If you bring a budding painter with you on vacation to Tuscany or if you book a villa in Florence, in particular, you’ll have no shortage of incredible and famous works of art to take in. If you are simply an art-lover yourself, you’ll have endless iconic pieces to tick of your bucket list. However, if you want to particularly impress and inspire any girls in your group or you simply want to seek out the rare examples of female artists among the countless famous men then you might find yourself a little stuck. There are works by these pioneering women to be found but to ensure you can add them to your itinerary, over the next few weeks we aim to highlight just a few of some of the must-see examples...
Today’s work by a female artist of the Renaissance that you should make a point see if you have booked a vacation rental in Florence, the birthplace of the movement, is...
The Last Supper by Plautilla Nelli
This large-scale oil on canvas can be found in the refectory of Santa Maria Novella, already famous for its lovely church and the institution’s long-standing and renowned pharmacy where beauty products once coveted by European queens can still be purchased. Originally created for the convent of Santa Caterina da Siena, which was Nelli’s home institution and was located a mile away, the piece was saved after Napoleon took Italy and the convent was closed before being ultimately destroyed. In 2019, the work was pulled from storage and put on display for visitors to the Santa Maria Novella church museum.
Notable for its own impressive qualities, the piece is also the first example of a female painter’s depiction of this subject at this scale, a scale at which it was already very uncommon for women of the time to paint.
It is also Nelli’s only known signed work, assuring its attribution alongside two other works despite the fact that we know her to have been a prolific artist in her time. We know she had many patrons (with a good number of female patrons among them) and completed a great number of both large-scale works and miniatures. Nelli is, furthermore, one of just four female artists listed in Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, a seminal contemporary text.
This piece showcases many of Nelli’s distinctive artistic traits that are worth noticing and discussing if you find yourself visiting during your stay in one of our luxury villas in Florence:
1. Enjoy the beautifully vibrant colours and lovely jewel tones.
2. Admire the vivid emotions displayed on the faces of her figures in this active and tense scene. The Last Supper is a subject that has always allowed artists to showcase their ability to tell a story and play out action in a still image for an audience. Nelli was especially talented in this regard and it is noted that this was heightened in her work, setting her apart from the artists who she copied from and learned from as a self-taught painter.
3. Notice the fact that her male figures can be described as somewhat soft or feminine in appearance. This underlines that, while she was supported in her ambitions to be a painter by her convent and given materials and time to work on her craft, she did not get to have a formal education or to learn by drawing from real models, unlike her male peers.
So, if you are enjoying an artistic visit to Florence during a holiday in Tuscany, be sure to add this piece and this stop to your itinerary.