Spring 2024

Restoration 

Conversations 

ISSUE 5, SPRING 2024 

Special features: 

Pre-Raphaelites: 

Modern Renaissance 

Exhibition at the San 

Domenico Museum 

in Forlì, Italy 

Women of the Sky: 

From Muses to 

Scientists, 

Museo Galileo at 

Florence’s Central 

National Library 

WOMEN’S STORIES: TODAY AND THROUGH THE CENTURIES 

Spring 2024 • Restoration Conversations 1

Publisher 

Calliope Arts Foundation 

London, UK 

Managing Editor 

Linda Falcone 

Contributing Editor 

Margie MacKinnon 

Design 

Fiona Richards 

FPE Media Ltd 

Video maker for RC broadcasts 

Francesco Cacchiani 

Bunker Film 

www.calliopearts.org 

@calliopearts_restoration 

Calliope Arts

From the Editor 

Let’s begin with something you can count on: a new column set to become 

a regular feature of the magazine. I’m referring to ‘Personal Reflections: 

Writers and readers share connections’, which debuts in this issue with 

Canada-based writer Carol Annett and how Florence Nightingale influenced 

her personal and family history. Restoration Conversations is true to its 

name, and our readers have much to tell us about the contributions of 

historic women to their own lives. With each new issue, we look forward 

to creating a chorus of women’s voices from past and present, with all the 

stories you hold most dear. 

The women featured in this issue search the sky and scour the stores. 

Their pursuit of knowledge takes us from the Cepheid stars and the 

comets of Caroline Herschel, to a high-security art vault hosting the 

Wulz’s photography. Women’s exhibitions are foremost in our minds this 

issue. Angelica Kauffman breaks into the boys’ club. The pre-Raphaelite 

Brotherhood has sisters, and Tate Britain gets it right with their exhibition 

title ‘Now You See Us’. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Enjoy the issue! 

Fondly, 

Linda Falcone 

Managing Editor, Restoration Conversations

GRAZIE MILLE 

Earlier this year, it was our pleasure, as donors, to take part in the launch of the 

Museo Galileo’s ‘Women of the Sky’ exhibition at Florence’s National Library. The 

exhibition perfectly reflects Calliope Arts’ mission to highlight and document women’s 

achievements in the arts and sciences. Thank you to Museo Galileo Director, Roberto 

Ferrari, who invited us to contribute to this project, and to co-curators, Natacha Fabbri, 

Simona Mammana and Caterina Guiducci, who produced an innovative and ambitious 

show covering centuries of women’s involvement in astrological discoveries. Ilaria 

Margutti’s embroidered artworks, which are a focal point of the exhibition, beautifully 

illustrate the interconnectedness of art and science – which happens to be the subject 

of the webinar series, ‘LIFE ON mARTS’, organised by Laura Caruso, project director at 

CasermArcheologica in San Sepolcro. 

Thank you to lead co-curator Peter Trippi who took the time to escort us around 

the once-in-a-lifetime exhibition, ‘Pre-Raphaelites: Modern Renaissance’ at the San 

Domenico Museum complex in Forlì (Fondazione Cassa dei Risparmi di Forlì and 

Grandi Mostre Fondazione Forlì) as well as to co-curator Elizabeth Prettejohn, the De 

Morgan Foundation Director, Sarah Hardy, and art historian Emma Merkling who shared 

their knowledge of, and passion for, the artists represented in the exhibition. 

In London and elsewhere in the UK, sincere thanks to co-curator Annette Wickham, 

to artist Sarah Pickstone and to donor Christian Levett for their insight into the works 

of Angelica Kauffman exhibited at the Royal Academy. We are grateful to Tate Britain for 

sharing images of their upcoming exhibition on four centuries of women artists, ‘Now 

You See Us’. We also appreciate the generosity of the De Morgan Foundation, the Watts 

Gallery Artists’ Village, the Herschel Museum of Astronomy in Bath and the Florence 

Nightingale Museum for allowing us to reproduce images from their collections. 

From further afield, thank you to contributors Carol Annett (Ottawa), Tanya Klowden 

(California) and Byron Hurst and Kelsea Blu Halfpenny (Australia) who have brought 

new voices to the conversation. 

We are always happy to collaborate with our friends at the Alinari Photography 

Foundation and appreciate the opportunity to have a behind-the-scenes look into their 

treasure trove of boxes all waiting to be plundered (in a good way). 

We’d also like to thank our partners The Florentine, for their efforts to promote and 

share Calliope Arts’ mission with our friends in Florence and beyond. 

4 Restoration Conversations • Spring 2024

CONTENTS SPRING 2024 

WOMEN AND THEIR QUESTS 

6 Personal Reflections on Florence Nightingale 

Writers and readers share connections 

14 The ‘Starfish Syndrome’ 

Searching the art vaults for things to save 

20 Astronomy for Everyone 

Co-curator Natacha Fabbri shares ‘Women of the Sky’ 

26 From Astral Beings to Female Agents 

Florence’s National Central Library speaks volumes 

34 Brilliant Lights 

The comets of Caroline Herschel 

42 Starlight and a Spool of Thread 

An interview with textile artist Ilaria Margutti 

BEING SEEN 

48 Pre-Raphaelites: Modern Renaissance 

Live at the exhibition with co-curator Peter Trippi 

58 Eggs and Shades of Gold 

Painter Christiana Herringham, in focus 

66 Soul Sister 

Evelyn De Morgan’s spiritual quest 

74 Breaking into the Boys’ Club 

Angelica Kauffman at the Royal Academy 

81 It’s Not Just About the Art 

Sarah Pickstone on the importance of Angelica Kauffman 

86 The Unfinished Space 

An interview with CasermArcheologica curator 

Laura Caruso 

92 Now You See Us 

Women artists from 1520–1920 at Tate Britain 

98 Artemisia in Australia 


Personal Reflections... 

on Florence Nightingale 

Writers and readers share connections

In 1974, I quit nursing training halfway through 

the program. I never had the honour of saying 

the Nightingale Pledge, which my mother recited 

when she graduated from nursing in 1949. So, 

what sparked my interest in Florence Nightingale 

almost 50 years after I became a nursing school 

dropout? It began with a statue my husband 

noticed on a trip to Italy in 2023. 

All along the walls of the nave of the Basilica 

of Santa Croce in Florence, Italy, there are 

monuments to great Italians, mainly men, 

including Dante, Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, 

Machiavelli, Marconi, Michelangelo and Rossini. 

Outside the church, embedded in one wall of 

the cloisters that enclose a quadrangle of lawn, 

is a memorial to a woman. An oval medallion 

frames the two-foot high figure, sculpted in white 

Carrara marble, of a woman wearing flowing 

robes and carrying a small oil lamp. She is the 

legendary Florence Nightingale – the Lady with 

the Lamp. Why was there a memorial to this 

nineteenth-century English woman, who was not 

even Roman Catholic, at Santa Croce? I knew 

nothing about the woman behind the legend but 

I vowed to learn more, especially since she was 

my mother’s personal heroine. 

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) became famous 

in her own lifetime as a nursing superintendent 

for the British Army during the Crimean War 

(1853–1856) and as an advocate for public health 

reform. In 1913, three years after she died, British 

expatriates in Florence, Italy commissioned Francis 

William Sargant to create a memorial at the Basilica 

of Santa Croce to honour her in the city where she 

was born. Her first official biography, The Life of 

Florence Nightingale, by British writer Sir Edward 

T. Cook, was published to worldwide acclaim that 

same year. 

Subsequent biographers writing about 

Florence Nightingale are blessed and cursed 

with an over-abundance of archival material. 

The British Library holds 200 bound volumes 

representing an archive about a single individual 

second only in size to that of Prime Minister 

Gladstone. Claydon House in Buckinghamshire 

holds a huge collection of her family letters. 

The London Metropolitan Archives maintains 

a repository connected with the running of 

the training school founded in her name 

at St. Thomas’ Hospital in 1860. Around the 

world there are over 200 smaller holdings of 

Nightingale papers.

Left: Photograph of Florence Nightingale 

by Henry Hering. National Portrait 

Gallery, London 

According to one of her more recent 

biographers, Mark Bostridge, previously unknown 

letters emerged after her death. Basing his story 

on this vast collection of reference material, he 

did well to keep his single volume, Florence 

Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend, under 

800 pages. 

Florence Nightingale was born on 12 May 1820 

in Florence, Italy, where her wealthy family was 

on an extended European holiday. Brought up in 

rural England with an older sister in Derbyshire 

and Surrey, Florence was a sensitive, spiritual 

child who loved animals and showed sympathy 

for the poor and the sick from an early age. 

Florence’s father, who believed in higher 

learning for women, supervised the education 

of his daughters at home. Florence was a 

brilliant student, becoming proficient in French, 

Italian, Greek, mathematics, history, philosophy 

and classical literature. Despite her privileged 

upbringing, Florence sought neither celebrity nor 

fortune. Rather, she came to focus her intelligence 

and humanitarian values on promoting public 

health and disease prevention for all. 

In 1847, seven years before she left for the 

Crimea, Florence travelled to Rome with family 

friends. There, she was introduced to Sidney 

Herbert, who would become a close friend. On 

this Roman holiday, Florence immersed herself 

in art and culture. At the Palazzo Barberini, she 

was profoundly moved by Guido Reni’s portrait of 

Beatrice Cenci, which is said to have been painted 

just before Beatrice was beheaded for conspiring 

to kill her abusive father. At the Sistine Chapel, 


Florence lay on the floor and gazed up in ecstasy 

for hours. Yet the highlight of the trip for her was 

not a work of art. Florence obtained permission 

to go on a 10-day retreat at a convent. During her 

stay, she confided to Madre Santa Colombe that 

God had spoken to her. 

Florence felt God wanted her to serve others 

and she decided to answer that call by becoming 

a nurse. But nurses at that time were viewed as 

fallen women who were prone to drunkenness 

and sexual impropriety, as personified by Sarah 

Gamp, a character in Dickens’ 1843 novel Martin 

Chuzzlewit. Florence’s parents vehemently 

opposed her pursuing this vocation and urged 

her to marry. Still, Florence was determined. She 

refused all offers of marriage and eventually 

acquired the training she sought. 

On 22 August 1853, Florence Nightingale 

accepted a position as superintendent at the 

Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in 

Upper Harley Street, London. Supplemented by 

an income provided by her father, she was finally 

able to live independently and pursue her chosen 

career. Two months after she began working in 

Harley Street, Britain entered the Crimean War. 

The following year, her friend Sidney Herbert, 

as Secretary of State at War, asked Florence 

Nightingale to superintend Governmentsponsored 

nurses at the military hospital at 

Scutari, Turkey. In November 1854, she arrived at 

Scutari with 38 volunteer nurses. 

Appalled by conditions in the military hospital, 

Florence discovered that soldiers died more from 

infections resulting from poor hygiene, poor 

Below: Florence 

Nightingale at the 

Military Hospital at 

Scutari, 1855. Image 

kindly provided by the 

Florence Nightingale 

Museum, London 


Above: Florence at the 

St. Thomas Nursing 

School surrounded by her 

students, 1860. Image 

kindly provided by the 

Florence Nightingale 

Museum, London 

nutrition, lack of supplies and improper waste 

disposal than from their battlefield wounds. 

Florence worked tirelessly to improve conditions 

in the hospital. Reports from wounded soldiers 

telling of her comforting presence propelled 

Florence to celebrity status back home. In February 

1855, an illustration titled “Miss Nightingale, in the 

Hospital at Scutari” appeared in The Illustrated 

London News depicting her nightly rounds. 

Though the Turkish ‘fanoos’ lantern that she 

carried was incorrectly pictured as a genie lamp, 

this was the image of the compassionate nurse 

that captured public imagination. The legend of 

the Lady with the Lamp was born. 

There was more to Florence Nightingale 

than this legend. Her work in military hospitals 

in Crimea was merely a prelude to the more 

important phase of her career in public health 

after the war. With her great analytical skills and 

knowledge of statistics, she set out to reform not 

only the profession of nursing but also Army 

and civilian health by advising the governments 

of Britain and India on improving the design 

of hospitals and workhouses and modernizing 

sanitary measures. During her lifetime, she 

published hundreds of pamphlets, books, reports 

and articles on subjects ranging from public 

health and nursing to religion and women’s 

oppression. Despite becoming an invalid due 

to chronic illness, she was able to carry out her 

ground-breaking work, including supervising the 

Nightingale School of Nursing, which was set up 

in 1860. The school’s success set the standard for 

nursing training around the world. 

In 1946, when my mother Marjorie graduated 

from high school in Canada, she wanted to attend 

university like her fiancé, Dick MacKinnon. Dick’s 

tuition at the University of British Columbia (UBC) 

was paid for by the Canadian government as a 

benefit for his service in the Royal Canadian Air 


Left: Marjorie Ruppel, a 

graduate of the Royal 

Columbian School 

of Nursing in New 

Westminster, BC, 1949 

Force in WW II. There was no money for Marjorie 

to go to university, so she applied to a school of 

nursing, which provided room and board. She 

and my Dad eloped because married women 

were not eligible to enter nursing school. 

She enrolled under her maiden name at the 

Royal Columbian School of Nursing in New 

Westminster, BC. While her secret husband 

boarded with her mother and attended UBC, 

Marjorie lived in the nurses’ residence and trained 

at the hospital. On 28 April 1949, Mum attended 

her graduation. After medals and diplomas were 

handed out, and before she gave the valedictory 

speech, all the graduates recited the Nightingale 

Pledge. Her mother and grandmother watched 

proudly. I was there too, in a way, because Mum 

was pregnant with me at the time. 

Over 20 years later, in 1970, I graduated from 

a Canadian university with a degree in biology 

and took a job as a lab technician in a medical 

research hospital. I hated working with test tubes 

and before long, decided to go into a field that 

offered more contact with people – nursing. If I 

remained in Canada, I would have to do nursing 

training at a university, which I couldn’t afford 

then. So, I chose a hospital-based program 

in England, in which classroom lectures were 

integrated with work experience, and students 

were paid a stipend. 

In 1972, I enrolled at Wolfson School of Nursing 

at the now closed Westminster Hospital in 

London. Settling into my tiny room at Wigram 

Nurses’ Home, I had to learn that the gas fire 

was not self-igniting – you had to light a match 

after turning the knob! Spotting a photo of my 

boyfriend on my chest of drawers, a teaching 

sister gushed “Ooh, who’s the dishy bloke?” 

