Plautilla Nelli: Art and Devotion in Savonarola's Footsteps / Arte e devozione sulle orme di Savonarola by Fausta Navarro (review)

There is no small irony in the fact that the Uffizi Gallery in Florence has mounted its first-ever one-woman show. Women have been crucial in establishing the Medici collection that populates that gallery and keeping it intact in Florence. Some of the Uffizi's best known paintings, for instance, Titian's Venus of Urbinoand works by Piero della Francesca, Raphael, and others, came to Florence in the seventeenth century as part of the dowry of Vittoria della Rovere, bride of Francesco II de' Medici. Then, in the mid-eighteenth century, Grand Duke Gian Gastone, the last male member of the family, died without issue. Enter his sister, Anna Maria Luisa, Electress Palatine. While the rule of Tuscany passed to another house, the Electress engineered what is called the "Family Pact," ensuring that the art collection would remain in Florence, open to the public, instead of being transferred to another European capital. More recently, Jane Fortune, founder and chair of the Advancing Women Artists Foundation, a supporter of this exhibition, tenaciously prodded Florentine museums to bring out of storage works by women artists. The focus of this exhibition, Suor Plautilla Nelli (1524–88), heralded as the first Florentine woman artist, has long been in Fortune's sights. Fausta Navarro, who curated the show and edited the bilingual catalog, sought to present Nelli's work in the context of what convents in Florence and nearby Prato produced and displayed. ¹Several decades of archival research across the disciplines have greatly expanded our knowledge of convent culture in general; this artistic output does not readily fit into the construct of so-called masterworks that informs displays in museums like the Uffizi.

A Dominican nun at Santa Caterina da Siena, located close to the Savonarolan male community of San Marco in Florence, Suor Plautilla was mentioned in Giorgio Vasari's Florence-centric Lives of the Artistsand other contemporary histories. Nelli scholar Catherine Turrill Lupi provides a substantive essay on the basics of Suor Plautilla's biography that also assesses her place in the subsequent literature. Although Nelli was apparently a prolific painter, scholars have focused until relatively recently only on her large paintings: a Last Supperfor her convent (now at Santa Maria Novella); three altarpieces; a Pentecostin Perugia; a Depositionfor the public church at her own convent (now at the Museum of San Marco); and an Annunciation(original location unknown, now Uffizi deposits). Lupi furnishes a model exploration of the ways in which Nelli's style has been interpreted: for instance, by the mid nineteenth-century Dominican cleric, Vincenzo Marchese, who cited her presumed lack of training and experience as the rationale for what he called her monotonous compositions and effeminate men. Male and female painters alike produced devotional art, which recent scholars, notably Fredrika Jacobs, have assessed positively, emphasizing the market for holy women like Plautilla. There was, in fact, a theorized stile devoto("devout" style), and despite Michelangelo's supposed disregard of Flemish painting as appealing "to women, especially to the very old and the very young, and also to monks and nuns and to certain noblemen who have no sense of true harmony," production of devotional images was a big business: as Vasari said of Nelli, her pictures were "in the houses of gentlemen throughout Florence." ²

Fausta Navarro's essay focuses on Nelli's depictions of Saint Caterina de' Ricci (1522–90), another Dominican nun in a sister convent in Prato. Renowned for her mystical experiences, Caterina attracted attention from Florentine noblewomen and influenced powerful men, as did many beatas(holy women) elsewhere. Navarro discusses multiple profile portraits of Ricci by Plautilla and her workshop, some of which Navarro herself discovered (Fig. 1). Technical analyses, supported by conservator Rossella Lari in her essay on Nelli...