Confined to a monastery by her parents, Plautilla Nelli became one of the Renaissance’s few female artists. Her forgotten masterpiece, The Last Supper, has now been resurrected

In a city dripping with Renaissance jewels, the restored Last Supper unveiled last week looks at first glance like just another masterpiece by one of the great artists of the 16th century.

Which it is. But look a little closer, and you notice one astonishing detail – the name on the canvas. The artist who signed it was female. She was Plautilla Nelli: a contemporary of Michelangelo, Titian and Tintoretto; a native of Florence who spent her entire life in the city in which her greatest work has now been rediscovered; a woman who managed to paint at a time when women were effectively forbidden from doing so; and a nun.

Nelli is one of the female painters art history forgot, but 15 years ago Jane Fortune, an American visiting Italy, chanced upon a market-stall book that mentioned a work by a Renaissance woman at the Museum of San Marco. Fortune went to look for the work, The Lamentation – the guard on duty told her no one had ever asked to see it before – and she was captivated. She formed an organisation, Advancing Women Artists, to seek out the work of Nelli and other women who had been written out of art history – and over the years since, about 20 of Nelli’s drawings and paintings have been found languishing in museum storage, or tucked away in dark corners on church walls.

The Last Supper, painted in the 1560s, is Nelli’s masterpiece, and has been undergoing restoration for the past four years. It’s a vast 7x2-metre canvas, and the all-female team responsible for its resurrection hope that it will restore Nelli to the canon of art history, where they believe she belongs. Speaking at a press conference in Florence this week, restorer Rossella Lari said that she had been aware, as she worked, of Nelli’s power as a painter. “She used wide brushstrokes, and she was quite forceful. She paid extraordinary attention to detail – you can see the veins on the apostles’ hands, and the cuticles on their fingernails.” In her article in the catalogue published to mark the unveiling of the painting, Lari describes the work as “a supremely balanced composition”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Before restoration – detail from the Last Supper. Photograph: Rabatti & Domingie

Silvia Colucci, director of the Santa Maria Novella Museum in Florence where the painting will hang, said that Nelli had been “totally forgotten, in oblivion”, which contrasted with how she had been received during her lifetime. “She was very successful in her own day – she was one of very few women mentioned by [the pivotal art historian] Vasari, and in her lifetime her works were much sought after by wealthy Florentines,” she said. “Also, the way she signed the painting – she added the words ‘Pray for the Paintress’ after her name – was an important act of self-affirmation, because she was claiming her status as an artist.”

She was born Polissena Marguerita Nelli in January 1524, the second child of a draper called Piero and his wife Francesca, who lived in the San Felice area of Florence. At the time, about 50% of educated girls in the city were deposited in convents, so that their families did not have to pay dowries – and in 1538 she entered the Dominican convent of Santa Caterina di Cafaggio, becoming Sister Plautilla – a decision that would open the door to a career virtually unheard of for a female in 16th-century Florence.

It was a time of great artistic creation in the city – but membership of the guilds, which licensed practitioners of the arts and provided for them to train and to sell their work, was restricted to men. The only painting that women could do was of miniatures for their own use; the small number of women who broke through the barriers tended to be the daughters of established male artists, whose workshops gave them opportunities for informal instruction.

Nelli, though, was different. “She didn’t work alongside any professional male painter, and she didn’t have any training as an artist,” says Colucci. “She did, however, inherit some drawings from Fra Bartolomeo [a Renaissance artist who died seven years before she was born].” These works, and the study of other pieces such as Franciabigio’s Last Supper at the convent of La Calza in Florence, were invaluable to Nelli in pressing forward with her painting – but essentially, and extraordinarily given the quality of her work, she was self-taught. As indeed was noted by Vasari who devoted a whole passage to her in the second edition (1568) of his essential Renaissance text, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects: he describes her as “beginning little by little to draw and to imitate in colours pictures and paintings by excellent masters”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Restorer Rossella Lari during the restoration of Last Supper. Photograph: Camilla Cheade

At the museum of Santa Maria Novella, Colucci has hung Nelli’s work opposite another rendition of the Last Supper, by the male artist Alessandro Allori (1535-1607); the differences are striking. In Allori’s work, the spotlight is literally on Christ; Nelli’s work has a more egalitarian feel to it, with each of the 13 characters around the table given equal billing. Unusually for a Renaissance artist, Nelli places Judas on the viewer’s side of the table, so we can see that he is clutching the bag of silver that is the reward for his treachery. Christ, meanwhile, is cradling the head of the apostle John, whose features are (suspiciously?) feminine. There is no known self-portrait of Nelli, although some art historians believe that her portrait of St Catherine of Siena, now hanging in the Museum of the Last Supper of Andrea del Sarto in Florence, may be inspired by her own features.

As a woman, Nelli was forbidden from selling her paintings; but her convent could, and very successfully did: she was commissioned to undertake large-scalepieces for churches as far afield as Perugia. As her fame grew, says Linda Falcone, she was effectively running a school for female artists in her convent, and it’s likely that as many as eight other nuns worked with her on the Last Supper.

The painting, in oil on canvas, was commissioned by her own convent of Santa Caterina; once completed, it was hung on the nuns’ refectory wall. Nelli died at the convent in May 1588; her Last Supper remained there until the beginning of the 19th century, when the convent was suppressed. It reappeared on the wall of another Dominican establishment, the monastery of Santa Maria Novella, in 1817. Just under a century later, though, it was put into storage. “It was rolled up and forgotten about, neglected for almost three decades, until in the 1930s it was restored,” says Colucci. “But then in the terrible flood of 1966 it was damaged again, not by water but by humidity.”

By the time it was rescued by Fortune, and delivered for restoration, it was – according to Lari – “very dark, very dirty, and very difficult to clean”.

Speaking at a dedication ceremony in the basilica of Santa Maria Novella on 17 October, the mayor of Florence, Dario Nardella, said: “Art history doesn’t only belong to men; it’s our duty to remember the women protagonists, of whom Nelli was one of the most important.” He also paid tribute to Jane Fortune, who didn’t live to see the moment she worked for: she died of cancer in September 2018.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rossella Lari puts finishing touches on the restoration. Photograph: Rabatti & Domingie

More women artists of the Renaissance period

Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625)

Born into a noble family in Cremona, and encouraged to paint by her father, Anguissola met Michelangelo in Rome in 1554, and was trained by him. She experimented with new forms of portraiture.

Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614)

A portraitist at the Vatican, and Pope Paul V was among her sitters. A mother of 11 (though only three survived her), she was the first woman to support herself and her family through art (her husband ran the household and took care of the children).

Marietta Robusti (1560-1590)

The daughter of Tintoretto (which is why she’s sometimes referred to as Tintoretta), Robusti was apprenticed in her father’s workshop after he realised her talents, and although she died young she was a noted portraitist whose work was much admired by prominent royal patrons.

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1656)

The best known female artist of the wider Renaissance period, (she belongs to the Baroque era), Gentileschi - whose father Orazio was also an artist – played out her personal story of rape on her canvases, to powerful effect, and is known as one of the most brilliant disciples of Caravaggio. A major show of her work will open at the National Gallery in London in April 2020