During the next year-and-a-half, interspersed 

with weeks of classroom learning, I was Nurse 

MacKinnon, working on medical, surgical and 


Left: Carol as a student nurse at the 

Wolfson School of Nursing, 1972, and 

below, at her home in Canada, 2024 

Right: A lamp for ‘The Lady of the Lamp’ 

c. 1850, ph. Florence Nightingale Museum, 

London 

children’s wards. In obstetrics, I assisted midwives 

delivering babies. In the operating theatre, I 

observed a leg amputation and open heart 

surgery and I “scrubbed” for an appendicectomy. 

I walked to the hospital for day, evening, night 

and split shifts wearing a black cloak over a 

blue uniform, with a stiff cardboard collar, black 

tights, sensible shoes and a white paper cap. 

Had I completed the program, I would have 

earned my Westminster Hospital belt buckle and 

the headpiece, called a “frilly”, that Westminster 

graduates proudly wore. The rigorous, practical 

training met the standard set by Florence 

Nightingale to elevate nursing to a respectable 

profession beyond the disreputable stereotype 

portrayed in Dickens’ novel. 

I found the hospital environment exciting. But 

the shift hours, illness, and homesickness wore 

me down. So, I left the program, flew home and 

married the dishy bloke. After four more years of 

university and a one-year internship, I graduated 

as a registered dietician. I worked for over 

thirty years in publicly-funded, patient-centred 

hospitals with advanced sanitation and infection 

control procedures – measures that Florence 

Nightingale would have endorsed. 

Florence Nightingale is honoured every year 

around the world. Since 1965, International Nurses 

Day has been celebrated on her birthday, May 12. 

Mark Bostridge writes, “If we were to derive one 

simple lesson from Florence Nightingale’s life 

and work, it would stem from this single unifying 

thread: that society has a collective responsibility 

for the health of all its members.” In a time of 

global pandemics, Florence Nightingale’s vision is 

still relevant. 

After her children were grown, my mother 

returned to nursing, the profession she loved. But 


FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE PLEDGE 

“I solemnly pledge myself, before God and 

in the presence of this Assembly, to pass my 

life in purity and to practice my profession 

faithfully. I will abstain from whatever is 

deleterious and mischievous and will not 

take or knowingly administer any harmful 

drug. I will do all in my power to maintain 

and elevate the standard of my profession 

and will hold in confidence all personal 

matters committed to my keeping, and all 

family affairs coming to my knowledge in 

the practice of my calling; with loyalty will 

I endeavour to aid the Physician in his work 

and devote myself to the welfare of those 

committed to my care.” 

The Nightingale Pledge, a modified version 

of the Hippocratic Oath, was first introduced 

in 1893 in Detroit, Michigan. Over the years, 

the phrasing has been changed to reflect the 

times. The version above, taken from the 1949 

yearbook of the Royal Colombian Hospital, 

is the one Marjorie Ruppel recited at her 

graduation. 

she had to quit when she developed symptoms 

of multiple sclerosis. As the disease progressed 

and she became hospitalized, my Dad became 

her devoted caregiver. When she was unable 

to hold a book, he would read to her. One of 

the books he chose was the inspiring story of 

Florence Nightingale. Dad knew she was Mum’s 

personal heroine. Now I’m a great admirer too. As 

Bostridge observes at the end of his biography, 

“For us, the lamp still burns.” 

CAROL ANNETT 

Carol Annett is a writer based in Ottawa, 

Canada. After a career of more than 30 years in 

the healthcare field, she now spends her time 

researching and writing about family history, 

with a particular emphasis on preserving 

women’s stories. 


Above, left: Conservator Francesca Bongioanni 

at Art Defender with the newly found Wulz 

Studio sign, note that an additional Roman 

numeral was added to indicate the atelier’s 

location on the third floor 

Above, right: Exploring the Wulz archive, ladies 

from another era 

Left: FAF’s storage spaces at Art Defender 

All images: Olga Makarova 


The ‘Starfish 

Syndrome’ 

Searching the art vault for treasures to save 

What does it feel like to hunt through hundreds of boxes in search 

of stories that once belonged to twentieth-century photographers 

Wanda and Marion Wulz? It’s a thrill we’d like to share with 

readers, via this ‘backstage photo album’ by photographer and 

filmaker Olga Makarova, documenting Calliope Arts’ visit to Art 

Defender with the research team from Fondazione Alinari per la 

Fotografia, which safeguards and manages the world’s foremost 

photography collection on Italy, from the 1840s to today. They 

are intently exploring the Wulz Studio Archive, as part of our 

‘5,000 Negatives’ project aimed at research, restoration and 

digitalisation of works from the Wulz sister’s Trieste-based atelier. 

Before discussing the day’s treasure hunt, it’s best to tell you 

where we are on the map. Fondazione Alinari per la Fotografia – 

at home at Florence’s Villa Fabbricotti – is temporarily storing the 

bulk of its collections at Art Defender in Calenzano, as they await 

a more permanent place in central Florence equipped to house 

their massive photography archive. Art Defender, as its name 

suggests, is a high-security art vault in the Tuscan hinterland, 

whose contents are safe, because no one on the outside ever 

really knows what’s under lock and key inside the facility. Even 

‘non-human’ thieves, like fire, are no match for the vault’s hightech 

systems, which use neither foam nor water to put out flames, 


Above, left: FAF director 

Claudia Baroncini 

exploring Alinari’s stores 

with Linda Falcone 

Above, right: Archivist 

Marta Magrinelli ponders 

documents that provide 

new clues 

because either of those elements would ruin art 

beyond repair – particularly photography. In case 

of fire, the system is programmed to deprive their 

warehouses of oxygen. It’s the only way, they say, 

to snuff out a blaze and to keep its stores safe. 

The only fire happening at Art Defender the 

spring morning of our visit was the flame of 

enthusiasm. If you think I’m being metaphorical, 

think again. Conservator Francesca Bongioanni 

unwrapped the Wulz studio office sign – what an 

appropriate way to start a search – and for all the 

wonder we felt, it could have been a signpost to 

heaven. “This archive has never been subject to 

full-scale research, reordering or restoration, so 

with ‘The 5,000 Negatives project’ we are heading 

in the right direction, one piece at a time,” says 

FAF director Claudia Baroncini. “Most of the Wulz 

boxes are just like they were received.” 

If you find that surprising, try this statistic on 

for size: Alinari’s stores are five million items 

strong, and 4,950,000 of these are photographic 

materials, many of which are one of a kind. Their 

vast collection is impressive, and the figure 

seems even more daunting when you consider 

that only three percent of the Alinari patrimony 

has been digitalised thus far. In short, one must 

be meditative when faced with all of their boxes, 

which somehow bring to mind the beached 

starfish story, ‘You’ll never be able to save them 

all,” one sceptical man told another who was 

throwing beached starfish back into the sea. 

“Well, I saved that one,” the other replied, and 


Left , top and middle: FAF’s team uncovers the 

Wulz family archive’s hidden treasures, from 

lens to documents 

Left, bottom: A snapshot from the show 

‘Fotografe!’ at Villa Bardini (2022) with 

co-curator Emanuela Sesti at work 

All images: Olga Makarova 

that is how it feels to be confronted with 

the foundation’s priceless but innumerable 

boxes. 

On site that day, we have FAF’s director 

Claudia Baroncini, archivist Marta Magrinelli, 

archive conservator Francesca Bongioanni, 

and scientific coordinator Emanuela Sesti, 

who readers of Restoration Conversations 

will remember as co-curator of ‘Fotografe!’, 

the dual exhibition at Villa Bardini and Forte 

Belvedere, Calliope Arts’ first Florentine 

project. All of these dedicated professionals 

are studying or safeguarding the Wulz 

Photography Studio Archive, a threegeneration 

concern, open in Trieste from 

1861 to 1981, which was passed down from 

highly successful studio photographer 


Above: More treasures from the Wulz family archive 

Giuseppe Wulz, to his son Carlo, and to Carlo’s 

daughters Wanda and Marion. 

Although most of the photographs published 

with this article feature conservator Francesca 

Bongioanni at work, it is archivist Marta 

Margrinelli who provides us the words required 

to better understand these pictures. “With the 

Wulz Studio Archive, we are not solely dealing 

with photographs. We have their ledgers, albums 

and invoices, post cards, family correspondence, 

exhibition posters they saved, and even their 

passports and identity cards. What is most 

interesting is that Marion, the atelier’s surviving 

and lesser-known sister, was the one who sold 

the archive, but before handing it over to Alinari, 

she drafted a description of the items she held 


most dear. The photographs’ attributions are 

based on her memory, and we know which of 

these belongings she cared most about, within 

the vast collection.” 

To me, this is particularly happy news. Marion 

was the quieter sister and, unlike Wanda, she was 

never courted by Futurism’s founder Marinetti as 

the darling of photodynamic photography. Marion 

often took pictures from her window, worked 

in the darkroom during the post-production 

phase, or shared the camera with her older 

sister, snapping photographs whose authorship 

is not always clear. I am glad to see her voice 

be heard through her efforts to document the 

studio’s treasures, a testimony to her grandfather 

and father’s work, but most of all, they are the 

memoirs of decades shared capturing the faces 

and fashions of bon-ton Trieste, where we are 

planning to go for the upcoming Wulz exhibition 

(in Trieste, 2024-25) of which ‘5,000 Negatives’ is 

the starting point. 

LINDA FALCONE 

The ‘5,000 Negatives’ project, developed by FAF 

to safeguard and promote the works of Wanda 

and Marion Wulz, involves research, digitalisation 

and exhibition. It is made possible thanks to a 

grant from Fondazione CR Firenze and Calliope 

Arts Foundation. For more on the Wulz sisters, see 

Restoration Conversations, Autumn Issue 2023. 


Astronomy for Everyone 

Co-curator Natacha Fabbri shares ‘Women of the Sky’ 

Many of our readers will remember Museo 

Galileo curator Natacha Fabbri from our live RC 

broadcast last spring. This season, she has taken 

her curatorial talents a few doors down the river 

from her home museum, to bring us ‘Women of 

the Sky’ at Florence’s National Central Library, 

which displays fascinating holdings from both 

venues. 

Restoration Conversations: In ‘Women of the 

Sky’, there are many interesting depictions 

of allegorical women – particularly from the 

medieval times, including the allegories of 

Astronomy, Geometry and Arithmetic, but 

what about the flesh-and-bones women who 

studied the stars through the centuries? 

Natacha Fabbri: This exhibition begins in the 1500s 

and follows a path that is long and discontinuous, 

which is marked by success and by failure. We are 

exploring the progressive introduction of women 

into the field of Astronomy, and their struggle for 

equality. It is a quest that remains unfulfilled, even 

at the end of our focus period, at the beginning 

of the 1900s. 

RC: How did women’s access to the field 

begin? 

NF: One important part of the exhibition focuses 

on the ‘querelle des femmes’, literary works 

that argued for women’s intellectual and social 

equality. So the issue was initially both scientific 

and literary. French author Bernard Le Bovier de 

Fontenelle was the first exponent of this genre, 

which developed at the turn of the seventeenth 

century. These published texts were always written 

in dialogue form; they were either dedicated to 

women or featured women characters. Initially, 

women were always on the receiving end of the 

philosophical conversation about the heavens. 

The sky is discussed in a simplified manner, 

in what would be known today as Popular 

Astronomy. For example, they discuss the role 

of the Sun, and its relationship with the planets, 

and the woman character’s questions are naïve. 

These women characters are not knowledgeable, 

but they do show great interest, and more than 

that, great ability when it comes to understanding 

mathematical disciplines. The philosopher 

might conclude that women are not inferior, or 


prescribe to the view that their lack of equality 

was actually a social problem due to lacunae in 

women’s formal education. 

RC: Speaking of equality, one of the sections 

of the show is ‘Astronomy for Everyone’. Can 

you tell us more about it? 

NF: One significant work in this section is by 

a woman author, Émilie du Châtelet (1706– 

1749), who translates and Newton’s Principia 

Mathematica, and her work adheres to the 

‘Science for everyone model’. In her view, 

scientific books needed to be addressed 

to everyone, and that included women and 

young people. One of the books displayed in 

this exhibition is the Italian translation of her 

Institutions de physique (1740), a manual on 

Newton’s physics and Leibniz’s philosophy that 

she wrote for her son – a young person – and 

was published only three years after the original 

French edition. We have also exhibited a very 

rare theatre play, Emilie du Châtelet, ou Point de 

lendemain, which was written in 1832, seventy 

years after her death. Despite being the play’s 

protagonist, she is not admired or held in high 

regard for her scientific works; instead, she is 

ridiculed for being frivolous and fickle in matters 

of love, as per the stereotype of the flighty and 

untrustworthy woman. She was a scientist and 

Above: Installation 

shots of ‘Women of 

the Sky’ with scientific 

instruments and art 

by Ilaria Margutti, phs. 

Federica Narducci 


Above: The press 

conference for the 

exhibition ‘Women of 

the Sky’ at Florence’s 

National Central Library, 

ph. Federica Narducci 

a philosopher, yet she was not accepted to the 

Academy of Paris, and was harshly criticised for 

her sentimental life. Was Voltaire – her lover – 

ever criticised for his sentimental life? That’s the 

question! 

RC: Florence’s National Central Library has 

a strong link to the Galileo Museum because 

the biblioteca is home to the great majority of 

Galileo’s manuscripts. Does the ‘Women of the 

Sky’ exhibition give a nod to Galileo and how? 

NF: The library has a host of literary and scientific 

works of immense value, a sampling of which we 

are delighted to share in this exhibition. One of 

the most exciting manuscripts on show is a letter 

by Margherita Sarrocchi (c. 1560–1617). A writer, 

not a scientist, she authored epic poetry in verse, 

but she excelled in mathematics and science as 

well, and Galileo frequented her salon in Rome. 

She used science as a way to access the upper 

echelons of society and participated in scientific 

discourse not normally accessible to women. 

Her contemporaries claimed she was one of 

the first woman to observe the sky through 

Galileo’s telescope. It’s important to note that 

many philosophers of her time refused to look 

inside the telescope because they considered it 

a creator of illusions – illusions that contradicted 

everything philosophers had believed and 

discussed for 2,000 years. 

Male philosophers taught and published 

according to a pre-established view, but she was 

not bound to one herself, because she did not 

share their academic training, Natacha explains. 

