Plautilla Nelli Last Supper: Renaissance Nun’s 21‑Foot Masterpiece

In the second edition of The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, the most important book on Italian (mostly Florentine) Renaissance published in 1568, along all the male practitioners, Giorgio Vasari, also mentioned the few women active at the time, among them Sister Plautilla Nelli.

This extraordinary artist was a self-taught nun stationed at the Dominican convent of St. Catherine of Siena in Florence. Nelli was profoundly influenced by the teachings Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican friar from Ferrara and preacher, and the art by Fra Bartolomeo, a highly regarded Florentin painter of religious subjects. Although artmaking was banned for women, she managed to obtain an active art production and thus made numerous religious paintings for churches in Tuscany, but also for the estates of the wealthy gentlemen in Florence.

Most importantly, Nelli was the first woman to paint The Last Supper while being in charge of an artistic workshop within her Santa Caterina. This remarkable execution of the best-known theme in Christianity was presented to the public in 2019 at the Santa Maria Novella Museum for the first time after centuries. This revelation sparked a further interest in the work of the nun-turned-artist who rightfully stood shoulder to shoulder with the greatest Renaissance masters such as Leonardo de Vinci or Domenico Ghirlandalo.

The Life and Art of Plautilla Nelli

Pulisena Margherita Nelli was born into a wealthy family of Florenten merchents, and at the age of fourteen she became a nun at the Dominican female convent of Santa Caterina di Cafaggio. She was praised by many patrons including women for both her large paintings and miniatures. Although Nelli lacked formal training, she managed to develop a compelling style by copying the works of the mannerist painter Agnolo Bronzino and high Renaissance painter Andrea del Sarto. Her vocabulary differed from those painters and is characterized by attention to details, the heightened sentiment and slightly effeminate male figures justified by the fact her religious vocation prohibited study of the nude male.

Nelli produced mainly devotional paintings, wood lunettes, book illustrations, and drawings, among them Lamentation with Saints, Saint Catherine Receives the Stigmata, Saint Dominic Receives the Rosary, Grieving Madonna (a copy of the same subject by Alessandro Allori), Crucifixion, and nine drawings that were restored in 2007, to mention the few that are held in collections across Italy.

The Last Supper

The above mentioned Last Supper is the only painting Plautilla Nelli signed that was produced within the workshop she run at the convent of Santa Caterina. This particular venue had the function of an art center which supplied devotional imagery (paintings and terracotta sculptures) for both religious institutions and secular individuals. Led by Nelli, who had the role of lead image-maker, the nuns of Santa Caterina collaborated on a seven-meter long painting which reflected their own daily practice besides the iconic religious scene.

Working on this major project meant a new challenge for the nun artist that enabled her to showcase the full extent her talents as a painter. The attention to detail illuminated by the starch white table cloth, turquoise ceramic bowls, fine China platters, and embellished glasses, the food typical of Tuscan cuisine, and the emotionally-charged expressions of the figures indicate Nelli’s skillfulness and devotion.

Last Supper was located in the convent’s dining hall until the congregation dissolved under the Napoleonic suppression in the early 19th century. In 1817, another monastery, Santa Maria Novella, acquired the painting, installed it in their dining hall before moving it to a new location around 1865. In 1911 for unknown reasons the panel was dismantled, and the painting was rolled up and taken to a warehouse, where it remained until 1939. Then, it was restored, returned to the refectory, and it even survived the flooding of Florence in 1966 barely damaged. Finally, in 1982 after the reclassification of the Santa Maria Novella into museum, the work wastransferred to the friars’ private rooms until its rediscovery in the 1990s.

The Rediscovery of Plautilla Nelli

The organization Advancing Women Artists Foundation (AWA) started a crowdfunding campaign in 2017 to restore Nelli’s Last Supper. The layers of overpainting from previous restorations had to be removed, and the process unraveled her powerful brushstrokes, astonishing sense of compostion, and the inscription Orate pro pictora or pray for the paintress Sister Plautilla made beneath her signature. It took a team of restoration experts four years to complete the restortion, and ever since, Last Supper is on public view in the Santa Maria Novella Museum in Florence.

As a matter of fact, AWA’s first restortion of Nelli’s work happened in 2006, at the time when only three paintings have been confirmed as authentic. Throughout the years, the interest in sister’s ground-breaking achivements grew, and by now seventeen works are attributet to her oeuvre.

The nun-artist was the subject of the 2007 documentary The Restoration of Lamentation with Saints: Plautilla Nelli that made the wider public aware of her practice. Worth mentioning is another documentary made in 2013 under the title Invisible Women, Forgotten Artists of Florence, based on a book of the same title by Dr. Jane Fortune, which features a segment on Plautilla Nelli and the restoration of the Lamentation with Saints.

By now it has become clear how important Nelli’s activity as one of the first women who stood out and made herself relevant regardless of her gender was. It was a daring decision and a bold one, especially since nuns were mostly subjected to practicing crafts traditionally recognized as appropriate for women, such as textiles and miniatures. Finally, by producing large scale paintings, especially the grandiose fresco-like such as the Last Supper, Nelli made a sort of protofeminist statement claiming that women are equally gifted as men. Although forgotten by history for a very long time, her deeds came to light and are now to be rightfully inscribed into the art history canon.