcadia’, that painters and poets<br />
sought to recreate in their works.”<br />
It is useful to note that Raggi was painting during<br />
the onset of the Industrial Revolution, followed<br />
by the French Revolution, when ancient ways of<br />
life began to give way to the modern world. Her<br />
luminous tempera works are reminiscent of an<br />
era that was no more, even at the time she was<br />
painting it. “Raggi depicts pastoral and bathing<br />
scenes and landscapes reminiscent of the Latin<br />
poets,” Calza notes. “They capture everyday<br />
life and the passing of seasons. Her figures are<br />
working the land, basking in the summer sun,<br />
or busy with the harvest. She paints an ancient<br />
Roman soldier gazing a pond, a peasant leaning<br />
on his staff, a woman bitten by a snake – who<br />
appears to be dancing, but is actually running.<br />
In the distance, her scenes continue down<br />
meandering roads, and the more we look, the<br />
more we find new stories to tell.”<br />
For me, Raggi’s whimsical scenes exude a degree<br />
of whimsy and delight that defies their size. But<br />
for everyone, I believe Calza’s last comment is<br />
indicative of the whole Opificio experience: the<br />
more we look, the more we find stories to tell –<br />
new and old. No matter their age these art-based<br />
tales and the works they engendered are forever<br />
striving to stand the tests of time.<br />
LINDA FALCONE<br />
Above: Postgrad student<br />
Sabrina mixes pigment<br />
All photos by Bunker Film,<br />
Calliope Arts Archive<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 47
Above: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Inclination, after restoration, Casa Buonarroti Museum, ph. O. Caruso; Digital reconstruction via scientific research, ph M.<br />
Chimenti and Culturanuova, from a photo by O. Caruso<br />
48 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
The Big Reveal<br />
Florence exhibition Artemisia in the Museum of Michelangelo<br />
Artemisia’s nude Allegory of Inclination was revealed after a year-long<br />
restoration, in the show Artemisia in the Museum of Michelangelo at Florence’s<br />
Casa Buonarroti. This international endeavour was designed to spotlight the<br />
painter’s prolific Florentine period and the iconic women-on-canvas that gave<br />
Artemisia her start. A 400-year-old fingerprint, a newly visible bellybutton, the<br />
original contours of Artemisia Gentileschi’s censored painting… and more.<br />
A VIRTUAL QUEST TO UNCOVER<br />
ARTEMISIA’S ORIGINAL<br />
Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Inclination,<br />
the keynote artwork at the conservationbased<br />
exhibition Artemisia in the Museum of<br />
Michelangelo (27 September to 8 January 2024)<br />
held at Casa Buonarroti in Florence, Italy – was<br />
rendered more beguiling by the censoring of<br />
the original nude allegorical figure, nearly 50<br />
years after she painted it, by order of Leonardo<br />
Buonarroti a descendent of Michelangelo. The<br />
addition of heavy swirling veils to cover the nudity<br />
was intended to preserve the modesty of the<br />
female inhabitants of the house. “The possibility<br />
of ‘unveiling’ this figure virtually, revealing the<br />
image originally painted by Artemisia turned<br />
an ‘ordinary’ restoration into a quest to discover<br />
the woman behind the veils,” explains Wayne<br />
McArdle, co-founder of the project’s co-sponsor<br />
Calliope Arts, in partnership with English art<br />
collector and philanthropist Christian Levett.<br />
THE BIG QUESTION<br />
Why remove the veils virtually, not physically?<br />
“The Artemisia UpClose project – which brought<br />
together Italian, American, Canadian and British<br />
philanthropists, curators, and conservation<br />
experts – was conceived knowing that the<br />
censoring cover-up would not be removed<br />
for two reasons,” explains head conservator<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 49
Elizabeth Wicks. “First, the removal of the thick<br />
layers of oil paint applied by Il Volterrano less<br />
than five decades after the original could put<br />
Artemisia’s delicate glazes just underneath<br />
the over-paint at risk. Second, the veils were<br />
applied by an important late Baroque artist<br />
and are now part of the painting’s history.<br />
Restoration scientists probed the painting at<br />
sixteen depths, nanometer by nanometer. The<br />
reflectograph penetrated the upper drapery,<br />
and we could see Artemisia’s pentimenti –<br />
the places in which she changed her mind. It<br />
took an x-ray to see through the white lead<br />
pigment covering the figure’s thighs – but, in<br />
the end, we got it: a science-based image of<br />
Artemisia’s original.”<br />
Top: Detail during cleaning in UV Fluorescence showing dark repaints on flesh<br />
Above: Installation view of the exhibition<br />
THE REVEAL<br />
Research and chemical analysis allowed<br />
Artemisia UpClose team members to identify<br />
Artemisia’s pigments and painting technique.<br />
Conservators learned, for instance, that she was<br />
sparing with her precious lapis lazuli pigment.<br />
It was more costly than gold at the time, and<br />
Artemisia used very little of it on the parts of the<br />
blue sky which would later be covered by the<br />
architectural framework of the Casa Buonarroti<br />
gallery ceiling. Removal of centuries of grime<br />
and repainting revealed the figure’s navel – not<br />
visible previously – and on the figure’s calf,<br />
Wicks discovered a fingerprint dating back to<br />
the painting’s creation “The fingerprint was<br />
made when the original paint was wet, and it<br />
is highly likely that of Artemisia herself.” Before<br />
completing work on the painted surface, a full<br />
structural conservation of the painting was<br />
carried out.<br />
Because the painting has been displayed<br />
‘belly-down’ on the ceiling since its creation<br />
50 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
four centuries ago, the restoration involved<br />
consolidation of the paint layers, improving<br />
both the surface distortions and those of<br />
the canvas, the application of a double set of<br />
canvas strips to the perimeter of the original<br />
canvas and the substitution of the strainer with<br />
an expandable stretcher, which allowed for<br />
controlled tension of the canvas.<br />
A HEROINE AMONG HEROINES<br />
The Florence exhibition puts Artemisia at ‘eye<br />
level’, as visitors have the opportunity to see<br />
Artemisia’s powerful women up-close, for the<br />
first time. “Throughout history, artists have<br />
been not only the gatekeepers but also the<br />
creators of culture,” explains the project’s cosponsor,<br />
Christian Levett, a British collector and<br />
founder of the Femmes Artistes du Musée de<br />
Mougins (Spring 2024) and the Levett Collection<br />
house-gallery in Florence, which houses<br />
artworks by the leading exponents of Abstract<br />
Expressionism. “This was true of Artemisia in<br />
her day, when she began to put heroines at the<br />
centre of her canvases. What is special about<br />
Artemisia is that she continues to be a driving<br />
force for culture today, and this exhibition and<br />
restoration reveal the abilities that complement<br />
her iconic personality.” In Florence, Artemisia<br />
found herself within the social circle and<br />
influence of the poet Michelangelo the Younger.<br />
Here, she would become the first woman painter<br />
to be admitted to the Accademia delle Arti del<br />
Disegno, make the acquaintance of Galileo<br />
Galilei and earn commissions from the upper<br />
echelons of Florentine society, including Grand<br />
Duke Cosimo II. Particularly worthy of note<br />
is Artemisia’s Penitent Mary Magdalene, from<br />
the Palatine Gallery (Uffizi Galleries), recently<br />
restored at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure.<br />
Above: X-ray image of Artemisia’s Allegory of Inclination by Teobaldo Pasquali<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 51
THE HEART OF THE EXHIBITION<br />
‘Artemisia in the Museum of Michelangelo’, curated<br />
by museum director Alessandro Cecchi and<br />
designed by Massimo Chimenti of Culturanuova,<br />
was presented in three rooms on the ground<br />
floor of Casa Buonarroti. “That singular Allegory<br />
of Inclination painted in 1616, as a commission<br />
from Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger,<br />
symbolically launched a series of celebratory<br />
images hailing the virtues of Michelangelo<br />
Buonarroti – the ‘divine’ artist and poet on the<br />
ceiling of the Gallery in the family home is at the<br />
heart of this exhibition dedicated to Artemisia<br />
Gentileschi and her time in Florence,” explains<br />
Cristina Acidini, president of the Casa Buonarroti<br />
Foundation. “We hope Artemisia UpClose will<br />
represent the first in a long series for the recovery<br />
of the paintings in the Casa Buonarroti Gallery<br />
and its adjoining seventeenth-century rooms,”<br />
adds exhibition curator and museum director<br />
Alessandro Cecchi. “The Allegory of Inclination,<br />
Artemisia’s first recorded work commissioned in<br />
Florence, and the show, in general, explains how<br />
52 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Above: The Gallery ceiling at Casa Buonarroti Florence, photo by Serge Domingie<br />
this painting fits into the iconological programme<br />
conceived by Michelangelo the Younger for<br />
the Galleria di Casa Buonarroti, with the aim of<br />
representing the Renaissance master’s many<br />
extraordinary qualities.”<br />
The volume in English, Artemisia UpClose (The<br />
Florentine Press, September <strong>2023</strong>) which contains<br />
essays by world-renowned Artemisia scholars,<br />
including Mary D. Garrard and Elizabeth Cropper,<br />
will be accompanied by a series of publications in<br />
Italian entitled “Buonarrotiana” (2024) containing<br />
research by specialists on Artemisia and her<br />
era. “We want to make Artemisia Gentileschi a<br />
household name and to generate interest in<br />
her groundbreaking artworks. Artemisia is the<br />
‘gateway drug’ for early women artists,” says<br />
Margie MacKinnon project co-donor and cofounder<br />
of Calliope Arts. “Her backstory is so<br />
dramatic, her paintings so powerful and her<br />
accomplishments so impressive, people wonder,<br />
‘Why haven’t I heard of her before, and who are<br />
the other women artists I need to learn about?’”<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 53
Three Wishes<br />
An Exhibition Walk-about with Elizabeth Cropper<br />
Ever since reading Elizabeth Cropper’s<br />
description for the 2020 London National<br />
Gallery show on Artemisia, where she<br />
recounts her escape from Florence on horseback<br />
to avoid paying the Grand Duke for pigment for<br />
paintings he commissioned but never received,<br />
I’ve wanted to meet her – the scholar, not the<br />
fugitive rider. Dr Cropper’s presence in Florence,<br />
on the occasion of Artemisia in the Museum<br />
of Michelangelo, provided the chance to ‘talk<br />
Artemisia’ on camera. Her forty years studying<br />
the artist, from the archives to the museum<br />
spotlight, made our Restoration Conversation an<br />
unforgettable event.<br />
Looking back on it now, I felt like Aladdin<br />
entering the Cave of Wonders. Did Cropper<br />
accept ‘the gig’ knowing she’d be Genie to my<br />
Aladdin? Of course not, but she did grant at<br />
least three wishes by addressing fundamental<br />
questions Artemisia lovers the world over have<br />
often wondered about. The show, which made<br />
Artemisia-related archives available to the public,<br />
gave us the opportunity to explore archival<br />
sources and what they meant in the artist’s life.<br />
.<br />
Why was Artemisia paid so much more than<br />
the other allegory painters?<br />
Artemisia was the first to be signed up among the<br />
artists doing Casa Buonarroti’s allegorical scenes<br />
around the gallery ceiling’s edges. She received<br />
the first down payment. Buonarroti the Younger<br />
provided each one of them with a prepared<br />
canvas and some ultramarine. The ledger is<br />
another phenomenal treasure which allows us<br />
to see the actual words on the page, regarding<br />
payments to Artemisia, which begin in 1615. It<br />