Sarrocchi freely defended the truth of Galileo’s 

novel celestial discoveries. In the letter we are 

exhibiting, she laments being kept at the margins 

of scientific discourse. She writes to Galileo, 

saying that when she presented the truths he 


told during a discussion on Astrology [then 

considered Astronomy’s younger sister], she was 

denigrated, and rather than being considered 

an academic, she was looked upon with an air 

of suspicion. Ultimately, even Sarrocchi’s highsociety 

freedom was curbed by a decree by the 

Holy See. In 1616, the geocentric model of the 

universe was condoned by the Church, and she 

backpedals, out of fear of taking a position against 

it. [Sarrocchi met Galileo Galilei in 1611, the year 

after he published Sidereus Nuncius. Seven of 

their letters survive at the NCL in Florence.] 

RC: The National Central Library welcomed 

your suggestion to exhibit contemporary art 

alongside their historic manuscripts. Ilaria 

Margutti’s artwork inspired by Henrietta 

Leavett’s research is noteworthy. What can 

you tell us about Leavett from the ‘equal 

rights’ standpoint? 

NF: We have one page from one of Leavitt’s ledgers 

in the show. As you know, Leavett was considered 

a ‘woman computer’, and she formed part of what 

was known as ‘Pickering’s Harem’ because she was 

one of many female human computers working 

at Harvard under Charles Edward Pickering. 

They were tasked with cataloguing the stars 

based on photographic glass plates taken from 

the university’s observatories. Remember that 

these women were considered manual labourers 

– mere manual labourers – not professional 

astronomers. Imagine that in just one hundred 

years, there were more than 150 women who 

worked at the observatory in this role – and 

one hundred of them were operative from 1875 

to 1920. The same was true in the Observatory 

of Lyon and Paris. Women were welcome in this 

field because they were considered more detailoriented 

than men, more precise and meticulous 

– and less expensive. Oftentimes, they were the 

Above: Margie MacKinnon 

and Wayne McArdle, 

Calliope Arts co-founders, 

with lead co-curator 

Natacha Fabbri at the 

exhibition, 




ones carrying out the calculations and making 

the observations, whereas the men would publish 

these women’s findings in their own name. 

RC: You once said that you dreamed of hosting 

this show in the National Central Library’s 

Sala Dante because of the room’s circular 

vault, which evokes a ‘Temple of Astronomy’. 

The library embraced and built upon your 

ideas for the show. For you, ‘Women of the 

Sky’ is a dream come true. How will the dream 

continue, once the exhibition is over? 

NF: Yes, the Sala Dante lends itself well to the 

‘temple of astronomy’ idea, and I immediately 

imagined Ilaria Margutti’s canvases inspired by 

Henrietta Swan Leveatt displayed. We contacted 

the library’s directors and my co-curators and 

they loved the idea. With regards to the show’s 

legacy for the future, we’ve created a number 

of short film clips that can be accessed in the 

exhibition via QR codes, which will remain 

as documentary evidence of ‘Women of the 

Sky’. Thanks to an invitation from the National 

Central Library, we – Museo Galileo – have 

created a digital library of all the texts in the 

show, that can be consulted from afar, via the 

museum’s website. The hope is that by being 

virtually available to everyone, these materials 

will become a study tool for schools, so that 

young people can have a medium through 

which to study these works and the era in which 

they were produced. That is a dream I hold dear, 

that what we have created here will become a 

valuable resource for future generations. 

LINDA FALCONE 

Left and above: Guests 

enjoy the show curated by 

Natacha Fabbri, Simona 

Mammana and Caterina 

Guiducci at Florence 

National Central Library, 

phs. Federica Narducci 



From Astral Beings 

to Female Agents 

Florence’s National Central Library speaks volumes 

Two curators from Florence’s National Central Library supported lead curator 

Natacha Fabbri, from Museo Galileo, in her conception and design of the ‘Women 

of the Sky’ exhibition (see p. 20). The NCL collection is home to some nine million 

volumes, occupying 100 kilometres’ worth of shelf space. With the exhibition’s 

theme in mind, this three-woman team scoured the collections to find the items 

and ideas that would best represent all kinds of women – historical, allegorical 

and modern – who take us to the moon and stars, throughout the centuries. 

In exhibition section ‘The Body is Celestial’, co-curator 

Simona Mammana explores the ‘astral tradition’ 

in early modern literature. “‘Astral’ in this context 

refers to identifying the body of one’s beloved with 

celestial bodies, most commonly the Sun and stars,” 

Simona explains. “The motif of ‘woman like the Sun’, 

which emerged as part of the Dolce Stil Novo literary 

movement [in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries], 

finds its maximum expression in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, 

in which the poet describes his beloved Laura in verses 

allusive to Christ’s light. They also refer to classical 

descriptions of Daphne, whom the Sun God Apollo 

loved. Petrarch’s poetry is filled with astral motifs: a 

woman’s eyes are like rays, or they are ‘adorned with 

stars’ and so on.” 

“By the 1500s, when several female writers came to 

the fore, Petrarch was already being read in a portable 

format, and the Canzoniere is pictured in many portraits 

of women. One famous example at the Uffizi is Andrea 

del Sarto’s Young Woman Holding a ‘Petrarchino’ (1528). 

Once a book was printed as a miniature – once it was 

pocket-sized – it inevitably became accessible to a 

larger audience, and therefore, to a growing circle of 

women,” Simona explains. “Poets like Chiara Matraini 

(1515–1604) and Veronica Gambara (1548–1550) built 

upon Petrarch’s poetics by claiming ownership of it and 

adapting its conventions to their own gaze. Essentially, 

a man was no longer doing the telling. These female 

poets also compared their own beloved to the Sun, as 

in one letter on show by poet Vittoria Colonna (1492– 

1547) who mourns her husband with the phrase, “il mio 

bel sole si è oscurato, my beautiful sun has gone dark”. 

Lucchese poet Chiara Matraini (1515–1604), in her Rime 

et Prose, published in 1555, also turns Petrarch’s rhetoric 

on its ear. In her work, men, not women, are at the 

centre of astral comparisons.” 

Left: Florence’s National Central Library, Pietro Mascagni, La Luna, ballata, 1913. Milan, Sonzogno, Music collection 1924.3378 


The Sun is not the only celestial body to be 

reckoned with, of course. “At the end of the 

section ‘Astral Personifications’, we’ve included a 

vast repertoire of divine figures from sixteenthcentury 

illustrated texts, which served as a 

reference for poets, painters and scholars. These 

works provided iconographical clues on how 

to depict divine principles or human virtue and 

vice. Vincenzo Cartari’s Images of the Gods and 

the Ancients is full of female personifications 

associated with stars, revealing their influence 

on human nature and existence,” says Simona. 

“In this book, published in Venice in 1592, 

Cartari represents ‘Night’ as a woman wearing 

a robe laden with stars, with astrolabe in hand. 

She is nurse to Death and Sleep, brothers and 

inseparable companions.” 

Simona also points us to Cesare Ripa’s Della 

novissima iconologia, published for the first time 

in 1593. Astronomy, as an allegory, only appears 

in its 1625 edition, in sync with the scientific 

upheaval of Galileo’s times, but Simona focuses 

her attention on another personification, that of 

Inconstancy. Incostanza is represented as a robed 

woman with a half-moon in her hand, standing 

on top of a crab. “She is associated with the 

waves of the sea and the Moon, which is unstable 

and triggers changes of temperament,” Simona 

continues. “Woman’ is lunar not solar. Rather 

than being a giver of warmth, she is ‘cold and 

humid’ and, therefore, inferior to man. Women 

were seen as psychologically unstable, envious 

and inconsistent in Ripa’s depictions.” This 

theory is prevalent in Italian literature, as in the 

case of Ariosto’s epics, and women’s mutability 

needed some sort of a quick fix. “In the show, 

we have samples of sixteenth-century medicinal 

and pharmaceutical recipes by author Giovanni 

Marinelli, as well as his ‘cosmetic solutions’ to 

counteract women’s flawed nature. He discusses, 

for instance, how to preserve a woman’s beauty 

through treatments for her eyes, and other parts 

of the body, some of which were repeatedly 

featured in Petrarchan literature – a woman’s hair, 

face, eyes, chest and neck.” 

Shouldering the weight of both the Moon 

and the stars is a burden that only Dante’s 

Beatrice can carry weightlessly. That may be 

Above, left to right: Texts 

from Florence’s National 

Central Library 

Chiara Matraini, Rime 

et prose, 1555. Lucca, 

Vincenzo Busdraghi. 

Palatino Collection 

2.3.1.17; 

Vincenzo Cartari, Le 

Imagini de i Dei de gli 

antichi, 1592. Venice, 

Marcantonio Zaltieri, 

Palatino Collection 

29.1.6.26; 

Cesare Ripa, 

‘Inconstancy’, Iconologia 

overo Descrittione di 

diverse imagini cavate 

dall’antichità, & di 

propria inventione, 

1603. Palatino Collection 

22.2.6.18 

Right: Dante Alighieri, 

Amos Nattini from La 

Divina Commedia e 

le imagini di Amos 

Nattini Paradiso, 1936 

Milan, Istituto nazionale 

dantesco, F.19.32 




why co-curator Caterina Guiducci takes us back 

into Heaven, as soon as she comes into the 

conversation, by sharing a large-format work 

by Amos Natali depicting Paradise, as seen in 

the Divine Comedy’s first canto. “Natali’s figures 

have the majestic nature of Michelangelo and 

his works are characterised by the very modern 

muted tones of the early 1900s. He depicted the 

entire Divine Comedy with exactly 100 images… 

one per canto, and his works were published 

in several editions and formats. Ours is 87 

centimetres long and each volume weighs 27 

kilograms [nearly 60 pounds].” 

Caterina, who is a ‘paper person’ par excellence, 

spends a moment revelling in the object’s 

material beauty. These pieces are her ‘babies’, 

after all. “Although the book was produced in 

the age of industrialised paper, its pages are 

handmade, because the composition aimed to 

reclaim ancient techniques. In the pictured scene, 

we see Beatrice with Dante, and she is looking 

towards the Sun. The solar sphere is opposite the 

earth – as its polar opposite. Natali’s watercolour 

scenes are perfect, when it comes to representing 

the passage from the Earth to the sky, from green 

to the gold of the Sun’s orb. Beatrice, as a woman, 

is the agent that connects the poet to Heaven, but 

not only that, she is a vehicle that transports the 

soul to higher dimensions. For Dante, women are 

the driving force in the journey towards Heaven.” 

Those interested in Beatrice as a conveyer of 

both science and spirituality will appreciate an 

additional observation Simona interjects here: 

“At a certain point in the Divine Comedy, Dante’s 

Beatrice goes from being a muse, to being a 

scientist. She abandons her role as inspirer and 

explains the secrets of the universe to Dante. 

Hers is a lesson in Natural Philosophy.” 

The clarity with which these modern-day 

women express these lofty ideas impress me just 

Below: Galileo Galilei, 

Letter to Christina 

of Lorraine, 1897. 

Padua, Salmin, Rare 

Books collection 343.7 

Florence’s National 


Left: Giuseppe Zangone, Donne sulla luna, canzone one-step, 1933. Trieste, Fabbri, Music collection 1935.191 


Above, left: Santo 

Santonocito, Come la 

luna, canzone, 1924. 

Florence, Forlivesi, Music 

collection 43.11 

Florence’s National 


Above, right: Ugo 

Franceschi, Ride la luna! 

Fox-trot canzone, 1925. 

Florence, Saporetti e 

Cappelli, Music collection 

1926.109. Florence’s 

National Central Library 

Right: Florence’s National 

Central Library on the day 

of the show’s opening, 


as much as their historical counterparts, real or 

allegorical. Caterina, as far as this exhibition is 

concerned, was in charge of pouring over the 

National Libraries vast collections to select the 

most impactful items for display. She seems to 

appreciate my acknowledgement of her ‘Dante 

tome’ as a thrilling art object and leads me over 

to the next source of excitement. 

“We have the letter Galileo wrote to Grand 

Duchess Christina of Lorraine, published by 

an editor in Padua, in 1894,” Caterina says. And 

although that may not sound overly thrilling, I will 

tell you this: the little book is 13 millimetres long, 

the size of a thumbnail, and it is shown under a 

magnifying glass, the only way it is fully visible. 

“Each page contains just nine lines,” Caterina 

explains. “Imagine that to print the book, its 

letters had to be placed on each tiny page using 

tweezers, and the whole process brings to mind 

the expression ‘made for the eyes of a fly’. Besides 

its unique size, this work is important because 

it is illustrative of seventeenth-century women’s 

interest in science, an idea that is central to one 

of the show’s special sections. Women were 

not only muses and figures of the stars, they 

were commissioners of scientific research, and 

through their patronage, many women made 

science more accessible.” 

Caterina curated the show’s ‘musical section’, 

dedicated to songbooks and sheet music whose 

cover images are associated with the Moon. 

With these publications, we are catapulted back 

into the modern world, so to speak, with covers 

from the end of the nineteenth century to 1961. 


“These covers were created using the graphic 

arts, and we are looking at how the image of 

women has changed from the 1800s to today 

– in clothes and attitude,” says Caterina. “The 

nineteenth-century image of women is staticlooking 

and composed, and as time goes on, we 

suddenly find ourselves in the 1930s, with women 

perched on the moon in their bathing suits 

and then, by the 1960s, we see young women 

with ruffled hair and ruffled attitudes!” These 

covers, displayed in the hallway section directly 

outside the Sala Dante, are a delight, as was our 

conversation. From starry floor-length garments 

to bikinis, from inspirers of higher sentiments, 

to science-minded patrons that make the money 

flow – it’s a wide and varied universe of women. 

LINDA FALCONE 

Caterina Guiducci manages the National Central Library of 

Florence’s Reference Rooms and Music Room sector, which host 

ancient books, special collections, music, maps and bibliographic 

materials. Caterina is committed to supporting scholars in research 

and is personally involved in selecting reference materials for 

acquisition and for curating the collection’s electronic databases. 

She also works as an archivist, in support of the library’s protocol 

office, through document management and as an archives 

administrator. 

Simona Mammana heads the National Central Library’s Public 

Services sector. She is also cultural events and communications/ 

PR coordinator. She is involved in the general management of the 

library’s warehouses hosting modern printed books – a collection 

of almost 9 million volumes. “Our collection grows 1.5 kilometres 

per year in terms of shelf space,” Simona explains, “because, by law, 

the library receives a copy of everything published in Italy.” 


