Episode #107: Bits of "Breaking Barriers": Plautilla Nelli (Season 12, Episode 8)
For this season of ArtCurious, I’m doing something a little bit different. I’m treating you to renditions of eight of my favorite segments from Breaking Barriers: Women Artists of Renaissance Europe, my online course found exclusively at avid.fm. Every other week through January, I’ll share selections from Breaking Barriers, and encourage you that if you like it, you can purchase the whole course. Today: it’s our finale! Another day, another nun! But Plautilla Nelli’s story is an interesting one, involving a great lost-and-found twist, and the opportunity to discuss how some artists can be “forgotten” and then rediscovered. From Breaking Barriers: Women of Renaissance Europe, please enjoy “Plautilla Nelli: Lost and Found.”
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Episode Transcript
Hi there, wonderful listeners! Welcome back to the ArtCurious podcast, where we explore the unexpected, slightly odd, and strangely wonderful in art history. Welcome to the season finale of our very unique season-- I hope that you have enjoyed it, and that you’ve stayed with me this whole time. As you know,. Instead of releasing our usual spate of new episodes, I’ve been taking a little time off to research a new book--yay!-- so to save myself a huge workload and to spare my sanity, I’ve been sharing eight of my favorite segments from my audio course, Breaking Barriers: Women Artists of Renaissance Europe. Breaking Barriers is a 21-day course, meaning that you get essentially a mini-episode of ArtCurious every day for three weeks straight, and the unique opportunity to learn about some artists that you may have never heard of before--and they are likely to blow your mind, or become your next favorite artist. That’s three weeks, with every day featuring the story of a new Renaissance painter, sculptor, miniature maker-- from Sofonisba Anguissola and Marietta Robusti to lesser-known artists like Plautilla Nelli and Levina Teerlinc, this course will lead you through the lives and careers of groundbreaking women who’ve made their marks on art history. This evergreen course is all about learning for fun, no tests, no papers, no quizzes, just cool content that you can access on your own time so you can learn at your own pace. Register for the course and start learning today at Avid.fm/jennifer.
Today, we’re talking not only about another fascinating artist, but one whose story involves a great lost-and-found twist, and also provides us with the opportunity to discuss how some artists can be “forgotten” and then rediscovered. Welcome to the story of Plautilla Nelli.
Plautilla Nelli is another one of those artist-nuns living and working in Renaissance Florence, like Maria Ormani who came before her, whose fascinating works we discussed previously in the Breaking Barriers course. And like Ormani, and Catherine of Bologna, and many other women of the cloth--Plautilla Nelli came from a wealthy family who had a long history as fabric merchants. She was born Pulisena Margherita Nelli-- that’s her given name--and her family was one of those big-name aristocrats of Florence, like the Medici, and like the Albizzi, whom we mentioned in our last class. But in contrast to the Medici family, for example, we don’t know too terribly much about Pulisena’s early years or her family life. But we do know that she officially joined the convent of Santa Caterina di Cafaggio in Florence at age fourteen, becoming a sister of the Dominican order and taking on a new religious name-- Suor Plautilla. Oftentimes joining a religious order meant that expensive dowries for a wealthy aristocrat’s daughter could be avoided--after all, fees to enter a convent were certainly more achievable, even for the richest of the rich, rather than marrying off your kids. So Pulisena became Plautilla (and her sister did the same, by the way, becoming known as Suor Petronilla) , and Plautilla forged a new identity and a new life.