involves double-entry bookkeeping, so it’s filled<br />
on both sides.<br />
We have to go back to the Accademia del<br />
Disegno to understand the reasons behind<br />
this choice. All the people called to paint the<br />
allegories, were the ‘giovani’ of master painters,<br />
‘il giovane di Allori’, for instance. Artemisia is<br />
nobody’s ‘giovane’ at this point. When she arrives<br />
in Florence, she is a fully-fledged painter who<br />
set herself up with her own studio, inside her<br />
house. She successfully gets this commission<br />
from Buonarroti who really wants to celebrate<br />
and recognise her. Giovane is almost a technical<br />
Right: Michelangelo Buonarroti’s plan for the<br />
gallery ceiling, photo by Olga Makarova<br />
54 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 55
Above: Artemisia in the<br />
Museum of Michelangelo<br />
exhibition<br />
term in the academy, and very often the role of<br />
‘il giovane’ was to execute allegorical images for<br />
Medici festivals or city celebrations. The literal<br />
translation for giovane is ‘young’ – some of these<br />
painters were close to her age [Artemisia was 20]<br />
– but it also meant they were subordinate to a<br />
master, and she was not subordinate to a master.<br />
That is not just a kind of psychological or social<br />
statement; it has to do with how much she should<br />
be paid. It was only right that a painter who was<br />
not anybody’s giovane should earn more.<br />
In Michelangelo the Younger’s account books,<br />
he mentions sending a servant, Francesco,<br />
to Artemisia’s home with a small amount of<br />
money, which she received while still in bed,<br />
after delivering her new-born child. Several<br />
decades ago, you were the first to study<br />
Artemisia as a mother. What can you tell us<br />
about that?<br />
EC: Many people had read this document but<br />
nobody thought, ‘This must mean there is a child<br />
somewhere’, so I rushed off to the Baptistery<br />
Archives and did indeed find the child – her<br />
third, little Cristofano, for whom Cristofano Allori<br />
stood as Godfather, and then, from there, I was<br />
able to go backwards and forwards and find more<br />
children which, for me, just increased my regard<br />
for Artemisia, and my sense of respect for how she<br />
managed to really push through the challenges<br />
she faced. She had five children that we know of.<br />
I found the baptized children, but Sheila Barker,<br />
another scholar, went and looked in the deaths<br />
archive and found another one, a little girl called<br />
Agnola, who was buried before she was baptised.<br />
We think that perhaps she was called Agnola for<br />
Michelangelo Buonarroti, whom Artemisia refers<br />
to as compare or Godfather. In one beautiful<br />
undated letter [also in the show], she refers to him<br />
as “Magnifico Compare”. Godfather is an elastic<br />
term. It may literally mean that you stood at the<br />
baptismal font and held the baby, but it can also<br />
mean a wider range of not biological family but<br />
social family – someone you feel very close to<br />
56 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Left: Buonarroti the Younger’s accounting book<br />
Photos by Mehdi Ben Temime<br />
and, obviously, in the absence of her own father,<br />
her own mother (and her husband’s not much<br />
help) Artemisia thinks of him as her compare.”<br />
Where did Artemisia get the theme for<br />
‘Inclination’?<br />
A darling sketch forming part of the Casa<br />
Buonarroti Archives is one of a whole series<br />
Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger made for<br />
the entire Gallery ceiling. It is fascinating to watch<br />
him change his mind and develop his ideas. You<br />
can see how many times he crosses things out.<br />
This isn’t a complete design, but you can see his<br />
handwriting where it says ‘Inclinazione’ and then,<br />
in different ink underneath it, he writes ‘Artemisia’.<br />
There’s an upside-down little stick figure with a<br />
star and a compass, but you can also see little<br />
things on the feet which are pulley-like objects<br />
one would use in shipping and military mechanics,<br />
which Buonarroti the Younger originally thought<br />
would be an interesting thing to put on the<br />
Inclination’s feet. This is one of the areas where<br />
I do feel their excitement with Galileo, who<br />
was friend and colleague to both Michelangelo<br />
the Younger and Artemisia. It comes into play<br />
because Galileo is not only deeply interested in<br />
magnetism, he’s also interested in mechanics and<br />
pulleys. In this case, these pulleys were seen as a<br />
mechanical ways to help the allegorical figure rise<br />
to the clouds. Her ascent was to be a mechanical<br />
process, but, visually and conceptually wasn’t a<br />
great idea!”<br />
The Big Reveal” and “Three Wishes” is adapted<br />
from the Artemisia UpClose Press Release and<br />
“Restoration Conversations with Elizabeth<br />
Cropper”. Both were originally released, in print<br />
and by broadcast, on September 27, <strong>2023</strong>, penned<br />
and conducted by Linda Falcone<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 57
Mission<br />
accomplished<br />
Courtyard snaps from the opening<br />
On September 27, <strong>2023</strong>, exactly one year after Artemisia’s Allegory of Inclination was<br />
removed from the Gallery ceiling at Casa Buonarroti, an intimate group of project<br />
participants and friends celebrate the inauguration of the show Artemisia in the<br />
Museum of Michelangelo in Casa Buonarroti’s courtyard.<br />
58 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Opposite page: ‘Artemisia UpClose’ sponsors Wayne<br />
McArdle, Margie MacKinnon and Christian Levett<br />
This page, starting clockwise from upper left: M.<br />
Chimenti, A. Cecchi, E. Wicks, M. MacKinnon, L.<br />
Falcone and W. McArdle; Conservator Elizabeth Wicks<br />
with finished painting; Casa Buonarroti president,<br />
director and curator C. Acidini, A. Cecchi and M.<br />
Marongiu; R-A MacKinnon and D. Salloum<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 59
60 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Opposite page: A happy group of friends<br />
celebrating the exhibition opening; Exhibition<br />
designer M. Chimenti discusses the show with<br />
sponsors, as Ruth-Ann MacKinnon and Carol<br />
Annett look on; FAF curator M. Sesti and CB<br />
curator E. Lombardi enjoy the evening;<br />
Upstairs in the Gallery; C. Marino moved by<br />
Artemisia’s Magdalene<br />
This page: E. Wicks, A. Vogler and C. Marino in<br />
the foreground; Restoration team members T.<br />
Pasquali and L. Conti; C. Levett and project<br />
coordinator L. Falcone; INO and CNR team of<br />
scientists, an all-woman team; FAF president<br />
G. Van Straten , the ADDFI’s G. Bonsanti and<br />
the Region’s C. Giachi standing in the<br />
foreground<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 61
Above: Lavinia Fontana, c. 1575-80, The Wedding Feast at Cana . Digital Images Courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Programme<br />
Right: Lavinia Fontana, 1577 Self-Portrait at the Virginal . Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, Roma. Photo by Mauro Coen<br />
62 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Trailblazer,<br />
Rule Breaker<br />
Lavinia Fontana at the National Gallery of Ireland<br />
Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614) was the first<br />
woman in Europe to become a professional<br />
painter. She grew up and painted for most<br />
of her life in the enlightened city of Renaissance<br />
Bologna, while her husband looked after the house<br />
and their eleven children. On a visit to Dublin<br />
earlier this year, Restoration Conversations had<br />
the pleasure of viewing the National Gallery of<br />
Ireland’s eye-opening exhibition of her works, in<br />
the company of curator Aoife Brady and restorer<br />
Maria Canavan, who offered their insights on the<br />
artist’s works, her artistic practice and the time in<br />
which she lived.<br />
One of the exciting aspects of mounting<br />
a major monographic exhibition is the<br />
opportunity to locate and bring together<br />
paintings from private collections, to<br />
advance the scholarship around the artist<br />
and possibly even make new attributions to<br />
add to her known body of work. Was this the<br />
case with the Fontana exhibition?<br />
AB: Yes. Myself and Babette Bohn, who is one of the<br />
leading specialists on the milieu of women artists<br />
of Bologna more broadly, made the attribution to<br />
Fontana of The Wedding Feast at Cana, a painting<br />
that appeared on the market in 2022. Nicholas Hall<br />
in New York brought it to my attention, and I saw<br />
it and it struck me immediately as characteristic<br />
of Fontana’s early style. And then I was able to<br />
identify some preparatory drawings by Vasari<br />
that Lavinia’s father also used in his own iteration<br />
of the Marriage Feast of Cana, which we now<br />
believe must have been in the family collection.<br />
And so, Davide Gasparotto, a good colleague of<br />
mine who is head of paintings at the Getty, got in<br />
touch about the painting. And I was able to say,<br />
‘Yes! I think it is [a Fontana],’ and others supported<br />
this, so they purchased it.<br />
Then, by an act of absolute serendipity, I came<br />
across the compositional study [for the painting]<br />
in Rob Smeets’ Gallery! It was so important, from<br />
my point of view, to have the two objects in the<br />
same public collection so they can be viewed<br />
together, because we don’t often get these kinds of<br />
insights into women artists’ workshop practices.<br />
I think any kind of serious consideration of their<br />
‘making’ is often overtaken by a preoccupation<br />
with biography. Writers focus on gender, both<br />
in modern and even early modern scholarship.<br />
Maria’s research [into Lavinia’s practice] spurred<br />
us on and we were able to carry the focus on<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 63
Above: Lavinia Fontana, c.1578<br />
Portrait of Carlo Sigonio,<br />
Archivio Fotografico del Museo Civico di Modena<br />
Photo by Paolo Terzi<br />
Right: Lavinia Fontana,<br />
Saint Francis Receicing the Stigmata<br />
workshop practice through into the exhibition.<br />
The Getty was very kind to lend us both objects<br />
not long after they had accessioned them into<br />
their collection. So, it was very special.<br />
Several motifs recur in Fontana’s works. For<br />
example, the backgrounds of her portraits<br />
often include features such as window<br />
frames and open doorways. These can be<br />
seen in her Portrait of Carlo Sigonio as well<br />
as her own Self-portrait at the Virginal. Was<br />
this a device that was common to many other<br />
artists at that time?<br />
AB: This was a sort of formula that was popularised<br />
by artists like Giulio Romano, so it would have<br />
come down to Bologna via Mantua, toward the<br />
end of the Sixteenth Century. It is something that<br />
even people who are specialists in the period are<br />
fascinated by when it comes to Lavinia. One of<br />
my colleagues, Raffaella Morselli, described them<br />
as ‘Lavinia’s escape rooms’, which I thought was<br />
great. But this is a motif that people in Bologna<br />
were commonly including in portraiture at the<br />
time, and oftentimes it was just a window or some<br />
kind of small ancillary space in the background.<br />
You see it in the portrait by Prospero Fontana<br />
in the first room. Lavinia exploits it to a much<br />
higher degree, and she becomes preoccupied<br />
with creating convincing illusionistic space. If<br />
you look at many of her portraits of men, you can<br />
see incisions mapping out the perspective, and<br />
the architectural features of the doorways are all<br />
carefully incised. They become more elaborate,<br />
these sorts of corridors of rooms with mysterious<br />
scenes in the background.<br />
The Bolognese call these ‘portraits in context’<br />
as they’re often of professional people with the<br />
tools of their trade. This creation of illusionistic<br />
space is sometimes known as quadratura<br />
painting. What you see with Lavinia is that the<br />
64 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
scenes happening in the background are hard<br />