Brilliant Lights 

The comets of Caroline Herschel 

C/2020 F3 is the official designation of the brightest comet in the northern 

hemisphere since Comet Hale-Bopp in 1997. Known more familiarly as NEOWISE, 

this long-period comet was discovered during the pandemic on March 27, 2020. 

Throughout the month of July that year, it was bright enough to be visible to the 

naked eye and was widely photographed by professional and amateur observers. 

Scientist and author Tanya Klowden was one of those attempting to photograph 

NEOWISE on a trip to Joshua Tree National Park in California. Here, she recounts how 

all the excitement over the pandemic’s own comet kept her thinking about Caroline 

Herschel, an astronomer known for her comet discoveries as much as for being, like 

many early female astronomers, her brother’s exceptionally skilled assistant. 


Far left: C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) 

photographed from Germany 

on July 14, 2020 , ph. SimgDe, 

Wikimedia Commons 

Left: Sir William Herschel and 

Caroline Herschel, A. Diethe, 

c. 1896 (William is polishing a 

telescope element – probably a 

mirror – and Caroline Herschel 

adds lubricant) © Wellcome 

Library no. 4183i 

CCaroline Herschel (1750–1848) was never 

expected to amount to much of anything. With 

a face scarred by smallpox and standing only 

4 feet and 3 inches tall, her marriage prospects 

were poor, her mother forbade her to learn the 

skills she would need to work as a governess, and 

so instead she was trained to carry out domestic 

labour in her family home, a role she would hold 

through her childhood and teen years, and again 

return to late in life, as her family dismissed her 

considerable accomplishments. 

In between the years of forced domesticity, 

Caroline Herschel demonstrated a multi-faceted 

extraordinariness. Though she was born into 

a family of musicians, she was not offered the 

same opportunities for musical training as 

her brothers, the eldest two moving from their 

native Germany to England (specifically to Bath) 

to work as conductors and composers in their 

own right. Mercifully, following her father’s death, 

her brother William sent for her to join him in 

England to keep his own household instead of 

their mother’s. She did not speak the language 

and was intimidated by the customs and ways of 

the English people initially, but her brother had 

ideas far beyond housework. He began training 

her to sing and she proved every bit as musically 

adept as her siblings. In short order, she became 

the solo soprano in his oratorios, and he grew 

busy managing her burgeoning singing career. 


Caroline Herschel (1750–1848) was never 

expected to amount to much of anything. With 

a face scarred by smallpox and standing only 

4 feet and 3 inches tall, her marriage prospects 

were poor, her mother forbade her to learn the 

skills she would need to work as a governess, and 

so instead she was trained to carry out domestic 

labour in her family home, a role she would hold 

through her childhood and teen years, and again 

return to late in life, as her family dismissed her 

considerable accomplishments. 

In between the years of forced domesticity, 

Caroline Herschel demonstrated a multi-faceted 

extraordinariness. Though she was born into 

a family of musicians, she was not offered the 

same opportunities for musical training as 

her brothers, the eldest two moving from their 

native Germany to England (specifically to Bath) 

to work as conductors and composers in their 

own right. Mercifully, following her father’s death, 

her brother William sent for her to join him in 

England to keep his own household instead of 

their mother’s. She did not speak the language 

and was intimidated by the customs and ways of 

the English people initially, but her brother had 

ideas far beyond housework. He began training 

her to sing and she proved every bit as musically 

adept as her siblings. In short order, she became 

the solo soprano in his oratorios, and he grew 

busy managing her burgeoning singing career. 

She was offered a permanent position as a soloist 

in Birmingham following her performances of 

the soprano solos of Handel’s ‘Messiah’, but she 

refused to be conducted by any musician other 

than her brother. 

Today we might still speak of noted 

eighteenth-century soprano Caroline Herschel, 

but her brother’s conducting diminished 

precipitously when he developed a fascination 

with astronomy. As a musician with an interest 


Far left: Caroline Herschel Memoir Manuscripts 

© The Herschel Museum of Astronomy, Bath 

Preservation Trust 

Left: A portrait of Caroline Herschel with an 

illustration of planets in the solar system 

© The Herschel Museum of Astronomy Bath 


in natural philosophy, William began reading 

Robert Smith’s treatises, first on harmonics, 

and then on optics. The latter book described 

the construction of the telescope and William 

quickly fell down that rabbit hole, soon trading 

his time at the harpsichord to grind mirrors and 

lenses and build his own telescopes. Caroline 

found herself unable to continue her music 

practice as her brother, at all hours, asked for her 

assistance in the matter of building telescopes 

and then, naturally, recording the observations 

made through these same devices. 

Recording astronomical observations is 

challenging work, requiring speed, accuracy and 

clarity in dark of night to leave a record that could 

at all be deciphered the next morning. Caroline 

called this “minding the heavens”. These were her 

mornings, as her brother abandoned music to 

spend his time studying and cataloging double 

stars and discovering Uranus along the way. (I am 

inserting a pause here so that you may snicker. 

There. That’s out of the way.) He actually tried to 

name it Georgium Sidus but that’s not nearly so 

funny. In fact, William received a royal appointment 

as a court astronomer for discovering Uranus. 

While William studied objects of particular interest, 

he assigned Caroline the task of methodically 

sweeping the night sky in search of anything 

unusual. It was while engaged in this somewhat 

tedious task that Caroline made her first and 

second significant discoveries within a single night. 

The first was a nebula which was not recorded in 

the Messier catalog (itself a list of objects observed 

by French astronomer Charles Messier that were, 

to his frustration, definitely not comets) and the 

second an ellipse galaxy in close proximity to the 

Andromeda galaxy. Messier had actually observed 

the galaxy (M110) about a decade before but had 

not included it in his catalog, so Caroline is still 

credited with the independent discovery M110. 


Above, left: Stargazing 

from the garden of the 

Herschel Museum of 

Astronomy 

Above right and right: 

Sculptures in the 

Herschel Museum of 

Astronomy garden 

All images © The 

Herschel Museum 

of Astronomy, Bath 


As William continued to enlist Caroline 

in the work of recording his astronomical 

observations, he (or probably, they) built a 

telescope specifically for Caroline to use to 

search for comets. Comet-fever was sweeping 

astronomical circles and broader society in the 

eighteenth century in a very similar fashion to 

the pandemic’s NEOWISE-borne craze. Caroline 

discovered no less than eight comets over 

an eleven-year span and independent of the 

clerical work she did for her brother. She was 

for a long while regarded as the first woman 

to discover a comet. While astronomer Maria 

Kirch had discovered a comet over eighty years 

before Caroline, her husband published it with 

his own work and despite noting that she found 

it while he lay sleeping, he was given the credit 

for the discovery for many years. 

Caroline’s first comet, Comet C/1786 P1 was a 

hyperbolic comet. It only ever passed through our 

solar system once. Immediately upon recording 

its location in the sky in detail, Caroline wrote 

directly to two prominent members of the Royal 

Astronomical Society with the news, apologizing 

for not going through her brother, as he was out of 

the country delivering a telescope. The Society’s 

president, secretary, and other significant London 

astronomers undertook the journey to Slough so 

that she could show the comet to them directly. 

William returned home to find that his diminutive 

and shy sister was now famous, and the royal 

family summoned him to Windsor Castle to show 

them his sister’s comet. 

Following the discovery and her brother’s 

devoting less time studying astronomy and 

more to courting and subsequently marrying a 


neighboring widow, Caroline boldly asked her 

brother to petition the King for a salary in her 

own right. Officially, the salary was granted by 

Queen Charlotte, as Caroline was ‘the ladies’ 

comet hunter’. It was both the first independent 

income that Caroline had ever earned in her life 

and the first time a woman had been paid as an 

astronomer. 

Caroline’s second comet, Comet 35P/Herschel- 

Rigollet, was determined to be periodic in 

1939 when it was observed again by French 

astronomer Roger Rigollet, and thus bears both 

their names. It has a 155-year period, which means 

it will visit the Earth again in 2092. Comets three, 

four, five, and six were also hyperbolic. Comet 

seven was observed by Messier about a decade 

before Caroline spotted it, and some years later, 

German astronomer Johann Encke was able to 

determine it was only the second period comet 

ever discovered (Halley’s comet being the first). 

With his prediction that it would appear again 

at the end of May 1822 confirmed in early June 


Above: Child with 

solarscape in the 

garden of the Herschel 

Museum of Astronomy 

© The Herschel Museum 

of Astronomy, Bath 


of the same year, the comet was named Comet 

2P/Encke. Comet Encke has an extremely short 

period of 3.3 years and was last visible in 2020 in 

the southern hemisphere. Northern hemisphere 

comet-chasers would have seen it in 2023, as 

Caroline Herschel did. 

Caroline’s final comet discovery, in 1797, was 

also hyperbolic, but it passed extremely close to 

the Earth and presented a spectacular view to the 

naked eye at its closest. Caroline was so eager to 

share the information on this discovery with the 

Royal Astronomer, Nevil Maskelyne, that rather 

than trust sending the news by post, she slept for 

one hour, then saddled her horse and rode for six 

straight hours through the night to present the 

information to him in person. I imagine this was 

very much like Paul Revere’s ride except about 

astronomy, and also side-saddle. Her excitement 

over the comet put her in the typical Austenheroine 

position of having to stay at the Royal 

Astronomer’s home for several days to recover 

from her wild journey. 

After her brother’s death, Caroline returned 

to Germany and, though she continued to make 

some astronomical observations, she was largely 

relegated back to being the household servant. 

She spent time reorganizing and rewriting the 

nebula catalog she had collaborated on with her 

brother and shared many of his observations with 

her nephew, who stayed in England and carried 

what was now the Herschel tradition of astronomy 

forward. In 1828, the Royal Astronomical Society 


It is difficult to gaze up at the fleeting spectacle of a comet 

whizzing by and not think about Caroline. There are 

billions of dusty snowballs rocketing through our solar 

system unnoticed in the darkness and cold of space. It is 

only as one or another comes streaking toward the sun 

that the powerful illumination warms it and brings its 

distinctive glow, a brilliant point of light with a glorious 

train trailing behind it. 

presented her with the Gold Medal for the 

catalog and her celestial discoveries. She was the 

first woman to be granted this prestigious award. 

The second woman to receive this honour (for 

her work on galactic rotations), Vera Rubin, was 

awarded her medal in 1996. Caroline also was 

awarded an honorary (not a full) membership 

in the Royal Astronomical Society in 1835. She 

and Mary Somerville became the first women 

to be awarded this honour. While she continued 

to receive accolades in her later years, she had 

stopped her observations some four years prior 

to receiving the Royal Astronomical Society 

medal. She died twenty years after drawing her 

astronomical studies to a close, at the age of 97. 

It is difficult to gaze up at the fleeting spectacle 

of a comet whizzing by and not think about 

Caroline. There are billions of dusty snowballs 

rocketing through our solar system unnoticed in 

the darkness and cold of space. It is only as one 

or another comes streaking toward the sun that 

the powerful illumination warms it and brings its 

distinctive glow, a brilliant point of light with a 

glorious train trailing behind it. It is in that moment 

that we are transfixed by the spectacle, by the 

splendour of it, and as we gaze, the comet speeds 

past, into darkness, into obscurity once again. 

Like many of the great women of science 

Caroline, too, faded into obscurity. Unremarkable 

in their seeming ordinariness, they all needed the 

light to shine. In the moment of discovery, we are 

astounded, amazed by their brilliance, and for a 

season no one can look away. Then, a heartbeat, 

two, three, and too many are forgotten, retreating 

into darkness again. 

We do not know which of the uncountable 

billions in the darkness will one day shine, only that 

there are always more waiting to be discovered, 

surprising us, enchanting us with their dazzling 

light. Nor do we know which will vanish from 

our view, too fleetingly faded, too quickly gone. 

Still, for each woman in obscurity, each comet 

that has not yet had its moment to shine, we can 

do as Caroline did. We can record the brilliance 

of those that shine before us, share their stories, 

name them so they will not be forgotten when 

they have left us. When we recognize they are 

extraordinary they show us how to shine. And, 

just as with NEOWISE, we all need that remarkable 

light in the world. It is what guides us through 

the darkness that otherwise would engulf us. 

TANYA KLOWDEN 

Tanya Klowden is a scientist, art 

historian, designer and parent. She 

holds graduate degrees in Physics 

and Art History and has written 

topics ranging from technology 

and climate change to the roles of 

women in the sciences and arts. As 

she writes, she seeks to amplify the 

voices that have been diminished 

or marginalized through history. 



Starlight and 

a Spool of Thread 

An interview with textile artist Ilaria Margutti 

Italian artist Ilaria Margutti abandoned her paint 

box for needle and thread seventeen years ago. 

With her fabric-art series The Swan Variables, 

on show until June 8 at the Florence-based 

exhibition ‘Women of the Stars’ (see p. 20 and 

26), Margutti looks to US astronomer Henrietta 

Leavitt and stitches her way to the stars. 

Restoration Conversations: Until 2007, 

you thought of yourself as a painter, but 

now, embroidery is your favourite form of 

expression. To start, what can you tell us 

about embroidery as a traditional craft? 

Ilaria Margutti: For generations, women used to 

embroider together, and their circle was one of 

listening – a place where lessons were passed 

on. These women explored myths, told fairy tales, 

and shared life lessons, so the embroidery circle 

was a place where young women were educated 

by word-of-mouth, and this process lasted 

from ancient times onwards, until the Women’s 

Liberation movement. In Italy – until about 50 

years ago, girls learned to embroider at school. 

During my grandmother’s generation, nuns 

taught this rigorous technique and, initially, I saw 

it as a skill devoid of creativity. Because women 

used to embroider in convents, or at home with 

their families and did not travel, I saw it as an 

activity that would limit my own emancipation. 

My perspective has changed! I now approach 

embroidery from an unconventional angle. 

With my work, I strive to convey the female 

perspective, using a traditionally female task as 

the starting point, because embroidery is part of 

women’s historical identity and education, but I 

am bringing it into a contemporary context. 

RC: How were you initiated into this craft, 

and how have you made it an art form? 

IM: I always considered myself a painter, until I 

met embroiderer Rosalba Pepi, who was 10 years 

my senior, and she introduced me to embroidery, 

which is full of symbolism. The needle and thread 

bind things. They are used to sew up wounds. 

