Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2010, vol. 5

Book Reviews

Plautilla Nelli (1524–1588): The Painter-Prioress of Renaissance . Ed. Jonathan K. Nelson. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008. 210 pp. $24.50. ISBN 978-88-952500-3-8.

Sister Plautilla Nelli, whose paintings were acclaimed by in his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1568), has only in recent years resurfaced as an artist of historical interest, though she is one of the earliest-known women painters of the Renaissance. Unlike that of many nun-artists, Nelli’s oeuvre was not limited to miniature illustrations in manuscripts or small devotional paintings. Instead, she also painted large-scale, multi-figured religious paintings that could be seen in public, such as a Lamentation now in the Museum of San Marco, Florence. In fact, the recent restoration of the Lamentation spurred further investigation of Nelli’s career and subsequently led to the publication of this collection of essays. Jonathan Nelson’s brief introduction to this volume provides use- ful background regarding the exceptionality of in the Renaissance and explains how Nelli was able to circumvent significant obstacles to a professional career, such as the lack of a traditional appren- ticeship with a male master. However, Nelson does not offer other information ordinarily included in introductions of this sort. He omits a discussion of Nelli’s place in the burgeoning art historical literature con- cerning early modern women artists or a coherent overview of the essays included in the volume. A framework for and explanation of the book’s contents, especially in light of Nelson’s edition of essays on Nelli published in 2000, would have been appreciated.

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Nelson’s previous collection, Suor Plautilla Nelli (1523–1588). The First Woman Painter of Florence (Edizioni Cadmo, 2000), also featured seven essays derived from a symposium sponsored by Syracuse University in Florence. There is a fair amount of overlap between the 2000 and the 2008 volumes; three of the contributions (by Catherine Turrill, Andrea Muzzi, and Ann Roberts) are revisions of their earlier essays. A cata- logue of Nelli’s oeuvre (by Turrill) and sixteenth-century textual sources on the artist are also included in each volume, albeit with modifications. Nevertheless, there are sufficient significant differences that the 2008 vol- ume is a welcome contribution to the literature. The number of extant artworks securely attributable to Nelli is still rather limited, so most of the essays place her contributions within a broader social or art historical context. The first essay, “Nuns’ Stories: Plautilla Nelli, Madre Pittora, and her Compagne in the Convent of Santa Caterina da Siena,” by leading Nelli scholar Catherine Turrill, amply demonstrates through extensive archival documentation that Nelli was not the only artist working in the convent of Santa Caterina. As Turrill reveals, there were at least eight other identifiable nun-artists whom Nelli likely trained, resulting in a prosperous artistic enterprise in devotional works that were often sold outside the convent and received praise from contemporaries. Andrea Muzzi next explores “The Artistic Training and Savonarolan Ideas of Plautilla Nelli.” One of the more perplexing issues in comprehend- ing Nelli’s creativity has been the question of artistic training. She was not born into a family of artists, and she entered the convent at the age of fourteen; so how did she learn to paint ambitious, large-scale works? Muzzi soundly dismisses previous suggestions that Nelli may have been a student of Fra Paolino, who worked in the neighboring convent of San Marco, and shows how she was able to formulate a style outside of a stan- dard workshop context through her study of drawings and works of art. (Nelli’s convent was not cloistered until 1575, allowing her the freedom to see contemporary art in Florentine churches.) Muzzi also asserts that Nelli’s paintings should be interpreted in light of the theological ideas of the Dominican preacher Savonarola, whose influence held sway in the San Marco convents even after his execution in 1498. Although Muzzi demonstrates that the Savonarolan context is quite relevant to Nelli and

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her colleagues, the topic is insufficiently developed in this essay; a more in-depth study seems warranted and would be of great interest to both art historians and historians of religion. Sally Quin considers two literary sources for Nelli’s life in her essay, “Plautilla Nelli’s Role in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Painters (1568) and Serafino Razzi’s History of Illustrious Men (1596).” In contrast to other scholars who have recently considered the characterization of women in the Lives, Quin offers a more positive interpretation that is well-situated within the theoretical framework of Vasari’s work. She succeeds in this endeavor by broadening the interpretive lens to consider not only Vasari’s comments on Nelli’s career, but also to relate them to his attitudes regarding two other Renaissance women artists, Lucrezia Quistelli della Mirandola and Sofonisba Anguissola. In addition, Quin underscores the changing perception of women’s abilities evidenced occasionally in Vasari’s text, and interestingly links his views to those found in contemporary discourses on the nature of women. She concludes by comparing Vasari’s treatment of Nelli’s career to that of the religious historian Razzi, and pro- vides convincing explanations for their telling differences. The final section of the publication presents more narrowly focused essays on specific works by Plautilla Nelli. Magnolia Scudieri gives an overview of “The History, Sources, and Restoration of Plautilla Nelli’s Lamentation,” which is then followed by a technical restoration report. Ann Roberts and Cristina Acidini both provide essays on Nelli’s Last Supper, resulting in some overlap regarding probable visual sources identified by both authors. Acidini’s essay (“The Last Suppers of Dan Brown, , and Plautilla Nelli”) is written in a more popular vein, whereas Roberts’s study (“The Dominican Audience of Plautilla Nelli’s Last Supper”) provides a fascinating scholarly examination of the painting that closely ties its subject to the daily lives and dietary habits of the Dominican nuns who would have seen this work. The publication is enriched with appendices documenting drawings and paintings attributed to the artist, and Italian texts (with English trans- lations) of Vasari’s and Razzi’s life stories of Nelli. The volume is further embellished with forty-nine illustrations (thirty-eight in color) of works of art by Nelli or other artists, which in turn may spur efforts to recover more

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of Nelli’s intriguing artistic corpus. Overall, this publication is warmly recommended to those desiring to delve further into the artistic and social contexts of religious women in the early modern period.

Julia K. Dabbs University of Minnesota, Morris

The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds. Merry Wiesner-Hanks. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 248 pp. $30.00. ISBN 978-0-300-12733-1

This book describes the folk and intellectual cultures surrounding people, animals, and objects that were considered strange to most Europeans. The especially hairy Gonzales family (ca. 1573–1656) provides an extended case study for Merry Wiesner-Hanks’s inquiry into early modern European attitudes toward physical difference and strangeness. Given the limited historical archive on the Gonzales family, Wiesner- Hanks deftly takes what might otherwise be a footnote about an “odd” family and uses it as a point of departure to assess the place of the strange and exotic in early modern Europe. The family patriarch, Petrus Gonzales, appeared to suffer from a genetic condition of excessive body hair known today as Ambras Syndrome, or hypertrichosis universalis, which caused his entire body and face to be covered in hair. Born on Tenerife, part of the Canary Islands, Petrus traveled as a small boy to the royal court of France’s Henry II. Source materials from the period express uncertainty about Petrus’s national and ethnic origins; some refer to him as a Guanche and others as a Spaniard. Historians have confirmed that Petrus married a non-hairy woman named Catherine from Paris around 1573, and the couple had a number of children, most of whom were hairy. The family relocated to the Farnese court around 1590. Early in the work, the author states her decision to focus as much as possible on the Gonzales sisters Maddalena, Francesca, and Antoinetta. This decision enables Wiesner-Hanks to draw connections to the ever- expanding scholarship on gender and feminist studies in the early modern

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