to interpret, so they force you to look again and<br />
spend a little bit more time mulling over what is<br />
going on.<br />
MC: There’s a bit of humour to them. Perhaps it is<br />
a Northern influence. They are little genre scenes.<br />
AB: It may be that they relate to something<br />
specific to the commissioner, but we may never<br />
know.<br />
Fontana’s Saint Francis Receiving the<br />
Stigmata is unusual in that it is a rare<br />
landscape painting which differs significantly<br />
in style and subject-matter from her other<br />
works. Would it have been challenging to<br />
attribute this to her if not for the signature?<br />
AB: Definitely. Landscape is not something [she<br />
is known for]. Lavinia’s visual horizons were<br />
limited in her early career. She didn’t develop a<br />
very specific style at the beginning, in the same<br />
way that many male artists, who were able to<br />
travel and absorb [the natural and artistic world]<br />
would have. So we see her really changing quite<br />
dramatically throughout her career. Even looking<br />
at pictures that are signed, you can line them up<br />
beside each other and the size will range from<br />
large to small, the palette will noticeably be quite<br />
different. In the 1590’s, when her father passes<br />
away and she is no longer having children, she<br />
starts to explore new ways and exhibits a little bit<br />
more creative freedom. It is not a linear evolution<br />
in the same way we might expect from male Old<br />
Masters.<br />
MC: And you can see her levels of confidence<br />
fluctuating in producing certain types of painting.<br />
Her practice was so reliant on the portraiture<br />
business that, by the end, she could almost do<br />
it with her eyes closed. But with landscapes<br />
she didn’t have the same level of instruction or<br />
opportunity to practice. In the Queen of Sheba<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 65
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 />
Above: Lavinia Fontana, 1592 Venus and Cupid<br />
Réunion des Musées Métropolitains Rouen Normandie, Musée des Beaux-Arts<br />
66 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
(see feature on p. 66) there is a landscape in the<br />
background, and you can tell that she’s unsure<br />
where she wants to put things. She ends up<br />
having these repeated elements from other<br />
works and then the rest of it might be a bit vague.<br />
One of the more unexpected styles in the<br />
exhibition is represented by Fontana’s erotic<br />
painting, Venus and Cupid. The model for<br />
Venus has been identified as Bolognese<br />
noblewoman Isabella Ruini. At a time when<br />
the Catholic Church’s Counter-Reformation<br />
teachings were very much in favour of<br />
promoting wholesome ‘family values’, how did<br />
Fontana get away with painting an eroticised<br />
version of a prominent society figure?<br />
AB: There was an emerging market in the late<br />
Sixteenth Century and Bologna was home to a<br />
large professional class who wanted pictures for<br />
their houses. Fontana and other artists responded<br />
to this largely with portraiture, but then they<br />
recognised the demand for these erotic pictures.<br />
And while the church could see that mythological<br />
painting was not really okay, they were prepared<br />
to tolerate it if there was an educational basis to it.<br />
This loophole allowed artists to create these erotic<br />
paintings that were thinly veiled as mythological,<br />
erudite subjects. It is essentially recognised by<br />
many modern scholars as the birth of what we<br />
would describe as pornography. These pictures<br />
were created for domestic spaces and hung<br />
behind curtains. [Fontana’s Venus and Cupid] is<br />
an allegorical portrait of a known woman, Isabella<br />
Ruini. In this instance, I think this is a woman<br />
who probably trusted Lavinia in a way that she<br />
wouldn’t have trusted a male artist to capture her<br />
image in such a salacious way. And the fact that it<br />
was painted by a woman would have made it all<br />
the more titillating. Actually, what’s funny about<br />
it is that most of her erotic paintings are not<br />
signed. So she’s not advertising the fact that she’s<br />
doing them. She’s relying on her close network<br />
of patrons [to get these commissions] but they’re<br />
not something she’s painting in a public way.<br />
The thing about Lavinia is that, from the start<br />
of her career, even as devout an artist as she<br />
was when depicting religious subject matter,<br />
she was also strategic, and she was recognising<br />
opportunities and exploiting them. From the<br />
beginning Prospero [her father and first teacher]<br />
was marketing her to the local scholars of<br />
Bologna. This was a class that he had connections<br />
with through his wife, whose family owned a<br />
publishing house, and because he himself was<br />
illustrating their treatises. Then, later on, Lavinia<br />
saw these elite cliques of women beginning to<br />
form in Bologna. Again, it is a very particular<br />
moment for women, and she moved her studio<br />
to the other side of the city, so that it intersected<br />
the streets that all of their palaces were on. She<br />
named her children after them and made them<br />
their godparents. So we see this pattern emerge<br />
that nothing happened in Lavinia’s career by<br />
accident. When you look at her altarpieces, you<br />
think, ‘Oh, my gosh, what a devout artist,’ but in<br />
reality she’s following the money. She’s looking<br />
for opportunities at every turn.<br />
MC: Whatever way she could pay the bills, I<br />
think she would be happy enough to give it a try.<br />
MARGIE MACKINNON<br />
The catalogue of the exhibition, Lavinia Fontana:<br />
Trailblazer, Rule Breaker by Aoife Brady, Yale/<br />
National Gallery of Ireland, <strong>2023</strong>, was chosen as<br />
one the Best Visual Arts Books of <strong>2023</strong> by the<br />
Financial Times.<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 67
Above: Lavinia Fontana, 1599<br />
The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon<br />
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin<br />
68 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
The Star of the Show<br />
Lavinia Fontana’s Queen of Sheba<br />
The recent exhibition of works by the Bolognese<br />
Mannerist painter Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614) at<br />
the National Gallery of Ireland began and ended<br />
with Fontana’s largest and most ambitious work,<br />
The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon<br />
(1599). The painting’s extensive restoration,<br />
sponsored by the Bank of America, had begun not<br />
long before the arrival at the Gallery of curator<br />
Aoife Brady, a specialist in early Italian and Spanish<br />
paintings. Together, those two events lit the spark<br />
for the highly praised monographic exhibition of<br />
Fontana’s works which ran from May to August<br />
this year. Over five rooms, Fontana’s works were<br />
displayed thematically, from ‘Men’ to ‘Allegory and<br />
Myth’, all leading to the final room showcasing<br />
her ‘Crowning Glory’, the monumental canvas<br />
inspired by the Biblical account of the legendary<br />
Queen’s visit to Jerusalem.<br />
Displaying all of Fontana’s mastery, The Visit of<br />
the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon has held a<br />
central place in the Gallery for well over a century,<br />
but much of its history remains a mystery. The<br />
subject-matter of the work is clear from its title,<br />
and the attribution to Fontana has never been in<br />
doubt. What remains unknown about the work<br />
is who commissioned it, who were the ‘models’<br />
for its two eponymous figures, and where was<br />
it hiding between the time of its completion in<br />
1599 and the first documented mention of it in<br />
the late eighteenth century in an inventory of<br />
artworks in the Zambeccari collection in Bologna?<br />
Painted in oil on canvas, the work measures 252 x<br />
327 centimetres - approximately eight by ten feet<br />
– which would have made it hard to miss if it<br />
had been hanging in even the darkest corner of<br />
a palazzo. And yet there seems to have been no<br />
mention of it in letters, diaries or inventories for<br />
over a hundred years.<br />
It is believed the painting remained in the<br />
Zambeccari collection until 1859 when it was<br />
purchased via an intermediary by Prince<br />
Napoleon Bonaparte, first cousin of Napoleon<br />
III, and sent, most likely rolled up for transport,<br />
to the Palais-Royal in Paris. Its residence in the<br />
French capital was to prove short-lived. The<br />
revolutionary government known as the Paris<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 69
Left: Detial showing the Queen from Lavinia Fontana, 1599,<br />
The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon<br />
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin<br />
Commune that had seized power in March 1871<br />
was brutally suppressed just two months later by<br />
the French army. During la semaine sanglante (the<br />
Bloody Week) of intense fighting, fire consumed<br />
buildings throughout Paris, including the Palais-<br />
Royal. Fontana’s Queen of Sheba was one of the<br />
few paintings that was rescued from the blaze,<br />
having suffered relatively minor damage. From<br />
Paris, the painting made its way to London where<br />
it was sold in 1872 by Christie’s auction house<br />
for £100 to the National Gallery of Ireland. Even<br />
at today’s equivalent of £14,000, it was an astute<br />
purchase, and the painting quickly became the<br />
centrepiece of the Gallery’s Italian collection.<br />
A version of the legend of the Queen’s visit to<br />
King Solomon, the ruler of ancient Israel who was<br />
thought to have reigned from 970-931 BCE, exists<br />
in many religious traditions. The story relates<br />
that when the fame of Solomon’s wisdom and<br />
wealth reached the distant land of what was then<br />
called Saba (now Yemen and Ethiopia), the queen<br />
decided to travel to Jerusalem to test the validity<br />
of these claims for herself. She is said to have<br />
arrived at Solomon’s court with a great retinue<br />
and camels bearing spices, gold and precious<br />
stones. On being presented to King Solomon,<br />
the Queen posed several thorny riddles to<br />
him, which he apparently answered to her<br />
70 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
satisfaction. In one retelling it was claimed that<br />
when she arrived, the Queen mistook the glass<br />
floor of Solomon’s throne room for water. Lifting<br />
her skirts to avoid getting them wet, she revealed<br />
her hairy legs, for which the King reprimanded<br />
her. (If there is any truth to this tale, it begs the<br />
question of how other women were managing to<br />
keep their legs hairless back in the days before<br />
razors and depilatory creams!)<br />
The Queen of Sheba has long been a popular<br />
subject in art and literature. Her visit to King<br />
Solomon is depicted in Lorenzo Ghiberti’s<br />
bronze doors to the Florence Baptistery and in<br />
frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli in the Campo Santo<br />
in Pisa. Another interpretation of the visit was<br />
painted by Flemish painter Lucas de Heere in<br />
1559, just 40 years before Fontana completed her<br />
work. Commissioned for the Choir of St Bavo’s<br />
Cathedral in Ghent, it has been conserved in situ<br />
ever since. References to the Queen in literature<br />
can be found in Boccaccio’s On Famous Women,<br />
Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies<br />
and the American short story writer O. Henry’s<br />
‘The Gift of the Magi’. And yet, among historians,<br />
the Queen’s existence is still disputed.<br />
The painting in the NGI’s collection has<br />
undergone several restorations, the first of<br />
which took place in London in preparation for its<br />
transportation to Dublin. This included repairing<br />
the damage done by the fire in Paris, as well as<br />
the construction of a new frame designed to<br />
facilitate the move. The painting was displayed<br />
in the Gallery for almost a century before any<br />
further interventions occurred. During this<br />
time, it suffered deterioration from atmospheric<br />