Left: The Swan Variables by Ilaria Margutti, featured in the show ‘Women of the Sky’ at Florence’s National Central Library, 2024, ph.Paola Iacopetti 


Above: Portrait of Ilaria Margutti, 2020, 

ph. Silvia Noferi 

Right: Works from the ‘Mend of Me’ series 

by Ilaria Margutti, 2008–2013, 

photo by the artist 

They create beauty on uniform fabric and inspire 

works dedicated to the female identity. Rather 

than choosing painting or photography, which 

were primarily developed by men, I choose 

embroidery, which has a feminine quality, 

and I make it become progress, a message, 

a language… and even a revolution, because 

the aim of my embroidery is not to produce 

something decorative. 

RC: As part of your artistic journey, you 

have often depicted creative women using 

embroidery, what can you tell us about your 

series Mend of Me? 

IM: One of my first series involved portraits of 

women who posed as if they were stitching the 

contours of their own faces and bodies. These 

were real women – my artist friends – painters, 

poets and photographers. These images of 

women ‘embroidering’ themselves helped me to 


eflect on embroidery – not just as a technique – 

but as an artistic language. It comprises all those 

traditionally female attributes of labour, of waiting 

and expectation, of the ability to listen and the 

capacity to access one’s inner world, and in so 

doing, to face the world beyond ourselves. As an 

art form, it involves the tenacity and resistance 

you need to bring a job to completion, even 

one that apparently serves no end, because it is 

not for ‘consumption’. Its purpose is meditation, 

concentration and internal exploration. 

LF: What is the story behind The Swan 

Variables series, on show at the exhibition 

‘Women of the Sky’? 

IM: I have been an enthusiast of Quantum Physics 

for many years, and of Astrophysics as a result of 

that, because all things are strongly interlinked. 

I am self-taught in this field, via publications 

written for general audiences, because I do not 

have a proper background in Mathematics. Fritjof 

Capra’s The Tao of Physics was a seminal text for 

me, among others. Embroidery is an appropriate 

medium with which to explore themes like 

Physics and Astrophysics, because these sciences 

are founded upon the principle of relationship. I 

was looking for a source of inspiration in which 

particle physics and embroidery could find a 

meeting point, when I discovered Henrietta 

Leavitt’s story, thanks to a book [by George 

Johnson] called Miss Leavitt’s Stars. Henrietta 

Swan Leavitt (1868–1921) was part of a group 

of human calculators – mostly women – who 

worked at Harvard, and each of them had a very 

specific task: to catalogue information gathered 

from observatories associated with the university. 

Henrietta was tasked with cataloguing a certain 

kind of star, the Cepheids, and my seven panels, 

Variables of the Swan, are a tribute to her process. 


RC: Why do you find Leavitt’s work so 

moving? 

IM: On the Harvard University website, I found 

the notebooks, logs and reports Leavitt kept. 

In her largest ledger, she catalogued 1,777 stars. 

I believe that number seven is no accident. 

The number seven symbolises transformation, 

passage and metamorphosis. Cataloguing is 

meticulous work that demanded Henrietta’s 

untold dedication, faith in science and, 

especially, the ability to sit for hours on end, 

fully immersed in these plates’ details. It was 

as if Leavitt were embroidering – not knowing 

how useful her work would be. I thought, “This 

woman touched Infinity with her fingers!” 

RC: What is one thing we should remember 

about Leavitt’s work? 

IM: Thanks to Leavitt’s discoveries, the sky 

became three-dimensional! It was no longer 

flat, like a stretched piece of cloth. Henrietta’s 

repetitive, almost obsessive cataloguing was, 

ultimately, the only way to see that the Cepheids’ 

brightness is cyclical. The photographs 


Far left : A panel from The Swan Variables, 2024, ph. Silvia Noferi 

This page: Details from The Swan Variables nos. 6 and 7 by Ilaria 

Margutti 

and negative plates Leavitt studied were from 

different periods, which allowed her to explore 

and record these stars’ maximum and minimum 

brightness, giving scientists a yardstick by which 

to measure the distance between the stars. 

[American astronomer Edwin] Hubble applied 

what Leavitt learned by observing Cepheids to 

determine that the Andromeda Nebula was in 

another galaxy, beyond the Milky Way. This was 

1933, not even that many years ago! Her research 

made it possible to calculate Andromeda’s 

distance from our galaxy, and to confirm… that 

the universe is in a state of constant expansion. 

LINDA FALCONE 

For more on Ilaria Margutti in her many hats: 

www.ilariamargutti.com 


48 Restoration Conversations • Spring 2024 

Left: Isabella and the 

Pot of Basil, William 

Holman Hunt, 1867– 

1868, San Francisco, 

Fine Arts Museums of 

San Francisco

‘Pre-Raphaelites: 

Modern Renaissance’ 

Live at the exhibition with co-curator Peter Trippi 

TThe only problem with the Forlì show at the San 

Domenico Museum, ‘Pre-Raphaelites: Modern 

Renaissance’ is that you may never come out 

of it. The hundreds of pictures temporarily on 

display are worth a thousand words apiece, but 

seeing them all together renders even the most 

loquacious of visitors speechless. As for me, 

‘overwhelming’ appears to be the only adjective 

left in my word-bag. Therefore, during my prebroadcast 

walk-through with lead co-curator 

Peter Trippi, I stick to the big-picture questions: 

Why does Raphael figure in the movement’s 

name? Why was the Brotherhood so fascinated 

with Florence? Why were those well-read boys 

rebelling against art’s status quo? And what of the 

women, on and off canvas, who inspired or built 

upon the movement, during its different phases? 

Peter is a fast-paced New York curator, magazine 

editor, scholar and friend. He is a straight-talker 

and, despite that, an absolute sucker for anything 

pre-Raphaelite, a movement he first encountered 

in a Scottish classroom, in his early twenties. It was 

a sleepy afternoon, he says, and all of a sudden, 

“there was this slide”. It was William Holman 

Hunt’s Isabella and a Pot of Basil. “I knew nothing 

of the Pre-Raphaelites, but I was suddenly very 

awake, ‘She’s carrying around what in a pot?’” [The 

culprit painting featuring Boccaccio’s Isabella and 

the plant that took root in her dead lover’s head 

is in the exhibition for all to see, especially those 

in Italy, who know that a train trip from anywhere 

to Forlì is relatively simple.] 

The show, which Peter curated with British 

scholar Elizabeth Prettejohn (see p. 58) and a team 

of experts from Italy, the US and Britain, including 

Cristina Acidini and Francesco Parisi, is sheer 

success, and a dream come true for all involved. 

I find the exhibition a dimensional door into 

another time, and not just because its curators 

achieved the daunting feat of bringing numerous 

masterworks by fifteenth-century greats into 

visual conversation with the nineteenth-century 

fellowship that emulated them. It is successful 

because it manages to break the time-space 

barrier, allowing us to partake of Beato Angelico’s 

angelic bread-breaking, and by forcing us to stand, 

much like Narcissus at the well, entranced by our 

own image – which in this case, is not personal, 


Above: The Last 

Moments of Raphael, 

Henry Nelson O’Neil, 

1866, Bristol, Bristol 

Museums, Bristol 

Museum & Art Gallery 

but collective – for the power of story, whether 

human or divine, is an irresistible reflection at 

which we must stare, until someone saves us by 

breaking the spell. 

Perhaps as a call back to earth, Peter answers 

my first question by finding the one thing ‘wrong’ 

with the exhibition. “I’m frustrated we didn’t move 

a 1860s picture by Henry O’Neil, The Last Moments 

of Raphael to the beginning of the show,” he says. 

“In the scene, a dying Raphael is gazing out the 

window at Rome, but he’s also looking at his 

unfinished painting, The Transfiguration. It was 

that picture that painters John Everett Millais and 

William Holman Hunt criticised as being terrible 

because, in their minds, Raphael’s assistants had 

ruined it. If only Raphael had lived longer, they 

thought, because lesser talents ‘mucked it up’ 

and ‘mucked up’ everything else for 250 years 

following his death. Raphael did a fantastic job 

– but that work was hijacked, simply because his 

assistants were not as good. They made it overarticulated, 

and for the Brotherhood’s founders, 

they lost the mojo.” 

“That painting cuts to the heart of why ‘pre- 

Raphael’ matters,” Peter continues. “‘Post-Raphael’ 

was the problem. That is the pivot point, 1520. The 

early death of Raphael, at 37, was the fiasco to 

which the Brotherhood was responding, as they 

were fans of high Raphael, and by the time the 

1840s rolled around, they were still mourning the 

death of the master. The Pre-Raphaelites revered 

the greats of the past, and they cultivated a love 

affair with history’s characters by ‘channelling’ 

their heroes into existence, depicting what they 


did and how they lived. They saw the Old Masters 

as human beings, and imagined the painters and 

sculptors in Lives of the Artists, and painted the 

anecdotes Vasari described. It was not just about 

admiring their art. The Pre-Raphaelites wanted to 

depict moments from their heroes’ lives.” 

Peter’s last statement provides a segue into 

the Florence connection. “The British flocked to 

Florence after Italy’s unification, after things had 

settled down and it was safer to purchase property 

and enjoy the Tuscan seasons, far from foggy, sooty, 

industrial England. By the end of the nineteenth 

century, we are looking at the idea of the love 

affair between Britain and Italy, which was founded 

upon mutual respect. No one was clearing out the 

churches… of course, some Italian dealers were 

selling off noble- and church-owned artworks to 

rich Brits and Americans, but this was capitalist, 

not imperialist—just saying some of your readers 

might object, if you ignore that reality!” 

“The Italians were looking back at Britain, and 

vice versa. This love of the Italian narrative and 

its depictions in British art were supported by 

these artists’ background in Romanticism and 

Antiquarianism – that was a pre-condition, or a 

foot in the door. In other words, they were ripe 

for falling in love with narratives by Dante and 

Boccaccio. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s father was 

a political exile, who fled from Italy to the UK 

in the 1820s – running for his life. He taught 

Italian language and literature and Dante was 

his specialty. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was actually 

called Gabriel, but he flips his first and middle 

name around, because Dante is foremost in his 

mind. He was a young man and the ringleader, 

the dynamo of the group, sharing Dante with 

Left: Entrance to San 

Domenico Museum, 

with Evelyn De Morgan’s 

Medea on the facade 


Above: Installation 

view of the exhibition 

‘Pre-Raphaelites. Modern 

Renaissance’ at Forlì’s 

San Domenico Museum, 

ph. Museo Civico San 

Domenico, 2024 

his buddies. He’s translating Dante’s works into 

English, and he was a poet, so he had the right 

gift for doing that, and these stories are an engine 

of excitement. Boccaccio had been treated by 

Keats… they all knew his works. They knew Blake 

and Shelley and were enthralled by the love-anddeath 

aspect. There was great awareness of death 

in Victorian life, because people died all around 

you. Young death was completely normal at that 

time. The narrative of an author like Dante, his 

colour and intensity are incredibly pictorial. 

Just to say the words ‘circles of hell’ is thrilling. 

Therefore, in the show, we see Divine Comedy 

lovers Paolo and Francesca, again and again and 

again. In almost every section, we see that motif, 

and the pathos is delicious.” 

British narratives – the Arthurian legend – are 

everywhere as well. “The Lady of Shalott was an 

adapted Italian tale, but stories featuring Lancelot 

and Galahad were rock-solid Celtic, whose 

definition is, of course, fluid and includes Brittany 

and Wales, but these narratives are emphatically 

British with a capital B,” Peter explains. “The stories 

the pre-Raphaelites painted converged with the 

Gothic revival in the 1830s, and this is the ‘crunch 

moment’ in which people are embracing these 

ideas. There is new interest in the Middle Ages and 

Britain’s medieval heritage. Sir Thomas Malory’s 

Le Morte d’Arthur had been around for centuries, 

but by the 1800s, its stories are being told across 

Europe… all European countries are beginning to 

tell their national tales, as with the troubadours 

in France, with their sixteenth-century luteplayers 

and enchanting ladies. The Arthurian 

legends were taken as Britain’s contribution to 

the dialog. These young men in their twenties 


– the Brotherhood’s original members – were 

reading all the time. This was pre-cinema and 

theatre performances were not as accessible as 

one might think. You read if you wanted to be 

entertained. Once the sun was gone, it was time 

to read… and these kids really read. They were 

middle class and had the privilege of owning 

books. Reading was a passion, as was making 

these stories come alive. Our show delves into 

the depiction of these narratives, in both the fine 

arts and the decorative arts, through painting, 

ceramics, glass and furniture, which makes it 

more experiential and comprehensible not just 

to the traditional gallery-goer.” 

As our walk through the show progresses, the 

question for which I’ve come seems to resound 

off every wall, independent of the artists whose 

paintings are hung there: ‘What of the women?’ 

Peter’s answer is detailed but matter-of-fact. “That 

the history of nineteenth-century art is filled with 

women being depicted is no surprise. They had 

long been vessels of meaning, objects of desire 

and great admiration, and they symbolised noble 

things like Love, Liberty and Faith. These painters 

begin to surprise us in the 1840s, as they use 

women in painting and sculptures to tell stories. 

One ‘pro-active’ example might be The Eve of 

Saint Agnes in the Holman Hunt room, where we 

see a young damsel in distress, just before she 

and her beloved escape from a drunken party in 

a castle, where she was being held prisoner. 

There is ‘girl power’ going on in many of these 

pictures. In the Edward Burne-Jones room, we 

find Sidonia, the enchantress, in charge, with 

beguiling evil on her mind. The femme fatale is 

another theme – not a big surprise. By the time 

Above: Beatrice 

Parsons, Annunciation, 

1897–1899, Provo, 

Brigham Young 

University Museum of 

Art, purchased with a 

grant from Thomas R. 

and Diane Stevenson 

Stone, 2007 


Above: Marianne Preindlsberger Stokes, Angels Entertaining the Holy 

Child, c. 1893, Provo, Brigham Young University Museum of Art, 

purchased with a grant from Roy and Carol Christensen, 2015 


we get to the later period, we start to see more 

heroic figures, like Evelyn De Morgan’s Ariadne, 

a victim left behind to wait with great patience 

and fortitude, until Bacchus comes along. Evelyn 

De Morgan’s Medea is another powerful figure, 

whether or not you approve of the character 

killing her children. We find Hera, the wife 

of Zeus, the patron of weddings, brides – all 

positive things – in a work by Marie Spartali 

Stillman. The respect for women as professional 

artists was fraught at the beginning of our story, 

and Stillman is an outlier as both an artist and 

a model. She was well born and independently 

wealthy; proper women were not supposed to 

be models. It was not a ‘polite’ profession, and 

she breaks that trend.” 

