At a restorer’s studio in Florence, art by Renaissance women emerges from the shadows.
© Joyce McGreevy

The Hidden Half of Florence, Italy’s Artistic Heritage

“First came the flood,” says Jane Adams. “Then came the flood of helpers.” A passionate builder of partnerships for Advancing Women Artists, Adams meets me at a café near the River Arno. The setting is picture-perfect: Florence, a 2,000-year-old city and the center of Italy’s artistic heritage.

Mirroring calm today, the River Arno turned deadly in 1966.
© Joyce McGreevy

But on November 4, 1966, the Arno surged over its banks with brutal ugliness, tearing the city in two. It killed 101 people, and inundated historic buildings to a depth of 22 feet.

By the time the water receded, it had deposited 600,000 tons of mud—one ton for everyone in the city. Slicked with motor oil, it swallowed up 14,000 treasures of Renaissance art.

A café in Florence, Italy, after the flood of 1966.

The Mud Angels

Almost immediately, volunteers showed up by the hundreds. In that pre-digital era, gli angeli del fango—“mud angels”—converged on Florence from across Europe with astonishing speed. According to historian Richard Ivan Jobs, “even before soldiers arrived as part of the official government response, ‘the city was already in the hands of the young’.”

The painstaking work of restoring art began.

But the flood was not the only threat to Italy’s art, says Adams. Artworks by women had long been buried by neglect. For centuries, the hidden half of Florence’s artistic heritage was relegated to basements or incorrectly attributed to men.

Who would undo that damage?

Jane Fortune’s book inspired the Emmy-winning documentary
Invisible Women: Forgotten Artists of Florence.
Photo courtesy of Advancing Women Artists

Florence’s Good Fortune

In 1967, a college student in Florence named Jane Fortune was heading home to her native Indiana. As Adams tells it, Fortune said to herself, I don’t know when, I don’t know how, but I will find a way to give something back to this city.

In 2005 she got her chance.

Returning to Florence as an art columnist, Fortune explored museums and was soon moved to wonder: Where are the women? Highly visible as subjects, they were rarely seen as artists.

Something was hidden away in a corner of San Marco, Florence.

Then Fortune read about Plautilla Nelli.

The first-known female Renaissance painter,  Nelli had been wildly successful, an achievement made more remarkable by the fact that as a woman she could not study anatomy or join a guild. Nor was she a lady of leisure. The prioress of a convent, she taught classes, managed budgets, and met daily demands.

Yet Nelli became one of the few women included in Europe’s first major art-history book, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1568).

As Vasari observed, “There were so many of [Nelli’s] paintings in the houses of gentlemen in Florence it would be tedious to mention them all.”

Praised for its raw grief, Nelli’s Lamentation with Saints almost vanished forever.

Searching for Nelli

Intrigued, Fortune sought  Nelli’s work, but only three paintings remained. When she tracked down one of them, it was a dark canvas streaked in dirt and infested with woodworm.

Fortune decided then and there to commit herself to the restoration of Nelli’s work.

The discovery of Nelli’s massive, highly personal Last Supper made global headlines.
© Joyce McGreevy

In the process, Fortune inspired a movement. As more people supported the effort, the number of artistic search-and-rescue missions grew.  In 2009, Fortune founded the Advancing Women Artists Foundation.

“Our aim is to create a connection between art lovers of the present and women artists of the past for everyone’s future,” says Adams.

It’s a mission that she and AWA director Linda Falcone have inherited from Fortune. “Indiana Jane,” as she was affectionately nicknamed by the Italian press, died of ovarian cancer in September 2018.

A Citizen of Florence

“What she did, she did in partnership,” says Adams. “It was for the sheer good of giving back something to Florence, bringing back to the forefront the hidden half of the Florentine Renaissance  heritage.”

Rosella Lari has devoted four years to restoring Nelli’s Last Supper.
© Joyce McGreevy

The Art of Making Art Visible

Now Adams and Falcone are carrying that partnership forward, inviting us to practice the art of making women’s art visible.

“Restoration is not re-creation,” says Adams of the painstaking process of
revealing original work.
L: Francesco Cacchiani for AWA / R: © Joyce McGreevy

AWA has restored 61 paintings and sculptures, published a dozen ground-breaking books, and identified 2,000 forgotten artworks. The foundation is building the world’s largest digital database of 15th- to 19th-century women artists.

Meanwhile, a painting once covered in dirt and infested with woodworm is nearing the final stages of restoration. When it goes on view in the Santa Maria Novella Museum, it will be the first time in 450 years that it has been publicly displayed.

Oh, I see: The hidden half of Florence, Italy’s artistic heritage is steadily coming to light.

Adams (above), Falcone, and donors from 19 countries are giving new visibility
to historic women artists.
© Joyce McGreevy

Join the worldwide effort to save women’s artwork here. Follow AWA here.

Explore Nelli’s Last Supper, the world’s largest painting by a female Renaissance artist here.

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