dust and grime, and the deleterious effects of<br />
cigar and cigarette smoke which would have<br />
pervaded the Gallery. A second restoration, in<br />
1967, was enabled by the establishment of the<br />
Gallery’s in-house conservation team, supported<br />
by the expertise of a group of restorers from<br />
Rome who brought with them the most up-todate<br />
techniques and theories combining the<br />
art and science of restoration. The most recent<br />
restoration, carried out from 2018 to 2021, much of<br />
it during Covid lockdowns, by conservators Maria<br />
Canavan and Letizia Marcattili, included “the first<br />
technical and scientific analysis of the painting<br />
and a conservation treatment that would restore<br />
stability to the structure and make legible the<br />
many indistinct details meticulously painted by<br />
Fontana in the sixteenth century.”<br />
In Fontana’s composition, the focus is on the<br />
figure of the Queen of Sheba, just slightly offcentre,<br />
to the left, and her retinue of ladies-inwaiting,<br />
each one a portrait of a sixteenth-century<br />
noblewoman, which fills up the rest of the canvas<br />
to the right. In the past, it had been noted that these<br />
women appear to have impossibly long necks,<br />
somehow detached from their bodies, perched<br />
awkwardly atop delicate lace ruffs and (allegedly)<br />
betraying a lack of anatomical knowledge on<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 71
Fontana’s part. However, the technical analysis<br />
“demonstrates that, in fact, Fontana adjusted the<br />
location of the women’s heads deliberately, and<br />
that they were originally lower down and in a<br />
more natural position… In fact, there are many<br />
pentimenti scattered across this composition to<br />
suggest that she revised aspects of her painting<br />
numerous times.” If the models for these women<br />
were noblewomen of Bologna who were among<br />
Fontana’s patrons, she would have had a reason<br />
to feature them more prominently than a strictly<br />
accurate portrayal would allow.<br />
Another significant discovery revealed by the<br />
conservation was the inscription of a year – 1599<br />
– on the base of the ornate clock seemingly<br />
held by the third noblewoman in the Queen’s<br />
retinue. Like some of the other anatomical<br />
anomalies in the painting, the hand that holds<br />
the clock is bizarrely placed, making it difficult to<br />
say with certainty to whom it belongs. Nor is it,<br />
surprisingly, the sort of carefully manicured hand<br />
one might expect of a woman who is otherwise<br />
meticulously coiffed and attired. The year, 1599,<br />
is important in providing a precise date for the<br />
completion of the painting and gives credence to<br />
the view that the painting remained in Fontana’s<br />
studio when she departed for Rome in 1603.<br />
There are a few clues to the identification of<br />
the two principal figures in Fontana’s work. The<br />
scene is not ancient Jerusalem but a sixteenthcentury<br />
Italian court, with all the fabrics, furniture,<br />
jewellery and fashions of a contemporary<br />
Renaissance court. An early theory, advanced by<br />
art historian Luigi Lanzi, suggested that Fontana’s<br />
King and Queen are portraits of the Duke and<br />
Duchess of Mantua (then Vincenzo I Gonzaga and<br />
Eleonora de’ Medici). Although this theory held<br />
sway for two centuries, Aoife Brady presents a<br />
convincing argument that, in fact, the two figures<br />
are the then Duke and Duchess of Ferrara, Alfonso<br />
II d’Este and his wife, Margherita Gonzaga. “Ferrara<br />
was home to one of the most important humanist<br />
courts in the Renaissance… The union of Alfonso<br />
and Margherita [his third wife] formed a political<br />
alliance between the rival Houses of Este and<br />
Gonzaga and the couple became important<br />
patrons of art and music.” Comparisons of known<br />
portraits of Alfonso and Margherita to Fontana’s<br />
King and Queen give further weight to Brady’s<br />
argument.<br />
The ’Ferrara theory’ might also explain why<br />
Fontana’s work seems to have languished in<br />
her studio after its completion in 1599. The<br />
union between Margherita and Alfonso had<br />
been childless and, without an heir, the Duchy of<br />
Ferrara collapsed on the Duke’s death in 1597. As<br />
Brady explains, “Since the date inscribed on the<br />
clock suggests that she was still working on the<br />
painting upon Alfonso’s death, it may be that the<br />
person who commissioned it no longer wanted a<br />
large-scale representation of a court that, by the<br />
time Fontana completed it, had ceased to exist.”<br />
A jewel in the crown of the National Gallery of<br />
Ireland’s collection, Fontana’s Queen of Sheba is<br />
more dazzling than ever following the restoration<br />
that spawned a blockbuster exhibition and a host<br />
of educational, cultural and other outreach events<br />
centred around the artist and her work. “We were<br />
delighted to have the opportunity to do this<br />
restoration,” explains Maria Canavan, “because<br />
we were able to demonstrate that a single project<br />
like this can grow into something bigger and can<br />
engage people who wouldn’t ordinarily come to<br />
the Gallery.”<br />
MARGIE MACKINNON<br />
[Quotations are from The Crowning Glory, Lavinia<br />
Fontana’s Queen of Sheba and King Solomon,<br />
National Gallery of Ireland, 2021]<br />
72 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
COMPARISONS AND<br />
CRAFTSMANSHIP<br />
The newly restored Queen of Sheba debuted<br />
at the National Gallery of Ireland’s exhibition<br />
Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker (<strong>2023</strong>)<br />
which included a number of noteworthy<br />
mythological paintings and portraits. Fontana<br />
often combined the two genres and used<br />
contemporary figures as models for her biblical<br />
and allegorical works.<br />
Undoubtedly, Fontana was a role model for<br />
Artemisia, since the Bolognese artist was hailed<br />
as the first professional woman painter in Italy<br />
to work outside a convent. We include two of<br />
the show’s Judith and Holofernes paintings, for<br />
readers to compare with the Gentileschis’ more<br />
Caravaggesque versions, created some fifty<br />
years later, on p.77.<br />
The artisans among our readers will want to<br />
take a good look at Fontana’s San Pellegrino<br />
work, which Count Carlo Cesare Malvasia<br />
described as ‘Judith illuminated by a torchlight’.<br />
The protagonist’s pectoral shield is laden with<br />
cameos and Carnelians – representing courage<br />
– and its central pendant bears a tiny peacock,<br />
the Christian symbol of Resurrection. Fontana’s<br />
second Judith, from Bologna, is also worth<br />
poring over with a crafter’s eye. The sheen of<br />
Fontana’s translucent robe work and delicate<br />
jewels almost make one forget the headless<br />
body in the background!<br />
.<br />
Top: Lavinia Fontana, Judith and Holofemes (c. 1595),<br />
Fondazione San Pellegrino<br />
Above: Judith Holofernes, (c. 1595-1600), Museo Davia Bargellini<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 73
Courage and Passion<br />
Artemisia comes to Genoa from around the world<br />
Until April 2024, the Doge’s Apartments in<br />
Genoa’s Ducal Palace is hosting Artemisia<br />
Gentileschi, Courage and Passion, a<br />
vastly ambitious show curated by art historian<br />
Costantino D’Orazio, on the 400th anniversary<br />
of Orazio Gentileschi’s sojourn in the wealthy<br />
port city once known as ‘La Superba’. Those<br />
who have visited Artemisia in the Museum<br />
of Michelangelo at Casa Buonarroti will be<br />
tempted to take a northbound train to Liguria,<br />
for a ‘world tour’ of Artemisia-related works<br />
from Naples and Pommersfelden, to Texas and<br />
Beirut. It is a celebration of Artemisia’s talents,<br />
an exploration of her father Orazio’s influence,<br />
and a study of the impact both Gentileschis had<br />
on Counter-reformation painters. Yet, most of<br />
all, the exhibition acknowledges Artemisia as<br />
Caravaggio’s true heir. With masterful brushwork<br />
and dramatic story-telling, Artemisia knows how<br />
to ‘steal the show’ – even when it is her own.<br />
The canvases in Courage and Passion are<br />
displayed in ten sections whose titles’ key<br />
words are exactly that – keys. A good glimpse<br />
at Artemisia’s ‘Revenge’ and her ‘Threatened<br />
Women’ gives way to a celebratory visual<br />
discussion of her ‘Heroines’ and ‘Legacy’. We<br />
find biblical Susanna who is threatened with<br />
slander if she does not “lie with the elders”<br />
– in a scheme later exposed by the prophet<br />
Daniel. We see Cleopatra, who would rather slit<br />
her wrists than face Roman capture, and meet<br />
two renditions of Philistine slave Delilah who<br />
diminishes Samson’s strength by cutting his hair.<br />
Paintings featuring the deeds and misdeeds of<br />
history’s women were popular in Europe’s most<br />
enviable collections during Artemisia’s era, and<br />
she paints them with great narrative strength,<br />
and in step with market demands.<br />
Perhaps the most popular heroine in the<br />
Gentileschis’ time is biblical Judith, who enters<br />
the enemy camp by feigning allegiance and<br />
leaves as liberator of her people, with the<br />
Assyrian general’s head in a basket. Exhibition<br />
curator Costantino D’Orazio, who has brought<br />
together father-daughter versions from Terni<br />
and the Vatican Museums, admits “I’m very proud<br />
of this comparison”. Restoration Conversations<br />
sat down with Dr D’Orazio, in December, for<br />
some insight on the show’s rebel spirit.<br />
Artemisia has received considerable<br />
attention in recent years, what do you feel<br />
you are adding to the discourse, through the<br />
Genoa show?<br />
Costantino D’Orazio: From the 1960s onwards,<br />
Artemisia received an ever-increasing amount<br />
of attention, but the lens through which she was<br />
seen was always aimed in one of two directions.<br />
There are those who contemplated Artemisia’s<br />
personal story and transformed her into a<br />
feminist icon. In contrast, other art historians<br />
– mostly Italian – virtually refused to see the<br />
Right: Artemisia Gentileschi, 1610, Susanna and the Elders<br />
Pommersfelden, Kunstsammlungen Graf von Schönborn<br />
74 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 75
dramatic, human side of Artemisia, preferring to<br />
focus solely on her artistic talent. With this show,<br />
I feel that, for the first time, we are merging<br />
both approaches, taking into consideration the<br />
vicissitudes of Artemisia’s life and her artistic<br />
merit, as we strive to understand how the two<br />
are intertwined. The show’s aim is to explore<br />
insight on her life and work, in parallel.<br />
Can you give us an example of how this goal<br />
plays out in the show?<br />
CD: The exhibition begins with two canvases<br />
representing the same subject, Susanna and the<br />
Elders. The first, from 1610, was painted before<br />
Artemisia’s rape. It’s a nude, and likely a selfportrait,<br />
created with the help of Artemisia’s<br />
father. The painting’s protagonist tries to defend<br />
herself, but she is unsuccessful. Nearly forty<br />
years later, in Naples, Artemisia takes on the<br />
same subject (1649). Her palette has changed<br />
and is more Caravaggesque. Susanna no longer<br />
succumbs to the violence. She is completely<br />
self-aware, and with a single determined<br />
gesture, she keeps the perpetrators at a<br />
distance. These two pictures alone, encapsulate<br />
the story of how Artemisia’s gaze, palette and<br />
iconography have changed. Leading up to the<br />
Naples picture, Artemisia had an intense career,<br />
she had formed her own bottega and worked<br />
for great courts. She has come into her own, as<br />
an entirely different artist.<br />
You have brought together numerous<br />
works by Artemisia, including three new<br />
attributions. What can you tell us about<br />
them?<br />
CD: The show hosts 50-odd works, 23 of which<br />
are authored by Artemisia, including three<br />
new attributions advanced by renowned art<br />
historian and Artemisia scholar Riccardo<br />
Lattuada, who forms part of our Scientific board.<br />
I believe exhibitions are places where novelties<br />