Peter shares two pictures in particular, by artists 

I do not know. “Beatrice Parsons is not a famous 

name,” he says, “and we are delighted to be 

able to tell new stories even to ‘nerds’ like me… 

fresh names. Parsons was well known in Britain 

and published as an illustrator and fine artist, 

especially in horticulture, which was extremely 

important in British life. She won prizes and 

exhibited regularly, and is present in the show 

with a touchstone Pre-Raphaelite narrative, 

The Annunciation. She transfers the story from 

the Holy Land to an English country garden 

in summer, with lilies in full bloom. Her deft 

handling of the Archangel Gabriel is noteworthy. 

We are in the 1890s, and that figure captures a 

glowing supernatural feel, in step with British and 

French symbolist art at that time. She captures 

a mix of the netherworld and the natural world, 

drawing from her own creativity which bears 

the influence of John William Waterhouse, who 

served as a Royal Academy Schools instructor, 

while Parsons was studying there.” 

“Marianne Stokes is from Graz, Austria 

originally, but comes to France, as protégé of 

the rock-star-famous artist Jules Bastien-Lepage, 

whose Joan of Arc at the Metropolitan you will 

know. He so beautifully mixes Impressionism 

and Symbolism. Stokes brought this approach to 


Britain and was much admired there. She was not 

just ‘the wife’, and she was, in many ways, a better 

artist than her painter-writer husband Adrian 

Scott Stokes. Marianne was already in the zone 

of naturalistic scenes with supernatural figures,” 

says Peter. “She’s got that believable, natural, 

glowing mother and child, entertained by almost 

eerie angels, who are not quite Siamese, but they 

are not entirely normal either. There’s the startled 

baby who brings us into the picture, sharing this 

spectacle of sound and sight. It is magic before 

our eyes.” 

That last statement, is utterly accurate and 

where we find our end. See the show. Watch the 

broadcast. Seek out all these captivating stories 

that are ours for the taking, in a way that can’t 

quite be captured. Like magic. 

LINDA FALCONE 

The exhibition ‘Pre-Raphaelites: Modern 

Renaissance’ is organised by the Fondazione 

Cassa dei Risparmi di Forlì, in partnership with 

the Municipality of Forlì. It is co-curated by 

Peter Trippi and Liz Prettejohn, with co-curators 

Cristina Acidini and Francesco Parisi, with General 

Director Gianfranco Brunelli. The curatorial team 

also includes Tim Barringer, Stephen Calloway, 

Véronique Gerard Powell, Charlotte Gere and 

Paola Refice. 

This ‘Restoration Conversation’ broadcast is 

sponsored by Calliope Arts in partnership with 

The Florentine, the De Morgan Foundation, Watts 

Gallery, the Fondazione Cassa dei Risparmi di 

Forlì and Grandi Mostre Fondazione Forlì. To 

view the programme, visit: youtube.com/@ 

calliopeartsrestoration 


Peter Trippi is editor-in-chief of Fine Art Connoisseur, the American 

magazine that serves collectors of contemporary and historical 

realist art, and president of Projects in 19th-Century Art, a firm he 

established to pursue research, writing, and curating opportunities. 

Based in New York City, Peter previously directed the Dahesh Museum 

of Art there, headed development teams at the Brooklyn Museum 

and Baltimore Museum of Art, and – with Prof. Liz Prettejohn of the 

University of York – has co-curated international touring exhibitions 

and publications of 19th-century British art devoted to J.W. 

Waterhouse and the studio houses created by Lawrence, Laura, and 

Anna Alma-Tadema. In 2021 Peter co-curated – with Nancy Carlisle— 

the exhibition Artful Stories: Paintings from Historic New England. 

One of its works – Marie Spartali Stillman’s Hera—is now on view in 

the Pre-Raphaelites exhibition we are discussing in this broadcast. 

Below: Peter Trippi and Linda Falcone during their Restoration 

Conversation about the exhibition ‘Pre-Raphaelites. Modern 

Renaissance’ at Forlì’s San Domenico Museum, ph. Francesco 

Cacchiani, Bunker Film 


Eggs and Shades of Gold 

Painter Christiana Herringham, in focus 

Co-curator and scholar Elizabeth Prettejohn recounts pre-Raphaelite 

painter Christiana Herringham’s recipe for success, in the following 

interview, conducted by Linda Falcone. It involves a bit of Botticelli and a 

fourteenth-century crafters’ handbook called Il libro dell’arte. 

Above: Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’arte from the early 1400s 

In the context of our exhibition 

‘Pre-Raphaelites: Modern Renaissance’, 

visitors notice that, as they go through, there 

are more and more women artists as time goes 

on. Women were also becoming increasingly 

skilful at interpreting the Renaissance 

material they were working with. Christiana 

Herringham (1852–1929) is a third-generation 

pre-Raphaelite artist, working in the 1880s, or 

even up to 1910, right at the end of our period. 

Herringham made a fundamental contribution 

to the study of Italian Renaissance art, as well 

as creating her own compelling work. 

Thinking about materials and techniques 

was important in the pre-Raphaelite period, 

and British artists sought out resources that 

could give them the information they needed 

about a new way of studying. Cennino 


Above: The Combat of Love and Chastity, Gherardo di Giovanni del Fora, c. 1480s, The National Gallery of Art, London, ph. Wikimedia 

Cennini’s Libro dell’arte from the very early 1400s 

is a key document. As we now know, a woman, 

Mary Philadelphia Merrifield, provided us with 

the first English translation of it, publishing this 

very important text in English in 1844. Women 

were often translators, and translation continues 

to be regarded as a secondary profession, but it 

shouldn’t be. While nineteenth-century men were 

studying their Greek, Latin and the Classics, the 

women were becoming highly skilled in modern 

languages. Ultimately, they were intermediaries, 

building bridges between countries in the 

modern world, as in the case of Britain and Italy. 

Merrifield published her translation of Cennini’s 

text eight years before Herringham was even 

born, so by the time she, Christiana, emerges 

as an artist in the 1880s and 1890s, and starts to 

conduct her own experiments in tempera, she 

builds on the previous generation of female 

scholarship. Herringham’s own translation of 

Cennini’s seminal work, published in 1899, is 

closely related to her practical experience with 

the tempera medium. 

The first thing to note about the artist is the 

beauty of the way she used tempera, reinventing 

and remaking this Italian Renaissance medium, 

for her own time. It wasn’t easy to convince our 

Italian colleagues that it was important to include 

Herringham’s paintings in the exhibition, but that 

was before they had seen them, and understood 

how wonderful her works are, or the role they 

play in this story. We ended up including three 

of her signed works in tempera. We don’t know 

when they were made, but we know the exact 

dates of the Italian Renaissance works they are 

based on, which is the wrong way around! Usually 


Above: Florence’s Opificio delle Pietre Dure continues to use Cennini’s recipe when restoring tempera works, 

ph. Restoration Conversations episode, Francesco Cacchiani, Bunker Film 

more recent art is better documented than ‘the 

older stuff’, but that is not what we see in this 

case, with Botticelli and Gherardo di Giovanni 

del Fora. Christiana’s copy of Gherardo’s The 

Combat of Love and Chastity – in the National 

Gallery of London as of 1885 – demonstrates 

how her execution is remarkably accomplished. 

With many copies, you think, ‘That is nice, as a 

record, but it doesn’t measure up to the original’. 

This one measures up to the original! If you’ve 

read about Herringham, you know she was a 

sophisticated scholar of Italian Renaissance 

materials and technique, so you may think she 

put her knowledge into practice by making 

studious copies that are dry and scholarly. We 

might imagine her dutifully trying to recreate 

something, when, in fact, what you see is alive, 

exciting… and extremely beautiful, as well as being 

very faithful to the Pre-Raphaelite precedent. 

One of the premises of our show was that we 

would not attempt to borrow Italian Renaissance 

works from British collections, only from Italy, 

so the exhibition features another wonderful 

work by Gherardo, from the Galleria Sabauda in 

Turin. His Triumph of Chastity was not the work 

Herringham was copying from, which makes the 

comparison even more interesting. There is the 

suggestion that Chastity – which is the female 

figure – is going to be victorious, and this is 

indeed what happens in the poetic source, a 

series of poems by Petrarch called Triumphs. 

Chastity is the upright figure with the confident 


Above: Triumph of Chastity, Gherardo di Giovanni del Fora, c.1485 at ‘Pre-Raphaelites. Modern Renaissance’, Museo di San Domenico, Forlì, 

ph. Wikimedia, Musei Reali di Torino 

stride, and she is gaining the upper hand, which 

we can assume was pleasing to Herringham, as 

a campaigner for women’s suffrage, engaged in 

feminist causes. She wasn’t a militant person, 

but liked the idea of the female figure being 

victorious in this mythical battle. For visitors 

to the exhibition, being able to look at the two 

paintings together gives a strong sense of what 

Christiana was doing and the sheer brilliance 

involved in being able to respond to the earlier 

source and making it come alive again. 

You can see how sensitively she is capturing 

the technique needed for working in tempera, 

recreating the medium based on her study of 

Cennini and other sources. Tempera is a difficult 

medium. It is quick drying, and requires a sure 

touch, absolute precision. You need a steady hand 

and relatively quick work, in very fine detail. One 

of the reasons she made her copy of the National 

Gallery painting was to demonstrate that it was 

possible to make it using tempera. There was an 

open debate among scholars in her era about 

whether Gherardo’s work was tempera or oil, 

because it seemed too refined, its execution too 

perfected and complete. Herringham’s picture is 

an experiment, which shows that ‘it can be done’ 

in that medium. In 2018 and 2019, her claims 

about Gherardo’s work were proven beyond the 

shadow of a doubt, through technical analysis 

with tools that did not exist in her day. 

We have two other Botticelli-based works 

by Christiana, which are different in character. 


CHRISTIANA IN CONTEXT 

When asked which artist she would like 

to discuss for a ‘focus’ article in this 

issue of Restoration Conversations, 

Elizabeth Prettejohn answered without 

a moment’s hesitation, “Christiana 

Herringham!”. The following is her 

‘in-a-nutshell’ description of the artist’s 

life, as a painter and social advocate. 

“Christiana Herringham was an artist 

and advocate for women’s causes, 

including suffrage and higher education. 

In addition to her Renaissance-inspired 

works, Herringham produced flower 

paintings – traditional for women – 

and was interested in architectural 

detail in the Ruskin vein. Later in life, 

she cultivated an interest in Indian art, 

through an important set of copies of 

the Ajanta cave paintings. That process 

was difficult and vexed, as the last 

major work she did, before succumbing 

to mental illness and spending the 

remainder of her life in institutions of 

various kinds… a sad end to the story. 

Christiana felt that her contribution 

had been pointless, but it hadn’t. 

Above: King Bimbisāra, Queen, and Attendants 

seated within a palace pavilion c. 1911, Christiana 

Herringham, Plate I, ph. Copy from the Ajanta 

Frescoes, The Victoria Web, Jacqueline Banerjee 


She enjoyed considerable public success 

in her younger years, a typical pattern 

for women artists of her period, before 

they go out of the picture, at the 

beginning of the twentieth century. In 

fact, most of them were excluded from 

public display or scholarly research, 

until the last decade. 

In 1901, Christiana co-founded the 

Society of Painters of Tempera, and 

became a founding committee member 

of The Burlington Magazine two years 

later. She contributed to creating 

institutions supporting the advancement 

of women, throughout her life, cofounding 

the Women’s Guild of Arts in 

1907. Christiana’s physician husband 

Wilmont Herringham shared her 

vocation to support women’s colleges 

and universities and, after her death, 

he gifted almost all of her work [more 

than 160 paintings] to Newnham College, 

one of the first women’s colleges 

at Cambridge University, and the 

University of London’s Bedford College 

[also a women’s college, now called 

Royal Holloway and Bedford College].” 

Botticelli was a new interest for artists in the 

second half of the nineteenth century. He was 

not particularly treasured or valued by earlier 

generations, but when he garners increased 

attention in the 1860s, she helps interpret his 

distinctive character and mystique for nineteenthcentury 

audiences. In her Head of the Magdalene, 

after Sandro Botticelli, she takes the head and 

shoulders of Mary Magdalene, who forms part of a 

larger ensemble from a Sant’Ambrogio altarpiece 

at the Uffizi, and chooses to concentrate solely 

on the Magdalene’s head. Mary Magdalene was 

famous for having golden locks, and Christiana’s 

approach to the golden tonalities for her hair and 

halo produces a haunting result that is mystical… 

magical. Through this very careful copy of the 

figure chosen, and by bringing out this golden 

tonality, Herringham is making it into a work of 

art in its own right. I think a contemporary artist 

would really see the point to this endeavour – 

taking the fragment of a larger composition and 

transforming it into a story all by itself. 

Christiana’s role in making Botticelli visible 

has been forgotten, due to the fame of betterknown 

artists, including Evelyn De Morgan, who 

responds quite directly to the big allegories, like 

the Botticellian work Flora. Christiana’s copy of 


Left: Christiana Herringham, Head of the Magdalene, 

after Sandro Botticelli 1445–1510, c. 1897, Egham, 

Royal Holloway, University of London at ‘Pre- 

Raphaelites. Modern Renaissance’, Museo di San 

Domenico, Forlì 

Botticelli’s Portrait of Smeralda Bandinelli, at the 

Victoria and Albert Museum, is not allegorical or 

mythological. It is a portrait – quite a simple thing, 

and Christiana has copied the entire painting 

accurately and sympathetically. Dante Gabriel 

Rossetti found the painting on the art market 

at a bargain price [something like 15 shillings!] 

because Botticelli wasn’t all that famous. 

He purchased it and the painting informed his 

art-making for the rest of his life – the diaphanous 

drapery of the figure’s dress can be found in many 

of Rossetti’s later works, and the same can be said 

of the way the figure’s gaze catches your eye. The 

Herringham copy is so beautiful I wonder if many 

people walking past it would recognise it is not an 

original Botticelli. Numerous scholars have written 

on the Botticelli revival, and you can certainly say 

that artists’ interest in Botticelli is a solid reason 

why he shoots up in fame. Christiana Herringham’s 

role in his rise to fame is significant and forgotten, 

and we need to bring that to the fore. 

