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The Florentine
Author and philanthropist, Dr. Jane Fortune is founder and chair of the Advancing Women Artists Foundation and creator of the Jane Fortune Research Program on Women Artists in the Age of the Medici at the Medici Archive Project. Her books include When the World Answered: Florence, Women Artists and the 1966 Flood; To Florence, Con Amore: 90 Ways to Love the City; Art by Women in Florence and Invisible Women: Forgotten Artists of Florence. She is known as “Indiana Jane” because of her efforts to identify and restore art by women artists in Florentine museums and deposits.
“Leonetta Pieraccini Cecchi wants to paint like a man and sometimes she really does succeed,” writes critic Mario Tinti in a 1929 review of this Tuscan artist, now recognized as ...
Summer makes me long for the lightness of silk, which is why I spoke with Sabine Pretsch, head of textile manufacturing at the Fondazione Arte della Seta Lisio, a Florentine ...
Il Palmerino, first cited in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of Artists in 1420 as the home to goldsmith Ottaviano di Duccio, is the first Florentine stop on the Via degli Dei, ...
The Uffizi’s now-annual Women’s Day Show covers two bases this year, providing a window onto painter Elisabetta Sirani and showcasing the treasures of a branch of the gallery often overlooked ...
In a city where breakfast means little more than a brioche and a coffee, “breakfast scene” paintings have been popular for centuries. The Medici love for still life gave value ...
Angelica Kauffmann painted her “auto-biographical” self-portrait called The Artist Hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting while in Rome in 1794. The torn Angelica was encouraged to abandon her ...
In December 2009, a newly restored David and Bathsheba by Artemisia Gentileschi was unveiled in Palazzo Pitti’s Sala Bianca. I remember it with fondness. Hers was the painting whose restoration ...
Behind every great man is a great woman, the old adage says. Was the same true of Michelangelo? Perhaps not in the classic sense, but here are tales of three ...
To show his influence, fifteenth-century banker Filippo Strozzi commissioned a palazzo designed to be bigger and grander than any of the Medici palaces. Today, this three-story cubic building in pietra ...
The whole of Italy celebrates the height of summer holidays on August 15, the day known as Ferragosto. Although many younger-generation Italians have forgotten the origins of this once-religious feast, ...
Seventy-eight years ago this month, sculptor Antonietta Raphaël Mafai fled Rome. The 1930s had been a harsh decade for her as the anti-Semitic media pushed for the creation of a ...
Villa Cerreto Guidi, near Fucecchio, was designed by Bernando Buontalenti and constructed in 1556 by order of Cosimo I. It became home to Isabella de’ Medici, the grand duke’s favorite ...
Whilst Florentine Renaissance artist Plautilla Nelli “follows in the footsteps of Savonarola” in her first solo show at the Uffizi, the work of contemporary Austrian painter Maria Lassnig (1914–2014) has ...
While contemplating Plautilla Nelli’s Last Supper in Rossella Lari’s Florentine restoration studio, I am overcome with a sense of wonder. There is no other way to feel when standing before ...
Early women artists are often depicted as rebellious souls who “wreak havoc” by overturning social expectations. In Florence, Artemisia Gentileschi shocked her fellows at Casa Buonarroti by painting her tribute ...
The Advancing Women Artists Foundation recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. Jane Fortune takes us on a walk down “Memory Lane”.
This year marks the tenth anniversary of my quest to re-discover and restore art by women in Florence. The announcement of a special exhibition for Suor Plautilla Nelli at the ...
On November 4, 2016, Florence’s Twentieth-Century Museum will inaugurate an exhibition featuring works by multiple artists who gifted art to Florence after the 1966 flood to show their support for ...
When I first met glass designer Ita Barbini several years ago at her Venetian studio, I was fascinated to learn more about the mysterious art of glass making. A 30-year ...
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the flood that devastated Florence on November 4, 1966. Much has been written about the 14,000-plus artworks affected by the disaster, but restorers ...
The search for history’s hidden stories has always been one of my personal passions. It was this passion that brought me to piazza Santissima Annunziata one autumn morning in 2012 ...
The Vasari Corridor was commissioned by Cosimo I de’ Medici from Giorgio Vasari in 1564, on the eve of the marriage of his son to Johanna of Austria; the kilometer-long ...
Adriana Pincherle (1906–96) and Eloisa Pacini (1928–74) are two very different painters in style and in personality, whose commonality was their love for Florence—the place they made their creative home. ...
The Florentine’s culture editor, Jane Fortune, scopes out a new exhibition venue and cultural center on via degli Artisti, spotlighting one of Tuscany’s top woman sculptors and her life’s work—now ...
