Autumn/Winter 2022

veil and drapery. Browning blames the Grand
Duke’s prudish superintendent – whom the poet
targets in more than one work: “The blockhead
Baldinucci’s mind, imbued / With monkish morals,
bade folk Drape the nude / And stop the scandal!”
In his own six-volume work, ‘Notes on Teachers
of Drawing from Cimabue until Now’, Filippo
Baldinucci (1665-1717), a post-Vasari art historian
and biographer, reports that on the instruction
of Lionardo Buonarroti, he asked Volteranno to
spare the blushes of women and children, by the
addition of a flowing veil over the lower part of
the painting. This order, made “for the decorum
and modesty” of the Buonarroti home, “filled with
young ones, his children… and his wife” made the
ink in Browning’s pen boil: “Hang his book and
him!” he wrote.
Although Baldinucci takes the literary brunt of
Browning’s disdain, it is not likely the biographer
had the power to sway Lionardo Buonarroti one
way or the other, as Hawklin and Meredith point
out (2009). What we can say is that censoring
nudes was a common practice that generations
of artists of Artemisia’s calibre and beyond had
to grapple with.
The 1684 addition of the veil to the Inclination
was carried out by a painter from the Tuscan
town of Volterra, Baldassare Franceschini (1611-
1689). Noted as a fresco painter, he received
commissions from the Medici family for work
in the Villa Petraia. Franceschini was known
as Il Volterrano (referencing his birthplace) or
sometimes Il Volteranno Giunore, to distinguish
him from an earlier painter from the same town.
Autumn / Winter 2022 • Restoration Conversations 49