ELIZABETH PRETTEJOHN 


Elizabeth Prettejohn is Professor of History of Art at the University 

of York. Her research is motivated by curiosity about the status of 

British art within art-historical narratives about modernism and 

modernity. Her books include The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, Beauty 

and Art 1750-2000, Art for Art’s Sake, and most recently Modern 

Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites 

to the First World War. She has co-curated exhibitions on 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Dante Gabriel 

Rossetti and John William Waterhouse. Her co-curated exhibition 

Pre-Raphaelites: Modern Renaissance is on view at the Museo 

Civico San Domenico Forlì until 30 June 2024 (see p. 48). 

Above, left: Sandro Botticelli, Portrait of Smeralda Brandini, 

c. 1475, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, ph. Wikimedia 

Above: Christiana Herringham, Portrait of Smeralda 

Bandinelli, copy after Botticelli, c. 1880–1897, Egham, Royal 

Holloway, University of London 


Soul Sister 

Evelyn De Morgan’s 

spiritual quest 

Evelyn Pickering De Morgan (1855–1919) is 

one of the Pre-Raphaelite ‘Sisters’ included 

in the exhibition in Forlì which is featured 

on page 48. Determined to become an artist from 

an early age, De Morgan defied the wishes of 

her parents and the conventions of her class to 

study art and make a living from her painting. 

She chose to be known by her middle name, 

Evelyn, which was then a name used by both men 

and women, an ambiguity she shared with her 

friend, the writer Vernon Lee. De Morgan spent a 

lot of time in Florence and, like the original Pre- 

Raphaelite Brothers, was influenced by the great 

Renaissance Masters she was able to study there. 

An excellent draughtsman, De Morgan was 

meticulous in her representations of the human 

body, making numerous preparatory sketches 

for her works. Rich in classical, mythological 

and biblical symbolism, her canvases are large, 

often featuring a single female figure. Her later 

works are heavily influenced by her deeply held 

spiritual beliefs and her commitment to pacifism. 

She exhibited throughout her life and was a 


commercially successful artist, earning enough 

to support her husband William in his ceramics 

business. After her death, Evelyn’s works fell out 

of fashion and her sister, Wilhelmina Stirling, set 

out to acquire as many of them as she could, 

creating what would become the De Morgan 

Foundation collection. 

To learn about the background of this hugely 

talented and enigmatic painter, I spoke with the 

De Morgan Foundation’s Director, Sarah Hardy, 

and with Emma Merkling, an art historian who 

is currently working on a book on De Morgan, 

based on her PhD thesis. I began by asking Sarah 

if Evelyn can accurately be described as a Pre- 

Raphaelite artist. 

SH: It depends on how you want to use the 

term Pre-Raphaelite. To absolute purists, that term 

describes the seven Pre-Raphaelite members 

who set up the Brotherhood and used the initials 

‘PRB’ on their artworks. In that sense, Evelyn is 

not a Pre-Raphaelite. But we have to understand 

what a major impact these chaps had on the art 

world and art criticism, on how people consumed 

and interacted with art in public spaces and, 

consequently, on the generations of artists that 

followed. We can definitely say that she paints in 

the Pre-Raphaelite style in some of her pictures. 

And she had familial links to the Brotherhood 

that brought her into the orbit of those artists. 

MM: What was her family background and 

how did she get her art training? 

SH: Evelyn was born in 1855 in London to parents 

of a high social status. Her mother was from the 

landed gentry and her father was a barrister. She 

and her three siblings had a very comfortable 

upbringing. When she decided she wanted to 

be an artist, there are varying accounts of how 

easy or difficult that was for her. [Her mother, 

who would have liked to see Evelyn presented at 

court, reportedly said, ‘I want a daughter, not an 

artist!’] Eventually she enrolled at the National Art 

Training School [now the Royal College of Art] for 

about six months. Then, in 1873, she gained entry 

to the Slade School, after passing their rigorous 

entrance examination. 

Left: Evelyn Pickering 

De Morgan, Flora, 1894, 

Trustees of the De Morgan 

Foundation 

Above: Evelyn Pickering 

De Morgan, Ariadne in 

Naxos, 1877, Trustees of the 

De Morgan Foundation 


Right: Evelyn Pickering De Morgan, 

Angel of Death I, 1881, 

Trustees of the De Morgan Foundation 

MM: Her timing seems to have been 

fortuitous, as I think the Slade School had 

only opened its doors to female students a 

couple of years before? 

SH: Yes, it was a perfect coincidence for her 

because she was just the right age to be admitted 

at that time. And the whole ethos at the Slade was 

that male and female students should be taught 

on precisely the same terms, giving everyone 

equal opportunities. 

MM: Did that include life drawing? 

SH: Yes. I read the Slade prospectus for the first 

time after University College London [of which the 

Slade is a part] scanned their early prospectuses. 

I had some time on my hands during lockdown 

and I read that women were permitted in the life 

drawing room, but not after 5pm. 

MM: Who knows what might have happened 

after 5pm! 

SH: Indeed. The mind boggles. But it was fairly 

enlightened of them to put the men and women 

on an equal footing. In any event, Evelyn 

flourished at the Slade, winning numerous prizes 

and scholarships. Her first exhibited painting, St. 

Catherine of Alexandria, was shown at the Dudley 

Gallery soon after she completed her studies at 

the Slade. One critic at the time said, ‘You know, 

it’s an amazing piece of work, so you’re going to 

be very surprised to learn that it’s by a young 

woman.’ Even as quite a young artist she really 

did stand up very well against the male artists she 

would have been measured against. 

MM: When did Evelyn first travel to Italy? 

SH: Soon after graduating, in 1876, we know that 

she went on an independent trip to Italy with 

her cousin Gertrude, who was a sculptor. Her 

maternal uncle, John Rodham Spencer-Stanhope, 

another Pre-Raphaelite painter, was already 

established there. She was able to get support 

from him to ease the family’s opinion of what 

it meant to be an artist, particularly for a young 

woman. Spencer-Stanhope had been a pupil 

of George Frederic Watts, the great Victorian 

painter [who also tutored Evelyn in his home 

studio] and had met Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 

Oxford in the 1850’s. Together with a group of 

artists including Edward Burne-Jones and William 

Morris, they created murals for the ceiling of the 

Oxford Union, which was the debating society. 

So, Evelyn had that influence in her formative 

years as an artist. 

MM: One of Evelyn’s works in the Forlì 

exhibition is Flora (1894) her iconic painting 

of the Roman goddess of flowers, which is 

clearly inspired by Botticelli’s Primavera and 

The Birth of Venus. Is that work part of the 

De Morgan Foundation collection? 

SH: Yes. I heard they were putting on this 

spectacular show, and one of the first times I 

spoke to [lead co-curator] Peter [Trippi] about it, he 

said, ‘we’re doing it in Italy so that we can have 

the Old Masters there, as they can’t travel to the 

UK.’ They put in the request to the De Morgan 

Foundation to borrow the artworks and we were 

very happy to support them. Flora was painted in 



Left: Evelyn Pickering 

De Morgan, Evening 

Star over the Sea, 

c. 1910–1914, Trustees 

of the De Morgan 

Foundation 

Right: Evelyn Pickering 

De Morgan, Aurora 

Triumphans, 1886, 

Bournemouth, Russell- 

Cotes Art Gallery & 

Museum 

Italy, so it is wonderful to think that, after all this 

time, it’s back in the country of its origin. There 

are so few of De Morgan’s paintings in public 

collections because the Foundation’s got most of 

them. I consider that a lot of my job is to take 

part in these exhibitions and to share the artwork 

as widely as possible – so that we can celebrate 

Evelyn De Morgan as I believe she should be 

celebrated. 

In my conversation with Emma Merkling, I was 

interested in finding out more about Evelyn’s 

personal life, particularly her friendship with 

Vernon Lee, the writer, social activist and fellow 

pacifist who made her home at Il Palmerino in the 

hills above Florence, and her relationship with 

her husband, the ceramicist William De Morgan. 

MM: Most of the letters and diaries of Evelyn 

and William, which might have provided insights 

into their private thoughts and recollections, 

seem to have been either lost or destroyed. 

What do you think became of them? 

EM: She could well have destroyed her letters 

and diaries, or left instructions for people to 

do so. She was an intensely private person. For 

example, her spiritualism was a deeply personal 

and private belief. She was not a public member 

of the Society for Psychical Research, and she 

did not talk about it publicly. She published her 

book of spirit writings anonymously. I think she 

was someone who thought that her art should, 

in some way, speak for itself. So, in the absence 

of diaries, any work on De Morgan, as with many 

other women artists, becomes like detective work, 

which I find quite fun. 


MM: What have you been able to learn about 

her friendship with Vernon Lee? 

EM: Lee was a fantastic source of information 

about De Morgan’s personality – what she’s talking 

about, where she’s going and what she’s looking 

at. This comes from Lee’s letters home, mostly. 

It seems that Lee and Evelyn spent more time 

together before her marriage, but later, Lee makes 

a point of saying that she likes spending time 

with Evelyn and William as a couple because they 

don’t make her feel ‘like a third wheel’. 

Writing to her mother, in June 1881, Lee reports, 

“In the evening [the poet] Mary [Robinson] & I 

went to Evelyn Pickering. She has a mother & 

sisters, but for all one sees, appears to be all alone 

in a huge handsome house in Bryanston Square. 

She is looking quite pretty. Her pictures in the 

Grosvenor are on the whole extremely hideous; 

but she had a very fine thing in the studio. We 

sat on perch chairs (the things models sit on) 

and talked for a long time. She is very clever, 

imaginative, theorising, the most comic contrast, 

with her theories of poetical subject, to John 

[Singer Sargent]. I must get them together.” 

In a May 1883 letter to Mary Robinson, Lee 

describes an idyllic afternoon spent with Evelyn 

in Florence: “This morning on returning from the 

Office, it being Sunday, I found Evelyn Pickering, 

who proposed we should go into the country. 

So, she stayed to lunch & we took a cab to S. 

Margherita. We remained up there over an 

hour, walking about under the olives, picking 


lovely purple orchids, and lying about in the 

shade on the grass. It was the first perfectly 

lovely & very hot day; you can’t think how 

exquisite everything looks, all the trees, vines, 

corn lush & tender green with already their 

summer sparkle; even the big mulberry trees 

quite green, and the wheat full of poppies. 

And the olives quite silver white (close upon 

flowering) against the pure, pale sky. How I 

wish you could have stayed to see it, and to 

feel the sun which made the grass quite hot 

to lie upon.” 

Evelyn met William De Morgan in August 

1883 and, following a long engagement, they 

married in 1887. After their marriage, Evelyn 

and William chose to spend half of each year, 

from late October to May, in Florence, while the 

summer months were spent at their home and 

studio in Chelsea. 

EM: Do you know the story of how they met? 

They were at a fancy dress party. And she was 

dressed as a tube of Rose Madder [a red paint]. 

And William De Morgan apparently goes up 

to her and says, ‘I must be madder still.’ I love 

that story. I love trying to picture her in this 

tube of paint. And then her wedding dress 

was scarlet. 

Above: Evelyn Pickering De Morgan, Portrait of 

William De Morgan Holding a Vase, 1909, 

Trustees of the De Morgan Foundation 


MM: It is lovely that they found each other 

and had an equal, supportive relationship. 

EM: I think their partnership was more central to 

both of their artistic practices than is generally 

understood. While he’s making his suite of 

moonlight pots, she’s painting works like 

Evening Star over the Sea that have this lustrous, 

shimmering quality that are also about the 

moonlight. As they’re working side by side there is 

a crossover of what they’re interested in. William’s 

death [in 1917] was devastating to her. I cried in the 

British Library reading some of her letters to May 

Morris after his death. To think of someone who 

was as bright and imaginative and theorising as 

Vernon Lee describes her writing these disjointed, 

desperate letters … they are pure grief. 

MM: In her work, Evelyn seems to have a 

preoccupation with death. Given that her 

husband was 16 years her senior, was she 

anticipating how bereft she would be without 

him? 

EM: Her interest in death predates her meeting 

William. Her painting, The Angel of Death I, from 

1880 is, I think, one of her most beautiful works. 

As a spiritualist, she believed that death was a 

threshold. Death is actually the beginning of 

the journey towards the ultimate truth, which is 

what the spiritual life is seeking. I think Evelyn’s 

Portrait of William De Morgan Holding a Vase, 

painted in 1909, has quite a lot to do with death. It 

is a super commemorative work. The vase that he 

holds looks like a funerary urn. William’s name 

is inscribed in the tiles on the left; then, on the 

right, you have things that are going to remain 

after his death – his books, carefully sorted and 

labelled, with the ink and letters beneath them. 

The plate and the urn are objects that he made, 

which will outlive him. She is trying to summon 

some essence of William onto the canvas that 

will survive him and shine out as something 

that is always active, in a process of being and 

becoming. She’s trying to find a way to summon 

his soul into visibility. 

MARGIE MACKINNON 

For more information on the De Morgan 

Foundation’s collection, exhibitions and events, 

visit www.demorgan.org.uk 

Quotations are from Sophie Geoffroy and 

Amanda Gagel, Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 

1856-1935, Routledge, 2023. 


Breaking into 

the Boys’ Club 

Angelica Kauffman at the Royal Academy 

Above: Exhibition installation photo, ‘Angelica Kauffman’ at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1 March – 30 June 2024) © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry 


A 

recent article in The Guardian newspaper 

declared that one of the oldest members’ clubs in 

the world, the venerable Garrick Club, founded in 

London in 1831, remains a bastion of male elitism 

almost 200 years after it was established. The 

club’s membership list is comprised of the great 

and the good from the legal establishment, the 

upper reaches of politics and the art world. 

Women are admitted to the club only as guests 

and, while they may be permitted to eat in the 

dining room, they must choose their meals from 

a menu without prices and are not allowed to pay 

for anything whatsoever. Some members claim 

that work is never discussed at the Garrick, so 

there is no question of excluding women from 

important networking opportunities afforded 

the ‘gentlemen’. Other, more forthright, members 

concede that business is often conducted there – 

but that it is ‘good form’ not to be blatant about it. 