In our previous classes on Maria Ormani and on St. Catherine of Bologna, we spoke about the ways that these religious women created art-- working oftentimes for the good of the religious order where they lived, by illuminating manuscripts or producing textiles to support the convent or associated religious orders, for example. Such women also occasionally completed projects on commission for wealthy patrons. This was certainly the case for Plautilla Nelli, but there was an extra reason behind her artistic projects, too. The Dominican Convent to which Plautilla belonged was founded by Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican friar who would later turn out to be a rather polarizing figure of Renaissance religious history. One of the things that Savonarola recommended of the Dominican nuns was that they should take up drawing and devotional painting as a way to avoid the deadly sin of sloth-- because idle hands are the devil’s playground, right? So the Dominican sisters of Santa Caterina took up this call and faithfully formed this little community of religious artists. But that meant that most of these women just learned on the fly-- and Plautilla Nelli was no exception. She was basically self-taught, learning by doing what many artists do, even now-- studying the artists who came before, and copying their works to learn the basics of artistic technique. Some of Plautilla’s favorites were Andrea del Sarto and Agnolo Bronzino, Florentines themselves, but her favorite artist was Fra Bartolomeo, a Florentine monk also associated with the Dominicans whose innovative draftsmanship and emotive religious scenes would end up majorly influencing Plautilla’s style. Fra Bartolomeo died in 1517, which was a few years before Plautilla Nelli was born, but his style and subject matter loomed large for her. She have learned of his works via one of his pupils, another Dominican monk--and, according to the late writer and philanthropist Jane Fortune, one of the foremost modern champions of the works of Plautilla Nelli, this monk-- the Dominican who introduced Nelli to Fra Bartolomeo--left behind documentation noting that he ended up giving Fra Bartolomeo’s surviving drawings to, quote, “a nun who paints” in the convent of Santa Caterina.” Unquote. No doubt that this was Plautilla--a fervent admirer of Bartolomeo’s, and, subsequently, a collector of his works, too.
Soon enough, Nelli was gaining attention for her artworks--for how well-made they were-- and also, perhaps, gaining attention because of the novelty factor of herself as a self-made nun artist. Thus, she quickly began amassing patrons outside of religious establishments-- and thus it’s probably not much of a surprise that our friend Giorgio Vasari, that documenter of Renaissance Art, caught wind of Nelli’s career. He wrote about her in his second edition of The Lives, saying, quote, “in the houses of gentlemen throughout Florence, there are so many pictures by [Plautilla Nelli] that it would be tedious to attempt to speak of them all.” Unquote. Obviously, she and her works made an impression.
There are a few interesting ways that Plautilla Nelli separated herself from her fellow nun-artists, and from many other female artists in Florence during the Renaissance. The first is that she emphasized the most exciting moment of each of her painted scenes in a way that surely presages the coming of the Baroque period in art, which is all about drama-- like in her painting, Lamentation with Saints, where Jane Fortune points to the fact that you can see the female saints show physical manifestations of their immense sadness over the death of Christ, showcasing red-rimmed eyes and tears pouring down their cheeks. Another way that Plautilla Nelli differentiated herself is that she worked big. Really big. While she also created the kinds of small-scale work that you’d expect from many artists of the time, like miniatures, drawings, and illustrations for manuscripts, she also created large-scale paintings meant to fit major spaces in churches, monasteries, and convents. And this wasn’t the norm for female artists of any kind during this time, to work so big--let alone for a nun to do so, when we know that they typically created works that were much smaller in scope. But Plautilla Nelli did both-- big and small--but it is her biggest work that rightly gets all the attention today, though not just for its size. Her biggest, and most famed, is her undated work, The Last Supper, made for the refectory, or dining hall, of the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella. If you’re familiar with any image of the Last Supper in art history, surely the one that’ll pop into your mind first is the famed (and feeble) fresco by Leonardo da Vinci in Milan. And it’s not surprising that Leonardo-- someone who was born and raised right outside of Florence proper-- would have opted to paint a scene of the Last Supper, because Florence was really into these scenes , and Florentine artists created their own little cottage industry to fulfill the requests from patrons and religious orders, who frequently commissioned artists to make frescoes or oil panels of this famous New Testament scene for--aptly enough--their dining halls. It wasn’t just an apropos subject matter for these spaces. These Last Supper scenes had a purpose-- a visual reminder of Jesus’s final meal, so that the monks or nuns who are viewing these images will contemplate its ramifications during their own meals. Beginning in the 1300s, artists throughout Florence began creating these works, collectively called Cenacoli, and there are at least eight examples of Last Supper scenes spread all around Florence, with some bigger Renaissance names, like Pietro Perugino and Dominico Ghirlandaio, getting in on the action. So it’s no surprise that Leonardo took this concept with him to Milan. And no surprise, then, too, that Plautilla Nelli was asked to make her own version-- and yet, it is a surprise, because it is the first known painting of the Last Supper to have been created by a female artist. And unlike Leonardo and his contemporaries, Nelli couldn’t really afford the time nor the resources to teach herself how to make works in fresco, which involves painting quickly in wet plaster before the plaster dries, setting the image permanently within. She had already had to teach herself to draw and paint, and she was good at it, so she ended up painting this--her Last Supper-- not in traditional fresco, but in oil on canvas. And it’s a stunning work. It’s big. 7 meters long, or just shy of 23 feet-- Leonardo’s, by the way, is only about 5 feet bigger. So it’s this fascinating rarity: a Last Supper scene that’s not only really large, but done by a woman-- a self-taught nun.