Top: Artemisia Gentileschi, 1610-1615, Samson and Delilah,<br />
private collection<br />
Above: Artemisia Gentileschi, 1620-1625, Samson and Delilah,<br />
private collection<br />
76 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
and new research can be studied and proposed.<br />
The display of these new Artemisia attributions<br />
also sends an important message, namely,<br />
that there is still a lot to discover, and I like it<br />
that our show has something to offer to the<br />
debate, as far as authorship is concerned. Two<br />
of new attributions – from private collections<br />
in England and Rome – are inspired by the<br />
Samson and Delilah story, while the other, from<br />
the Fondazione Orintia Carletti Bonucci in<br />
Perugia, depicts Paolo and Francesca [iconic<br />
lovers famously found in Dante’s Inferno].<br />
If you could choose one thing you’d like the<br />
public to know about the exhibition, what<br />
would it be?<br />
We have a noteworthy section on Genovese<br />
artists, curated by Anna Orlando, in which<br />
we focus first on Orazio Gentileschi’s time in<br />
Genoa, from 1621 to 1625. His sojourn essentially<br />
marks the arrival of Caravaggio’s style in local<br />
artistic circles, influencing artists like Domenico<br />
Fiasella, Gioacchino Assereto and Bernardo<br />
Strozzi. Caravaggio himself spent a month in<br />
Genoa, but he met with virtually no one, and left<br />
no works in his wake. Instead, the art of both<br />
Gentileschis made its mark on the city.<br />
Although Artemisia never worked in Genoa,<br />
her paintings were collected in this financial<br />
capital in the seventeenth and eighteenth<br />
centuries, and they are a wonderful window<br />
onto Caravaggism for the region’s artists.<br />
Artemisia’s fame is precocious and powerful.<br />
She – not her father – is Caravaggio’s true heir.<br />
Artemisia is very skilful at constructing a space<br />
without the help of architecture. The body of<br />
her characters penetrate the canvas, defining<br />
its volume and depth. Cleopatra, from a Belgian<br />
collection, is a case in point. The protagonist’s<br />
legs almost rupture the canvas, and the volume<br />
of the figure’s body expresses true power. That<br />
is what Artemisia learned from Caravaggio.<br />
Top: Artemisia Gentileschi, 1640-1645, Cleopatra,<br />
private collection, Naples<br />
Above: Orazio Gentileschi, 1615-1621, Saint Cecilia Playing the Spinet and an Angel<br />
Umbria National Gallery, Perugia<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 77
Left: Orazio Gentileschi, 1622<br />
Madonna and Sleeping Child in a Landscape<br />
Musei di Strada Nuova – Palazzo Rosso, Genoa<br />
Below: Orazio Gentileschi, c. 1620<br />
Portrait of a Young Woman as a Sibyl<br />
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston<br />
In ‘Artemisia in her Father’s Workshop’, we<br />
see Artemisia, the model. She is Baby Jesus<br />
in Orazio Gentileschi’s Annunciation. He has<br />
10-year-old Artemisia pose as Saint Cecilia,<br />
the young patron of music. Finally, his grownup<br />
daughter becomes priestess and prophet<br />
in Portrait of a Young Woman as a Sybil.<br />
What can you tell us about this section?<br />
CD: The practice of painters using their<br />
daughters as models was not rare, especially for<br />
those who worked in the manner of Caravaggio,<br />
in workshops inside their homes. It was normal<br />
and desirable for children to pose, because they<br />
didn’t have to be paid, but what is unique in<br />
Artemisia’s case, is that she continues to be<br />
Orazio’s model, even after she no longer lives<br />
with him. He painted the Sybil portrait when<br />
she was already married and in Florence, for<br />
instance. If I were to push our conversation<br />
outside the bounds of art history and into the<br />
realm of supposition, we could say that Orazio’s<br />
enduring reliance on Artemisia’s face was<br />
indicative of his obsession for her. Many of his<br />
female protagonists have Artemisia’s rounded<br />
chin, her close-set eyes – she remains forever<br />
clear in his memory, and is his model, albeit, not<br />
literally, for the whole of his career. [Readers<br />
can look to Orazio’s Lot and his Daughters and<br />
Danaë and the Shower of Gold, at the Getty<br />
Museum in Los Angeles, widely considered two<br />
examples of this trend.]<br />
Artemisia often modelled for herself as well,<br />
and many of her painting’s protagonists<br />
appear to have her features. What can you<br />
tell us about that?<br />
Yes, another very common practice in her era<br />
was for female painters to model for themselves.<br />
Think of Sofonisba Anguissola, whose selfportraiture<br />
became a genre in its own right;<br />
in fact, her father sold them very successfully.<br />
There is some self-portraiture among male<br />
78 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
painters, but self-portraiture forms part of the<br />
oeuvre of every single known female artist.<br />
Women artists often depicted themselves for<br />
economic reasons. In Naples, Artemisia – who<br />
was already an established painter at the time<br />
– wrote to Antonio Ruffo, asking for money so<br />
that she could provide advance payment to five<br />
female models. So, self-portraiture was a form<br />
of training but it was also a way to avoid renting<br />
other people’s bodies. We also have to consider<br />
that, until the 1870s, women could not study<br />
human anatomy live.<br />
You have recently been working with<br />
Florence’s Casa Buonarroti Museum<br />
to bring the newly restored Allegory of<br />
Inclination to the Genoa show, along with<br />
Pitti’s Penitent Magdalene. Why have you<br />
decided to bring these ‘late-comers’ to<br />
the show, nearly three months after its<br />
opening?<br />
CD: A historic opportunity presented itself<br />
with the restoration of Artemisia’s Allegory of<br />
Inclination and its removal from the ceiling,<br />
thanks to ‘Artemisia UpClose’ [sponsored and<br />
conceived by Calliope Arts and Christian Levett,<br />
in collaboration with Casa Buonarroti Museum<br />
and Foundation]. The fact that the painting is<br />
not on the ceiling right now, represents an<br />
extraordinary opportunity. Dr Acidini, Casa<br />
Buonarroti Foundation President, was a huge<br />
supporter of the painting travelling to join<br />
us. We are also happy to share the ‘Artemisia<br />
UpClose’ restoration and the decision to<br />
remove the veil digitally, rather than physically<br />
(See p. 46). Artemisia’s Florentine period is her<br />
best. She paints alone, with no collaborators.<br />
She measures herself against exceptional<br />
masters and stands comparison to them. In a<br />
word, Artemisia’s work absorbed the Roman<br />
environment through her father, but, she is a<br />
Florentine soul.<br />
LINDA FALCONE<br />
Artemisia Gentileschi, Courage and Passion is<br />
promoted and organized by Arthemisia with<br />
Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura, the<br />
Municipality of Genoa, and the Region of Liguria.<br />
Top: Orazio Gentileschi, c. 1622, Judith and her Maidservant with Holofernes’ Head<br />
Vatican Museums, Vatican City<br />
Above: Artemisia Gentileschi, 1640-1645, Judith and Abra with Holofernes’ Head<br />
Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio, Terni<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 79
The Colour is Brown<br />
On Tuesdays mornings, Florence’s Museo<br />
Novecento is a meditative place.<br />
Founded at the start of the Thirteenth<br />
Century, the complex predates the Basilica of<br />
Santa Maria Novella, whose glinting marble façade<br />
stares at the museum’s shady arcade from across<br />
the square. The venue, which is now a museum<br />
and centre for modern and contemporary art,<br />
was initially a hostel for pilgrims and beggars<br />
(dedicated to Saint Paul). Later, in 1345, it morphed<br />
into a fully-fledged hospital, managed by<br />
Franciscan tertiaries and named for Saint Francis.<br />
Today, I have come for a different saint, however.<br />
An abbot of admirable stoicism, he is pictured<br />
in the Temptations of Saint Anthony, to which<br />
ultra-acclaimed British painter Cecily Brown<br />
dedicated a decade of brain-space. Brown’s 30-<br />
work show in the Tuscan capital is the product<br />
of a conversation that started six years ago with<br />
Sergio Risaliti, the Museo Novecento’s artistic<br />
director – also the show’s curator – who has been<br />
working as culture consultant to Florence mayor<br />
80 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Curator Sergio Risaliti speaks ‘Cecily’<br />
at Museo Novecento<br />
Dario Nardella for the last ten years, “to bring<br />
Florence into the modern world”.<br />
The plan is for us to walk through Brown’s show<br />
together, and I await his arrival in what was once<br />
the structure’s cloister. Despite its contemporary<br />
art installations, the Museo Novecento’s space<br />
still has a monastery feel that the Leopoldine<br />
suppression of religious orders in 1870 did<br />
not manage to erase. Readers of Restoration<br />
Conversations will be interested to know that<br />
Pietro Leopoldo, upon claiming the space as state<br />
property, transformed it into a school for girls –<br />
aged 6 to 16 – whom the Grand Duke wished to<br />
see educated “in the first duties of religion and<br />
catechism, the rules of decency and cleanliness<br />
appropriate to the state of the girls, reading,<br />
writing, the abacus, and women’s work of knitting,<br />
sewing and the weaving of both ribbons and<br />
veils, linen and woollen cloth of all kinds and silk<br />
cloths wide and narrow”.<br />
One day, I will learn more about this space<br />
known, until recently, as Le Scuole Leopoldine,<br />
Above: Museo Novecento<br />
during the Jenny Saville<br />
exhibition<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 81
Above: Mark Hartman<br />
Portrait of Cecily Brown<br />
Right: Cecily Brown, 2022-23<br />
Run Away Child, Running Wild<br />
because the Grand Duke’s intentions were<br />
upheld – more or less – until the school closed,<br />
just over a century later, in 1975. That is not<br />
today’s job, of course. Today, I am here to see<br />
what ‘ribbons and veils’ Brown is weaving in her<br />
mostly Abstract works that Risaliti traces back to<br />
“post-impressionism, starting with Cezanne and<br />
passing through late Monet and towards Abstract<br />
Expressionism, including Pollock and de Kooning”<br />
[Willem, not Elaine].<br />
More soft-spoken than I anticipated, Risaliti<br />
surprised me, as he does most. “Despite Cecily<br />
Brown’s vibrancy and her exciting vitality, she is<br />
exceptionally rigorous,” he says, as we cross the<br />
threshold of the first room. Rigorous is not a word<br />
I expected to encapsulate a show whose title<br />
promises ‘a bit of a mess’: Temptations, Torments,<br />
Trials and Tribulations. Risaliti reads the surprise in<br />
my face. “I say this because she was born an artist,<br />
and she knows how to avoid ruining a painting.<br />
She throws an untold number of colours onto<br />
canvases that are packed with pictorial gestures<br />
and chromatic nuances. There’s almost an ecstasy<br />
involved, a delirium or fury, but the artist does not<br />
succumb to it – or more accurately, the painting<br />
does not succumb to it. Cecily is always controlled,<br />
and she generates a new form of perfection… To<br />
understand her work,” Risaliti suggests, “think of<br />
the evolution of classical music from Mahler and<br />
late Beethoven to contemporary Jazz and even the<br />
sounds of Led Zeppelin. What appears cacophonic<br />
or is perceived as a threat to harmony and<br />
composure is simply a new world that has never<br />
been seen before.”<br />
I’m well aware that Risaliti likes bringing new<br />
worlds to ‘old spaces’, so thus far, I’m following his<br />
discourse. He brought Jeff Koons’ stainless steel<br />
Pluto and Proserpina to Piazza della Signoria way<br />
back in 2015, and, one year later, sought to realign<br />
the “plates of the piazza’s scale” by installing Jan<br />
Fabre’s giant turtle, Searching for Utopia, not far<br />
from the Neptune fountain. “I wanted to offer<br />
82 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 83
Above, left: Ela Bialkowska,<br />
