8th March in Florence to discover the Women of Art

The history of Florence is full of female figures who contributed to making the city the cradle of the Renaissance that we know. Female artistic talent was never allowed to reveal itself in the past, so the narrative of the centuries has reached us in part.

We can never know what would have changed if women had been able to take an active part in culture and art, but we are certain that a woman like Pautilla Nelli would today be remembered in history books as an important 16^th century artist and her individual talent would have been rightly attributed to her.

But who was Pautilla Nelli?

The forerunner of women artists!

With Pautilla Nelli we enter the world of pictorial art. Pautilla was born in 1524 in Florence and lived through the times of Vasari's art, who in those years also created the Florentine Uffizi complex. At the age of 14 she entered the convent of Santa Caterina in Cafaggio in Florence, in Piazza San Marco, becoming a Dominican nun. Here, as prioress of the monastery, she was able to express her fervent faith and pictorial talent by creating a flourishing artistic workshop in which sacred images of great quality were produced and then sold, and also commissioned, to relatives, convents and clients. The sale of these works became very important for the survival of St Catherine's Convent.

Artistically, we can now say that Pautilla Nelli filled convents and patrician homes with her works of poetic-figurative inspiration of Savonarola's magisterium, having female sanctity as her model. However, as a woman, she suffered the fate of all women of the time: her works were attributed to male artists.

To every work its author!

Thanks to the work of Advancing Women Artist Foundation, active in Florence since 2006, which aims to restore women's names and surnames to works of art from the past, Pautilla Nelli was discovered. In 2017, the Foundation restored 21 of her works and organised an exhibition dedicated to her.

By Pautilla Nelli, today in Florence you can see The Dead Christ in the Museum of San Marco, still partly a convent, and in the refectory of Santa Maria Novella, The Last Supper, the only one painted by a woman.

Celebrate Women's Day, then, at Palazzo Castri, taking advantage of the holiday packages, for a Florentine memory tinged with pink, both for the sweet welcome that Palazzo Castri always reserves for its guests, with professionalism and high quality, and for the female gaze through which you will see the world of art and culture.

A tribute to women on the occasion of this 8^th March 2022.