What’s just as fascinating is the journey that this incredible work has taken over the centuries. As we’ve discussed, Plautilla Nelli’s Last Supper was meant, most likely, to follow in that Florentine tradition of decorating refectories, and so Nelli sought to do the same for Santa Caterina. And there, her finished work hung in the relative privacy and quiet of the convent. But then, something interesting happened. In the late 18th century, about 200 years after Plautilla Nelli painted her Last Supper, none other than Napoleon Bonaparte came a-knocking to Florence as part of his imperial expansion. And part of what Napoleon was really jazzed about was going to Italy and emphasizing civic power and duty, rather than religious power and duty, so he opted to, in the words of historian Alan J. Reinerman, quote, “suppress religious orders and advocate for the sale of their properties,” unquote. As you might expect, this rigorous restructuring meant that the Dominican convent of Santa Caterina was shut down--and later demolished entirely. And this is where we stop and thank Plautilla Nelli for not taking the time to learn fresco, because if she had painted her Last Supper in fresco, it would have just been seen as part of a wall in a convent meant for destruction. We might never have known about this work--or even much about Nelli at all--because her most famous work could have been reduced to rubble. But luckily, some thoughtful soul, or souls, removed the canvas from the rectory wall, rolled it up, and sent it into storage at the nearby Basilica of Santa Maria Novella.
In most cases, it’s probable that this would have been the end of the story. But thankfully, in the case of Plautilla Nelli and her Last Supper, it’s not. In the early 2000s, philanthropist Jane Fortune founded an organization called Advancing Women Artists, which was dedicated to the identification, restoration, and exhibition of works by women. And it’s AWA that really put Plautilla Nelli back on the map by funding the in-depth conservation and care of these rare works of art that the world really had forgotten about. After a successful restoration of another painting by Nelli, called Lamentation with Saints, AWA tackled a newly-rediscovered work by the artist-- her Last Supper, found languishing in Santa Maria Novella’s storage. But the rediscovery wasn’t the only surprise. The work itself had another one-- another special and significant element in this rare work of art. The Last Supper is the only work that Plautilla Nelli ever signed, along with an inscription asking viewers to, quote, “pray for the paintress,” unquote. All of this further emphasizes the awe-inspiring fact that it was a woman who created this piece--and, whether intentionally or not--that she placed herself on the same footing as Leonardo, Ghirlandaio, and other male painters from her own city who carried on this tradition of depicting the Last Supper. And now, Nelli’s painting, after several years of restoration, is finally on view at the museum of Santa Maria Novella, where the public has been able to visit it since October 2019.
Plautilla Nelli died in Florence in 1588 at the age of 64, and instead of languishing forever in art-historical obscurity, she’s now back on the front lines of education and appreciation of artists from the Renaissance, receiving further claim as, according to some historians, the first female Renaissance painter of Florence.
I so appreciate you taking the time to listen to ArtCurious today-- thank you so much, and I truly hope that you enjoyed this entire season of the show. I know that it is different than normal, but it means so much to me that you’ve allowed me the flexibility to take a tiny step back. It also sure means a lot to me as an independent creator if you would register for my course, Breaking Barriers: Women Artists of Renaissance Europe. It’s on sale right now, 21 days, learn on your own time and at your own pace, and it’s fun--I promise. No quizzes or grades, either, just learning for the sake of good old fashioned learning! Please register now at avid.fm/jennifer, and not only will you get the entire 21 day course, but you’ll also receive a PDF with every episode featuring the images discussed and a recommended reading list. So again, that’s Breaking Barriers: Women Artists of Renaissance Europe, available now at avid.fm/jennifer.
I’ll be back with you again in two weeks to share another story from Breaking Barriers. Thank you, again, for supporting me while I research my next project--you are awesome. Remember that we’ve got exclusive video content coming at you over on YouTube. So check us out there-the link is in the show notes on your handy-dandy podcast app right now. Stick with me, we’ll be back in the spring with, for real, an all-new spate of episodes. And until then, stay curious!