OKNO Studio, <strong>2023</strong>.<br />
Sixteenth-century depiction of<br />
St. Anthony, after an engraving<br />
by Martin Schongauer<br />
Above, right: Cecily Brown,<br />
2010. The Temptation of St.<br />
Anthony (after Michelangelo)<br />
citizens a landmark, to introduce completely<br />
new scenery and correct the square’s imbalance,”<br />
Risaliti explains. “Tourists seemed to slide away<br />
into the void, at the corner of the Loggia de’<br />
Lanzi, and Fabre’s sculpture provided a point<br />
of attraction, of magnetism, that prevented that<br />
from continuing to happen. It was a healthy<br />
shock for the citizenry, but, eventually, I think they<br />
assimilated it.” The list of Risaliti’s contemporary<br />
“points of attraction” is growing as Florence<br />
museums – from the Bardini and Forte Belvedere<br />
to the Museo del Opera del Duomo and Casa<br />
Buonarroti – open their monumental gates to<br />
the modern world. Risaliti brought Jenny Saville’s<br />
Michelangelo-inspired works to these last two<br />
venues in 2022, and Saville’s art proves one of<br />
his most deeply ingrained convictions, “Artists<br />
of today love, understand and have profoundly<br />
assimilated the great Renaissance and Italian<br />
traditions. Therefore, they naturally create<br />
connections with the past.”<br />
The modern artist’s fascination with the Old<br />
Masters lies at the core of Brown’s show as well.<br />
“There is this idea that from the early Twentieth<br />
Century onwards, when art lost its more<br />
figurative element and forfeited its more classical<br />
foundations, it somehow lost its value,” Risaliti<br />
explains. “In the eyes of many, Abstractionism<br />
was something created, more out of daring than<br />
from skill. Certainly, I acknowledge our debt to<br />
the great personalities of the past, as does Cecily,<br />
who contradicts traditional models of order and<br />
symmetry by reinventing them completely. Yet,<br />
she manages to produce a harmony that is equal<br />
to that of a Renaissance painting. In a work like<br />
The Aspiring Subordinate, I see the same search<br />
for chromatic harmony, the same forms of tension<br />
and movement, that you find in a Baroque work<br />
by Luca Giordano or Corrado Giaquinto, because<br />
of the exuberance and quality of her colours and<br />
the way she develops energy.<br />
A quality like ‘la perfezione’ is the product of<br />
a process, apparently, and Brown works on her<br />
paintings for several years. “Cecily goes back to her<br />
canvases and completes them, years later, adding<br />
that brushstroke of blue or white, or this squiggle<br />
and that slash mark,” the show’s curator says. “One<br />
day, she told me, ‘I have a painting brain’. It means<br />
she does not think about herself divorced from<br />
painting or recognise herself, if not as a painter.”<br />
84 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
But what of her method, I ask, and what of<br />
my stoic saint? “Cecily’s work starts with a sort<br />
of infatuation,” explains Risaliti, “She becomes<br />
enchanted by a work from the past. It might be a<br />
painting by Degas, a work by Bosch, a Tintoretto –<br />
and that piece gives rise to years of creativity. She<br />
worked on the image of Saint Anthony Abbott<br />
resisting temptation for a decade, and it ended up<br />
being the cycle she wanted to present in Florence.<br />
Saint Anthony is her initial inspiration. In the<br />
original engraving from the fifteenth century, he is<br />
the centre of gravity, and around him, and there is<br />
centrifugal and centripetal activity, created by the<br />
monsters. At a certain point, Brown frees herself<br />
from the figurative element; she disconnects<br />
from it, without denying the compositional forces<br />
underlying the image.”<br />
Above: Cecily Brown, <strong>2023</strong>, The Aspiring Subordinate<br />
We reach the lofty ‘chapel’ room, empty except<br />
for a small plate attributed to Michelangelo from<br />
the Kimbell Art Museum, in Fort Worth, Texas and<br />
a small-scale painting that Risaliti found last year,<br />
while wandering through Florence’s antiques fair,<br />
the Biennale dell’Antiquariato. Now in a private<br />
collection, it is considered an early copy, by a<br />
sixteenth-century Flemish painter, according to<br />
an attribution by Cristina Acidini. “I’ve exhibited<br />
it here in the chapel, as a surprise for Cecily, and<br />
she was really happy to see it,” Risaliti says. Then,<br />
he shares an incident involving Michelangelo,<br />
recounted by both Vasari and Condivi.<br />
Michelangelo was still an adolescent, aged 13 or<br />
14, and doing his apprenticeship in the bottega of<br />
Ghirlandaio. “He was assigned a task to test his<br />
painting ability, namely to reproduce, in colour, an<br />
engraving by Martin Schongauer, depicting the<br />
temptation of Saint Anthony. Vasari and Condivi<br />
tell us that in order to get the monsters’ colours<br />
right, he went to fish market, to study the scales<br />
of every fish on sale there. Michelangelo looked<br />
to life, as always.”<br />
“Looking to life” in Florence today, I have to ask<br />
whether Risaliti has encountered resistance to<br />
his efforts to “rejuvenate Florence’s relationship<br />
with the past”. The Museo Novecento puts on<br />
fifteen to twenty exhibitions a year, not counting<br />
the art its artistic director installs in other<br />
venues city-wide, including Palazzo Vecchio,<br />
the Museo Innocenti and Santa Croce. No. He<br />
has not encountered resistance. “When you<br />
speak to cultured people who love art and<br />
propose serious projects that are mediated and<br />
pondered, where the objective is not to clash,<br />
shock or engender provocation… when you<br />
seek connection, between a story of today and<br />
one from the past, the doors open. The mind is<br />
full of prejudices, but the sensitive, creative side<br />
of ourselves is much more open to dialogue.”<br />
Well stated, Sig. Risaliti, and lovely to see British<br />
New York-based Brown in a place whose quiet<br />
both challenges and embraces such measured<br />
turbulence. I’m already looking forward to our<br />
conversation on Louise Bourgeois, whose Museo<br />
Novecento show is scheduled to open come June.<br />
LINDA FALCONE<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 85
The Painting in the Dining Room<br />
Paula Rego’s Garden of Delights<br />
In 1991, the Sainsbury Wing of London’s<br />
INational Gallery opened to the public. Along<br />
Iwith the Renaissance treasures to be discovered<br />
Iin this newly designed space was a large work<br />
Iby Paula Rego,<br />
Crivelli’s Garden (1990-91). The<br />
Ipainting, more than nine metres in length, had<br />
Ibeen specially commissioned – not for one of<br />
Ithe prestigious exhibition rooms - but for the<br />
Imuseum’s new restaurant. Was this a slight to<br />
Ian artist with a growing reputation who was<br />
then ‘having a real moment’ following her major<br />
survey show at the Serpentine Gallery?<br />
There is a long tradition of Renaissance<br />
masters creating ‘last supper’ frescoes in convent<br />
dining halls where the resident friars or nuns<br />
could contemplate Jesus’s final meal in silence<br />
while enjoying their own repasts. One of the<br />
world’s most celebrated artworks, Leonardo’s<br />
Last Supper (1495-1498), was painted for the<br />
refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.<br />
Andrea del Castagno’s Ultima Cena (1445) in the<br />
Convent of Sant’Apollonia and Andrea del Sarto’s<br />
1526 masterpiece for the Church of San Salvi<br />
(otherwise known as the Last Supper Museum of<br />
Andrea del Sarto) also come to mind. The only<br />
painting by a woman that depicts this subject,<br />
Plautilla Nelli’s Last Supper (1550), was created for<br />
the refectory of her convent, Santa Caterina da<br />
Siena, and is now exhibited in the Museum of<br />
Santa Maria Novella in Florence.<br />
On the other hand, a more recent restaurant<br />
commission had a less felicitous outcome. In<br />
1958, Mark Rothko was asked to create a series<br />
of paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant in<br />
New York’s Seagram Building, designed by Mies<br />
van der Rohe. Ambivalent from the outset, Rothko<br />
(presciently) ensured that his contract would<br />
allow him to back out of the deal and recover his<br />
paintings if necessary. Rothko struggled to realise<br />
his vision for the series and sought inspiration<br />
on a trip to Italy. “I realized that I was much<br />
influenced subconsciously by Michelangelo’s<br />
walls in the staircase room of the Medicean<br />
Library,” he said. On returning to New York, the<br />
artist dined at the Four Seasons with his wife to<br />
get a feel for the space where the murals would<br />
be exhibited. Far from acting as an incentive, the<br />
experience reinforced his disdain for capitalist<br />
values and, that same evening, he cancelled the<br />
commission, declaring, “anybody who will eat that<br />
kind of food for those kinds of prices will never<br />
look at a painting of mine.”<br />
86 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Above: Installation shot of Paula Rego’s Crivelli’s Garden (1990–1) at the National Gallery of London’s exhibition by the same name<br />
© Paula Rego, photo by The National Gallery, London<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 87
Above: Carlo Crivelli, 1491,<br />
Madonna of the Swallow,<br />
altarpiece from S. Francesco dei<br />
Zoccolanti, Matelica,<br />
The National Gallery, London,<br />
photo by The National Gallery,<br />
London<br />
Paula Rego was similarly ambivalent when she<br />
was asked to become the first participant in the<br />
National Gallery’s Associate Artist programme<br />
which would lead to the Crivelli commission. She<br />
initially declined the offer explaining that, as the<br />
Gallery’s collection was so male dominated, there<br />
was not a lot she could do with it. Then, a week<br />
later, she reversed course and said that, because<br />
the collection was so male dominated, she would<br />
absolutely be able to find things there to work<br />
with. As for the restaurant commission, Rego<br />
understood the irony, as a woman artist, of being<br />
shown in that space, as opposed to the collection<br />
upstairs. But she relished the idea of ‘sneaking<br />
in’ through the back door, the kitchen door,<br />
to counteract the overwhelmingly masculine<br />
influence of the gallery experience which, on<br />
past visits, had left her feeling queasy. Rego was<br />
given studio space in The National Gallery for<br />
two years, beginning in January 1990. In addition<br />
to the restaurant commission, her residency also<br />
resulted in an exhibition, Tales of the National<br />
Gallery, which was presented in the Sunley Room<br />
(December 1991-March 1992).<br />
Crivelli’s Garden, which would be Rego’s largest<br />
ever public commission, hung in the dining room<br />
for 30 years – until it was taken down to facilitate<br />
the ongoing renovation of the Sainsbury Wing.<br />
Happily, it was not consigned to storage but earlier<br />
this year became the focal point of an exhibition<br />
located in the central part of the Gallery. It was<br />
displayed together with the work from which<br />
its name derives, Carlo Crivelli’s Madonna of<br />
the Swallow (after 1490). Like Rothko, Rego<br />
found inspiration in a Renaissance master. “The<br />
opportunity to subvert the male gaze inherent<br />
to the history of painting was one too tantalising<br />
for Paula to resist,” says the exhibition’s curator<br />
Priyesh Mistry.<br />
Rego’s mural-like work, painted on five<br />
canvases, depicts a series of spaces, delineated<br />
by columns, archways and staircases. They<br />
are decorated with blue and white tiles and<br />
populated almost exclusively with female figures<br />
in various groupings and a range of sizes. The<br />
figures are mostly clothed in muted browns and<br />
greys, colours chosen deliberately so as not to<br />
overwhelm the restaurant setting. The scene<br />
shifts from one panel to the next, disappearing<br />
around corners and fading into distant seascapes.<br />
Its characters represent women from myths,<br />
fables and biblical stories, as well as people from<br />
Rego’s life, including women who were working<br />
at the Gallery during her residency.<br />
At first glance, it is not easy to see the connection<br />
between Rego’s work and the Crivelli altarpiece.<br />
The Madonna of the Swallow, created for the<br />
Odoni family chapel in the Franciscan church at<br />
Matelica in the Marche region of Italy, depicts the<br />
Virgin Mary and the Christ Child, together with<br />
Saints Jerome and Sebastian. The choice of saints<br />
reflects the interests of the painting’s patrons,<br />
one a theologian, the other a soldier. In the<br />
predella, on which the painting ‘rests’, those two<br />
saints appear again, along with Saint Catherine of<br />
Alexandra and Saint George. Saints Jerome and<br />
88 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Catherine represent theological learning. Saint<br />
Sebastian, the patron saint of soldiers, is joined<br />
by Saint George, another military saint. Crivelli<br />
has used the common Renaissance technique<br />
of expanding the stories of the figures in the<br />
altarpiece with narrative scenes in the predella<br />
providing details of their lives.<br />
According to Mistry, Rego spent hours in<br />
the company of then-curator Colin Wiggins,<br />
soaking up the Gallery’s extensive collection of<br />
Renaissance works, “talking about the artworks,<br />
picking out details, perhaps laughing about them<br />
and discussing them in different ways. And I think<br />
they would often return to Crivelli,” says Mistry.<br />
“He is a painter that appeals to so many artists<br />
because his figuration and his way of depicting<br />
space is so peculiar. And what’s really amazing<br />
about Crivelli is his linear perspective, which<br />
recedes far into the distance.” Mistry points out<br />
the architectural features of the predella panel<br />
showing Saint Sebastian being shot with arrows.<br />
“There is something interesting about the way<br />
Crivelli is able to build a world that you feel that<br />
you can enter.” This, he explains, is what created<br />
the stage for Crivelli’s Garden. Rego “imagined<br />
creating another kind of complex, quite mazelike<br />
garden for her to host women saints, for the<br />
women to occupy these spaces and to be able<br />
to tell their stories.” The scale of the painting<br />
certainly allows the viewer to enter into that<br />
space, especially in the exhibition setting.<br />
The work also celebrates the tradition of<br />
storytelling with which Rego grew up in her native<br />
Portugal. “Crivelli’s Garden is quite identifiably<br />
set within a Portuguese garden, by virtue of the<br />
distinctive blue and white tiles which you see<br />
almost everywhere in Portugal,” Mistry points<br />
out. “The tiles are significant because they<br />
hold stories within the images that they depict,<br />
adding another layer of narrative.” Rego had a<br />
Catholic upbringing and, in addition to religious<br />
stories, she absorbed folklore from her aunt<br />
and grandmother. She had conducted extensive<br />
research into fairy tales and fables from around<br />
the world, all of which fed into her artistic practice.<br />
Among the references immediately evident in<br />
Crivelli’s Garden are Aesop’s ‘The tortoise and<br />
the hare’ and ‘The ant and the grasshopper’ at<br />
the base of the fountain in the first panel. In the<br />
next panel the mythological ‘Leda and the Swan’<br />
adorn a column. The thirteenth century treatise<br />
The Golden Legend became another resource for<br />
Rego in preparing for the commission. Used by<br />
many of the same masters whose works are found<br />
in the Gallery, this collection of biographies of<br />
Christian saints provided a tangible connection<br />
to artists of the past.<br />
On the right-hand side of the painting, two<br />
women are engaged in a private conversation.<br />
The older, taller woman is passing on a secret to<br />
the woman in white, her message hidden behind<br />
her raised hand and the intimacy of the moment<br />
Above: Carlo Crivelli, 1491, Predella of Madonna of the Swallow, altarpiece from S. Francesco dei Zoccolanti, Matelica, The National Gallery, London.<br />
Photo by The National Gallery, London<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 89
conveyed by her other hand gripping the arm of<br />
her younger companion. A small figure in the<br />
corner of the panel clothed in animal skin and<br />
holding a lamb (attributes of John the Baptist)<br />
gives us a clue to the protagonists. This is a<br />
version of the Visitation, a meeting between the<br />
Virgin Mary, then pregnant with Jesus, and her<br />
cousin Elizabeth (then in her eighties), pregnant<br />
with John the Baptist. This pivotal event, marking<br />
the transition from the Old to the New Testament,<br />
is often depicted with the two women bathed in<br />
supernatural light, but here, as Mistry comments,<br />
“Rego renders it almost ordinary … a private<br />
matter, a secret of concern shared between two<br />
relatives.” In Rego’s hands it becomes a relatable<br />
moment: two women who have found themselves<br />
pregnant in unexpected circumstances. No<br />
wonder they have secrets to share!<br />
Rego called the diminutive character in the<br />
painting’s lower right corner its ‘anchor figure’.<br />
Also known as ‘the reader’, she looks out from<br />
the canvas rather than at the book in her lap,<br />
whose pages are left blank. A beautifully executed<br />
pencil drawing of this figure was included in the<br />
exhibition, along with several other preparatory<br />
drawings, and the care that Rego took over this<br />
one in particular is evident. With her dark hair,<br />
direct gaze and head tilted toward the painting, the<br />
reader could be a substitute for Rego, inviting the<br />
viewer to take in the dramas unfolding around her.<br />
In fact, she was modelled on Ailsa Bhattacharya<br />
(also the model for the young girl painting the<br />
snake), one of several members of the National<br />
Gallery’s education team who Rego invited to sit<br />
for her. “Paula based the characters in Crivelli’s<br />
Garden on women that surrounded her in her<br />
life, and used their characters or the way that she<br />
perceived these people to inform which roles they<br />
would take within the painting,” says Mistry.<br />
The book on the reader’s lap recalls Rego’s<br />
preoccupation with fairy tales and storytelling.<br />
For Mistry, the reader is “a nod to the power<br />
inherent in stories that are passed down through<br />
the matriarchal lineage. Under Salazar’s regime<br />
in Portugal where Paula grew up, women didn’t<br />
have many rights, but there was an extraordinary<br />
resilience within the Portuguese women, and the<br />
communication of stories from one generation<br />
to the next allowed this form of resilience to<br />
continue.” It is also tempting to interpret the<br />
90 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
ook’s blank pages as symbolic of the unwritten<br />
stories of women throughout the ages, and<br />
perhaps especially the stories of women artists.<br />
Elsewhere in the painting, a young and<br />
troubled-looking Judith deposits what we assume<br />
to be Holofernes’ head into an apron held open<br />
by her maid, a sleeping Samson is oblivious to<br />
his fate as Delilah looms over him, and virtuous<br />
Martha efficiently wields her broom while her<br />
penitent sister Mary sits below her on the steps,<br />
adopting the pose of Rodin’s Thinker. Rego<br />
focuses on the moments before or after the<br />
dramatic action, forcing us to think about what<br />
is going on in the minds of these protagonists.<br />
Among the more obscure figures is Saint Mary<br />
of Egypt, the figure in the central panel, next to a<br />
lion. Like Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt was a<br />
‘fallen woman’ who retreated to the desert after<br />
she had renounced her life of sin. Rego portrays<br />
her, says Mistry, as “this aged woman, covered by<br />
a wealth of matted hair, almost like Cousin It from<br />
the Addams Family.” Ancient sources recount that,<br />
on her death, the monk who was struggling to<br />
dig her grave under the burning sun was given<br />
assistance by a passing lion, thus acknowledging<br />
her repentance and conferring nobility on her.<br />
In the preface to the exhibition’s catalogue,<br />
Paula Rego’s son, Nick Willing, recounts, “I<br />
remember my mother being told more than once<br />
that a great male artist could paint the female<br />
experience as well as, if not better than, a woman.”<br />
Rego would not have needed any help to prove<br />
the fallacy of this claim; it is simply impossible<br />
to imagine a male artist having created Crivelli’s<br />
Garden with its multi-layered narratives portrayed<br />
from a distinctively female perspective, its<br />
symbolism, the rich cast of female characters,<br />
intergenerational relationships representing the<br />
transmission of knowledge – from mother to<br />
daughter, teacher to student, and the divulging<br />
of secrets from one expectant mother to another.<br />
Having initially found a way into the National<br />
Gallery’s patriarchal collection from a side door,<br />
Rego’s work will eventually be exhibited in a<br />
more permanent place in the National Gallery<br />
when it reopens in 2024. Sadly, Rego died before<br />
the exhibition was mounted, but Mistry relates<br />
that, “she was thrilled at the prospect of being<br />
able to take her rebellious garden out and show<br />
it alongside one of the old master paintings<br />
within the collection.” While her work may owe<br />
a debt to the old masters, her contemporary<br />
retelling of timeless stories is uniquely her own.<br />
MARGIE MACKINNON<br />
Curator Priyesh Mistry is Associate Curator of<br />
Modern & Contemporary Projects at the National<br />
Gallery, London where he works towards an<br />
ambitious programme to integrate contemporary<br />
art within the context of the museum and its<br />
historic collections.<br />
Left and above: Details from<br />
Paula Rego’s Crivelli’s Garden<br />
(1990–1). Presented by English<br />
Estates, 1991 © Paula Rego,<br />
photo by The National Gallery,<br />
London<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 91
Above: Cover of Flavia Frigeri’s new book featuring art by Jann Haworth and Liberty Blake<br />
92 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Women at Work<br />
Portraits in Words and Pictures<br />
A new publication from the National Portrait<br />
AGallery, AWomen at Work, 1900 to Now, ‘celebrates<br />
Athe professional accomplishments of women<br />
Awho have made their mark on history because of<br />
Atheir determination, talent and unique approach<br />
Ato life.’ It begins with tennis player Charlotte<br />
ACooper who, at the 1900 Paris Games, became the<br />
Afirst female Olympic champion in an individual<br />
Aevent, winning the Ladies’ Singles and the Mixed<br />
ADoubles titles. She was renowned for her mental<br />
strength and ability at the net and was one of<br />
the few women to serve overhead. Deaf from<br />
the age of 26, she reached the singles final at<br />
Wimbledon 11 times, winning in 1895, 1896, 1898,<br />
1901, and 1908. Her victory at almost 38 years<br />
of age in 1908 makes her the oldest woman to<br />
claim the title and one of only a few to do so<br />
after having children. She is memorialised at the<br />
tennis museum at Wimbledon by a single object:<br />
a silver dressing-table powder compact awarded<br />
as ‘3rd prize’ in 1912.<br />
The volume ends with the <strong>2023</strong> unveiling of the<br />
seven-panel mural Work in Progress, which was<br />
created by artists Jann Haworth and Liberty Blake<br />
in collaboration with communities throughout<br />
the United Kingdom. The mural showcases 130<br />
inspiring women who, over the course of many<br />
centuries and across numerous disciplines, have<br />
made significant contributions to British history<br />
and culture. A blank silhouette in the seventh<br />
panel represents the many women, past and<br />
future, who also deserve to be recognised. Just<br />
like this mural, women’s history is a ‘work in<br />
progress’, with the stories of those who have<br />
been omitted or written out still to be told.<br />
In addition to verbal portraits of individual<br />
women, who range from a little known secret<br />
agent to Royal Academician Tracey Emin, the<br />
book includes insightful essays on the challenges<br />
faced by women who worked as social activists,<br />
photographers, scientists, writers, artists and<br />
designers. Editor Flavia Frigeri is quick to point<br />
out that “while a deliberate choice has been<br />
made to focus on women who have joined the<br />
paid labour force, this is in no way meant to<br />
disavow the work that women do within the<br />
household … [where] women still shoulder the<br />
majority of unpaid domestic labour, irrespective<br />
of how much they earn.”<br />
In her essay, ‘Hidden Heroines of Design’,<br />
Alice Rawsthorn provides a literal example of a<br />
woman being airbrushed out of the story. She<br />
recounts that when a group photograph of British<br />
architects was taken to promote a 2014 BBC<br />
documentary series called The Brits Who Built<br />
the Modern World, it included one woman, Patty<br />
Hopkins, along with five of her male colleagues.<br />
When it came to promoting the third episode of<br />
the series, the network, without any explanation,<br />
simply deleted Hopkins from the photograph.<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 93
Above: Tracey Emin’s<br />
The Doors, <strong>2023</strong>,<br />
National Portrait Gallery,<br />
London © Olivier Hess<br />
“The lady vanished,” says Rawsthorn, “leaving<br />
five white cis men to represent the BBC’s choice<br />
of the nation’s most influential architects.” It is<br />
worth noting that this occurred less than ten<br />
years ago when it might have been expected that<br />
the programme makers would have been aware<br />
that such narrow representation would not reflect<br />
well on them, nor fairly represent the profession<br />
at the time.<br />
Women have had to overcome barriers to entry<br />
in almost every profession. In the design world,<br />
mentorship and collaboration with experienced<br />
colleagues are necessary for establishing the<br />
credibility to secure commissions and to gain<br />
access to production facilities. When the<br />
gatekeepers are men with little inclination to<br />
admit women, it becomes difficult to find a way<br />
into the profession. As an exception to this,<br />
Rawsthorn cites the “glorious anomaly of a group<br />
of women’s suffrage campaigners during the<br />
late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.”<br />
Among them were cousins Agnes and Rhoda<br />
Garrett who, having finally managed to secure<br />
apprenticeships with an architect, were then<br />
thwarted by being banned from ‘unladylike’<br />
building sites. They chose a new tack by opening<br />
their own interior design company which<br />
promoted a style of decoration that would make<br />
it easier for women to clean their homes, freeing<br />
up time for other, more interesting, activities.<br />
Among the Garretts earliest clients were Agnes’<br />
two sisters, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (Britain’s<br />
first qualified female doctor) and Millicent<br />
Fawcett (a suffrage campaigner). These women,<br />
in turn, recommended the design firm to their<br />
friends, including Fanny Wilkinson who became<br />
the first woman to practise landscape design in<br />
the UK. Agnes went on to design the interior<br />
of the New Hospital for Women as well as the<br />
Ladies’ Residential Chambers which provided<br />
accommodation for single professional women<br />
in London.<br />
94 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
Above: Mary Somerville by James Rannie Swinton, 1848<br />
© National Portrait Gallery, London<br />
Right: Agnes Garrett by Olive Edis. c. 1900s<br />
© National Portrait Gallery, London<br />
Design became an important element in the<br />
cause of women’s suffrage. The purple, green and<br />
white sashes worn by suffrage advocates created<br />
an easily recognisable visual identity. This colourcoded<br />
identity was used in creating the Holloway<br />
Brooch, designed by leading suffrage campaigner<br />
Sylvia Pankhurst, and awarded to militants upon<br />
their release from Holloway Prison. Ethel Smyth,<br />
composer of ‘The March of Women,’ would<br />
become one such recipient. (See feature on p. 20).<br />
As Rawsthorn explains, “By constructing a circular<br />
economy of clients, funders and collaborators<br />
within the suffrage movement, Agnes and<br />
Rhoda Garrett, Fanny Wilkinson, Sylvia Pankhurst<br />
… [and others] circumvented the male design<br />
establishment.” Their imagination, ingenuity and<br />
courage continue to serve as an example for<br />
women today.<br />
In her essay on early women scientists, Emma<br />
Chapman notes that, when given the task of<br />
drawing a scientist, the great majority of children<br />
– whether girls or boys – draw a picture of a man.<br />
She then points out the irony of this situation,<br />
given that the word ‘scientist’ was invented<br />
specifically to describe work that had been<br />
carried out by a woman. That woman, the Scottish<br />
polymath Mary Somerville (1780-1872), was a<br />
highly respected mathematician and philosopher<br />
who wrote books on a wide range of subjects. In<br />
his review of Somerville’s second book On the<br />
Connexion of the Physical Sciences, historian<br />
and noted neologist William Whewell could not<br />
compare her to other ‘men of science’ and so he<br />
coined ‘scientist’ as a term that allowed for the<br />
possibility of both men and women contributing<br />
to scientific knowledge.<br />
Despite her accomplishments and renown, Mary<br />
Somerville was ineligible for membership of any of<br />
the professional bodies that regulated education,<br />
publications and academic appointments within<br />
the sciences. The Royal Astronomical Society’s<br />
charter, for example, referred to members using<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 95
Above, left:Sir William Herschel and Caroline Herschel. William<br />
polishing a telescope element, probably a mirror and Caroline<br />
Herschel adds lubricant. Colour lithograph by A. Diethe, ca. 1896.<br />
Image: Wikimedia Commons<br />
Above, right: Portrait of Hertha Ayrton, Girton College, University of<br />
Cambridge; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation<br />
Opposite page: Tennis player Charlotte Cooper<br />
© International Tennis Hall of Fame<br />
male pronouns, and this was sufficient to deny<br />
women full membership, although Somerville<br />
was made an honorary member in 1835. Other<br />
female scientists suffered similar indignities.<br />
Caroline Herschel’s astronomical discoveries won<br />
her the RAS’s Gold Medal in 1828, but she was not<br />
permitted to present the results of her work to<br />
the Society. That honour was given to her brother,<br />
William. Hertha Ayrton, who gained international<br />
recognition for her research into artificial lighting,<br />
was unsuccessful in her bid for membership of the<br />
Royal Society because, as a married woman, she<br />
had no personhood under law.<br />
Considering that these and many other<br />
women have gone largely unrecognised,<br />
despite their significant contributions to<br />
96 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
scientific advancement, it is not surprising that,<br />
even now, children are more likely to picture<br />
men, rather than women, as scientists. Female<br />
role models are essential for girls to imagine<br />
themselves in these positions. The National<br />
Portrait Gallery is working to redress the gender<br />
imbalance in its collection by filling in the gaps<br />
in representation of women. Women at Work<br />
provides a fascinating glimpse of just some of<br />
the women in Britain’s past whose achievements<br />
deserve to be celebrated. It is important not<br />
only to read about them but also to come face<br />
to face with their images in the museum. As<br />
schoolchildren wend their way through the<br />
halls of the Gallery, it is vital for boys and girls<br />
to see that just as many women as men have<br />
shaped the nation’s artistic, intellectual, social<br />
and political history.<br />
One of the first women’s colleges at Oxford<br />
University, established in 1879, was named after<br />
the first ‘scientist’, Mary Somerville. Perhaps<br />
Wimbledon could consider naming one of their<br />
courts after the remarkable Charlotte Cooper,<br />
whose record string of eight trips to the<br />
Wimbledon finals lasted 90 years, until Martina<br />
Navratilova earned her ninth finals appearance<br />
in a row in 1990.<br />
MARGIE MACKINNON<br />
Flavia Frigeri (ed.), Women at Work, 1900 to Now,<br />
National Portrait Gallery Publications, <strong>2023</strong><br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 97
Two New Books for 2024…<br />
PALACE WOMEN<br />
Creators of Culture in Florence<br />
Eleonora di Toledo’s purchase of an Oltrarno home and the<br />
emergence of Florence’s artisan district. Cristina di Lorena’s creation<br />
of a Medici wonderland at Villa La Petraia. Vittoria della Rovere’s role<br />
in supporting women’s art at Poggio Imperiale. Anna Maria Luisa de’<br />
Medici’s stroke of legal genius which linked Florence to an eternal<br />
Renaissance. Elizabeth Browning’s perspective from the windows of<br />
Casa Guidi, where she called for freedom and claimed it for herself.<br />
Fifteen women photographers and eight contemporary artisans<br />
rediscover female influencers in their Tuscan palaces, villas or<br />
garden oases and produce artisanal works or pictures celebrating<br />
their untold legacies. From the former convent of San Francesco di<br />
Paola, to the once-hunting lodge of Isabella de’ Medici, this keepsake<br />
volume explores multiple venues, where ‘palace women’ – from<br />
the sixteenth century to the present day – have carved their place<br />
in history as creators of culture, giving new meaning to the everrelevant<br />
aspiration: ‘a room of one’s own’.<br />
Photos: Gruppo Fotografico Il Cupolone<br />
Author/Editor: Linda Falcone<br />
The Florentine Press, <strong>2023</strong><br />
ARTEMISIA UPCLOSE<br />
A day in the life of Artemisia... today<br />
Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Inclination (1616) tributes the<br />
genius of Michelangelo, gives a nod to Galileo, and bears a striking<br />
resemblance to Artemisia herself. During its conservation at Casa<br />
Buonarroti, the canvas was removed from its ceiling heights, and<br />
placed at eye-level in the Florentine home-museum where Artemisia<br />
worked while five months pregnant, receiving a salary three times<br />
that of her male counterparts, and earning the esteem of her patron,<br />
Michelangelo the Younger.<br />
Artemisia UpClose documents this once-in-a-lifetime encounter<br />
and celebrates a project that encompasses research, restoration<br />
and an exhibition, in which world-renowned curators, conservators,<br />
philanthropists, art historians, restoration scientists and the artloving<br />
public come together to discover the untold mysteries of an<br />
extraordinary artist and her censored artwork, painted over with<br />
draping not long after its creation, now unveiled – virtually – for<br />
the world.<br />
Authors: Cristina Acidini, Alessandro Cecchi, Elizabeth Cropper,<br />
Mary Garrard, Margie MacKinnon, Elizabeth Wicks, Linda Falcone (ed.)<br />
The Florentine Press, <strong>2023</strong><br />
98 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>
A day in the life...<br />
Crafters Jane Harman and Ilaria Ceccarelli from the collective<br />
‘Intreccio Creativo’ meet up for work at Harman’s studio in<br />
Pelago to discuss the installation Tablescape for the Palace<br />
Women exhibition at Cultural Association Il Palmerino (October-<br />
December <strong>2023</strong>). Creativity always starts with conversation!<br />
Photo by Viola Parretti, Gruppo Fotografico Il Cupolone<br />
Front cover:<br />
A Portal at Villa La Petraia by Viola Paretti<br />
© Gruppo Fotografico Il Cupolone and Calliope Arts Archive<br />
Back cover:<br />
Wanda and Marion Wulz pictured with a friend while leafing through a book (c. 1920)<br />
by Carlo Wulz © Archivi Alinari, Florence<br />
<strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong> • Restoration Conversations 99
100 Restoration Conversations • <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2023</strong>