The Garrick was named in honour of 

the actor David Garrick, whose acting and 

management at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 

the previous century, had by the 1830s come to 

represent a golden age of British drama. In 1764, 

Garrick’s portrait was painted in Naples by the 

23-year-old Angelica Kauffman, currently the 

subject of a monographic exhibition at London’s 

Royal Academy. As one of its two female 

founding members (the other being Mary 

Moser), Kauffman saved the Royal Academy from 

starting out as an exclusively male institution 

– although she and Moser would remain the 

only female Academicians until Laura Knight’s 

admission in 1936. And Kauffman would have 

to wait 250 years to have a solo show at the 

Academy she helped to found. 

The show’s co-curator, Annette Wickham, 

makes the point that because this is Kauffman’s 

first show at the RA, “we intentionally made it 

a chronological overview of her whole career, 

rather than a more thematic presentation, 

because we felt that she still needed a bit of an 

introduction to a UK audience.” 

Surprisingly, there are three portraits of men 

among Kauffman’s earliest works. Surprising 

because it would have been unusual at the time 

for men to sit for a portrait by a female artist 

and almost unseemly for a woman, and quite 

a young woman at that, to be in such close 

contact with a male subject. Wickham notes 

that it is likely that Kauffman would have been 

chaperoned for these sittings, most probably 

by her father, the Austrian portrait and fresco 

painter Johann Joseph Kauffman. “These early 

portraits are of friends and acquaintances – the 

interesting, famous people with whom she was 

crossing paths in Italy. There is an informality to 

them. With Garrick, there is this idea of a kind 

of familiarity and ease that is quite striking. He 

is just turning around in his chair as though he 

wants to chat to her.” Kauffman’s 1764 portrait 

of German art historian Johann Winckelmann is 

similarly intimate. “She’s depicted Winckelmann 

in his house coat,” says Wickham, “as though he 

has just sat down to study a great thought that 

he needs to record, and it feels as if Kauffman is 

present in that moment. She has stripped away all 

the theatricality of a typical Grand Tour portrait. 

There is nothing in the background and the only 

indication of his great standing as a classical 

scholar is the little bas relief, underneath his 

book, of the Three Graces.” 


Above: Gallery view of Portrait of Joshua Reynolds, 1767. On 

loan from National Trust Collections (Saltram House, The Morley 

Collection) ph. David Parry © Royal Academy of Arts, London 

Left: Angelica Kauffman, Portrait of Johann Joachim 

Winckelmann, 1764. Kunsthaus Zurich, Gift of Conrad Zeller, 1850 

© Kunsthaus Zurich 

The third male portrait is of Joshua Reynolds, 

the RA’s first President and Kauffman’s great 

supporter. The two quickly developed a friendship 

after Kauffman’s arrival in London, where her 

reputation as a precociously talented painter and 

multi-linguist (she spoke at least four languages) 

preceded her. Wickham comments that “there is 

a lovely familiarity in the Reynolds portrait. She 

dresses him up in a sort of Van Dyck costume, 

referencing the ‘great swagger portraits’ that 

Reynolds was looking to produce himself. She 

surrounds him with books, some by his friend Dr 

Johnson, as well as publications that he himself 

contributed to.” A bust of Michelangelo in the 

background appears to be whispering in his ear, 

offering inspiration. Wickham continues, “This 

work is a step in between her early portraits and 

the slightly more formal ones that she painted for 

aristocratic patrons. Reynolds returned the favour 

by painting Kauffman’s portrait, and then, when it 

came to his 1780 RA self-portrait in his academic 

robes, he used the bust of Michelangelo, and the 

same table full of books. So, there is an artistic 

conversation between the two that goes back and 

forth. It is not just Kauffman looking to Reynolds 

– he looks to her work and incorporates aspects 

of it into his own.” 

Like Reynolds, Kauffman was an advocate of 

history painting which, for Kauffman, provided 

the opportunity to feature female protagonists 

– Cleopatra Adorning the Tomb of Mark Antony, 

Penelope at Her Loom and The Death of Alcestis 

are among the works exhibited. Some reviewers 

have suggested that Kauffman’s heroines are 

too demure, that they “represent female agency, 

dignity under pressure, without challenging 

male power”, as the Financial Times’ critic put 

it. Wickham acknowledges that “it seems people 

want her to be more rebellious and more 

revolutionary. Kauffman has been described as a 


Left: Angelica Kauffman, Cleopatra 

Adorning the Tomb of Mark Antony, 

c.1765. The Burghley House Collection 

© The Burghley House Collection 

‘stealth revolutionary’ by the artist Ellen Harvey. 

I love the subtleties at work in her paintings. 

It is fascinating to see how she subverts 

expectations, but often just slightly. The women 

are very much at the centre of the canvases and 

their stories are being highlighted in a way they 

would not be otherwise.” 

In The Death of Alcestis, Kauffman gives the 

ancient Greek heroine a heroic deathbed scene 

which dominates the composition. In order 

to live beyond the day he was fated to die, her 

husband Admetus has been told he must find 

someone to die in his stead. Exemplifying the 

virtue of unwavering loyalty, his wife is the only 

person to volunteer. According to Wickham, “in 

other depictions of this story Alcestis is often 

already dead or has her eyes closed. Here, the 

couple look into each other’s eyes, which draws 

more attention to Alcestis’s choice to sacrifice 

herself. When you unpack it, there’s more 

subtlety and a bit of subversion of the norms.” 

(Spoiler alert: Alcestis is eventually rescued from 

the underworld by Heracles.) 

Kauffman portrays Cleopatra as a woman in 

mourning, not as the seductive femme fatale so 

often seen through the male gaze. Her Penelope, 

endlessly waiting for the return of Odysseus, 

is the quintessential long-suffering wife, and 

the expression of the little dog at her feet who 

shares her gloominess injects some humour 

into the picture. “Kauffman had to be quite 

careful about how these women were portrayed,” 

explains Wickham. “She had already been the 

subject of unwanted gossip [in part because 

of her close relationship with Reynolds] and 

making works that might be seen as titillating 

would have been problematic for her. Also, it is 

important to look at the context that she was 

working in. Her representations were consistent 

with the Neoclassical style that was prevalent 


at the time.” Restraint and clarity of form were 

prized above all. 

The focus on women in Kauffman’s history 

paintings brings to mind Artemisia Gentileschi, 

another painter whose works feature strong 

female protagonists. It is interesting to speculate 

on whether Kauffman came across or even 

copied some of Artemisia’s works during her 

time in Italy. While there is no evidence that this 

was the case, Wickham notes that “the fact that 

she foregrounded women so much and had this 

interesting take on how they were presented does 

suggest that Kauffman could have been familiar 

with [the celebrated Baroque artist]. She knew 

a lot of other creative women at the time, and 

she would have been interested in precedents.” 

Kauffman, in turn, would have an important 

influence on the female artists who followed her, 

providing ample proof that women could in fact 

have a career as an artist. Maria Hadfield Cosway, 

whose career Kauffman encouraged, was seen 

as her natural successor and she might have 

achieved greater success in the art world if her 

husband, the Academician Richard Cosway, had 

permitted her to paint professionally. Elisabeth 

Vigée Le Brun, who met Kauffman in Rome, 

recalled in her memoirs that seeing the latter’s 

self-portrait at the Uffizi in Florence gave her 

courage in pursuing her own artistic ambitions. 

Kauffman was represented in the Uffizi’s 

famed self-portrait gallery by two pictures. The 

first, acquired by the gallery in 1772, is one of 

two early paintings in which Kauffman appears 

in a traditional costume of the Bregenz Forest, 

Above: Exhibition installation photos, ‘Angelica Kauffman’ at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1 March – 30 June 2024) © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry 


Left: Angelica Kauffman, Self-portrait 

with Bust of Minerva, c. 1780-1781 

Grisons Museum of Fine Arts, on deposit 

from the Gottfried Keller Foundation, 

Federal Office of Culture, Bern 

her father’s Austrian homeland. Painted in 1757, 

Kauffman later considered that the work was 

“unworthy of herself”. The Uffizi then accepted 

a second portrait which she completed in 1787. 

In the intervening years, Kauffman had become 

much more conscious of controlling her own 

image. The second portrait presents the artist 

as a ‘vestal virgin’, a timeless, symbolic image as 

both creator and muse. And not just any muse. 

With the chalk between her fingers and the board 

on her lap, Kauffman is personifying disegno, the 

‘father’ of all the visual arts. A bold move that was 

rewarded when her portrait was chosen to hang 

next to that of Michelangelo himself at the Uffizi. 

Beneath Kauffman’s carefully cultivated 

and rather benign exterior was a shrewd 

businesswoman and a skilled networker. Following 

her marriage to Venetian painter Antonio Zucchi 

in 1781, Kauffman returned to Italy, where her 

portraits were much in demand by the aristocracy 

as well as Grand Tourists. In Rome she presided 

over a salon that was frequented by artists, actors, 

opera singers and writers, most notably Johann 

Wolfgang von Goethe, the German poet, novelist 

and scientist. She received commissions from 

her female friends and fellow creatives who she 

painted with the same allegorical approach used 

in portraying herself, including the Portraits of 

Domenica Morghen and Maddalena Volpato as 

Muses of Tragedy and Comedy and Portrait of 

Emma, Lady Hamilton, as Muse of Comedy. 

Kauffman’s prodigious output was documented 

in a book kept by Zucchi, recording her works 

and income. Unfortunately, what is missing from 

this archive is Kauffman’s own voice. Two years 

before her death in 1807, she burnt her letters 

and other documents. Having been the subject 

of scurrilous gossip, particularly during her 

time in London, she had reason to worry about 

how her private thoughts might be construed 

by biographers. She had been the object of 

ridicule in a painting by Irish artist Nathaniel 

Hone. Known as The Conjurer, the work depicts 

an old man, with a girl at his knee, ‘conjuring’ a 

picture from an array of old prints. This was a 

dig at Reynolds – known for his liberal recycling 

of motifs from the Old Masters – but the girl’s 

pose also mimics Kauffman’s painting Hope, 

painted in 1765 and published as a print in 

England in 1775. When the Academy proposed 

to include The Conjurer in their 1775 Annual 

Exhibition, Kauffman threatened to remove her 


Left: Angelica Kauffman, Portraits 

of Domenica Morghen and 

Maddalena Volpato as Muses 

of Tragedy and Comedy, 1791. 

National Museum in Warsaw 

MNW, ph. Piotr Ligier 

© Collection of National Museum 

in Warsaw 

paintings and quit the Academy. A ballot of the 

Council followed, with the Academicians voting 

overwhelmingly in favour of Kauffman – an 

indication of her standing within the institution 

as a highly regarded artist, and confirmation that 

she was not merely a token woman member. 

Kauffman’s status was further cemented with 

her commission to paint four roundels, depicting 

the ‘Elements of Art’, as part of the decorative 

scheme of the Royal Academicians’ Council 

Room in purpose-built apartments at Somerset 

House, the Academy’s first home (see feature on 

p. 81). From their new home in the Front Hall of 

Burlington House, Kauffman’s allegorical figures 

representing Design, Composition, Colour and 

Invention greet today’s visitors as they enter the 

Royal Academy. Welcome to the club. 


Supported by principal sponsor Christian Levett 

and Musee FAMM, ‘Angelica Kauffman’ at London’s 

Royal Academy is on until 30 June 2024. 

As this article was going to print, The Guardian 

reported that women could finally become 

members of the Garrick Club within months, 

193 years after it was founded, following a new 

interpretation of the club’s rules which clarifies 

that there is no specific prohibition on women 

joining the Club. 

Annette Wickham is Curator of Works on Paper 

for the Royal Academy Collection and co-curator 

of the Angelica Kauffman exhibition. She has 

curated and contributed to numerous displays 

and exhibitions at the Academy including ‘Daniel 

Maclise: The Waterloo Cartoon’ and ‘Constable, 

Gainsborough and Turner and the Making of 

Landscape’. Annette has published on aspects 

of the Royal Academy’s history, its Collections 

and its Schools. 


It’s Not Just About 

the Art 

Artist Sarah Pickstone on the importance of Angelica Kauffman 

I“If these paintings were by a man, today we 

would not look at them at all,” claims Financial 

Times critic Jackie Wullschlager. She is referring 

to the works of Angelica Kauffman, the celebrated 

Neoclassical artist who had to wait over 250 years 

for a solo exhibition at London’s Royal Academy, 

the institution of which she was a founding 

member. Laura Cumming, in The Guardian, 

damns Kauffman with faint praise, commenting 

that this “elegant and selective exhibition does 

not overstate her gifts.” 

I am interested in hearing the reaction 

of contemporary artist Sarah Pickstone to 

Wullschlager’s and Cumming’s assessments. 

Pickstone was commissioned to create two 

works inspired by Kauffman’s ceiling roundels 

based on the ‘Elements of Art’. The ‘Elements’ 

had been removed from the gallery’s grand 

entrance hall to be restored in anticipation of 

the RA’s reopening for its 250th anniversary. 

In September 2018, three of the roundels went 

back up on the ceiling while the fourth, Design, 

was exhibited in the newly created Collections 

Gallery. Pickstone’s version, entitled Belvedere, 

was installed in the ceiling of the entrance hall 

where it was exhibited for one year. At the same 

time, The Rainbow, a six-metre-wide homage to 

Kauffman’s Colour, occupied a wall along the 

corridor leading to the RA’s Grand Café. 

Right: Sarah Pickstone, The Rainbow, 2018, Royal Academy of Arts, 

London, ph. Justine Trickett 


Sitting in my kitchen, and fortified with builder’s 

tea and banana bread, Pickstone does not hesitate. 

“They’re missing the point,” she says, referring to 

Kauffman’s critics. “The Royal Academy, as with 

its other current exhibition ‘Entangled Pasts’, 

which questions its role in colonialism, is doing 

something that it hasn’t done before. The RA is 

assessing its own history as an institution. That is 

why it is really relevant that Kauffman is shown. 

The point is that the museum’s job is not just to 

show taste, and what is valid in terms of current 

taste or intellectual thinking. The museum’s 

job can also be to educate and, in this case, to 

reposition the history of its institution as well.” 

Are people tiring of the narrative that 

accompanies exhibitions of women artists – 

the familiar story of their being excluded from 

drawing classes and apprenticeships, the success 

against the odds and the inevitable fading into 

obscurity? “It almost seems as if the pendulum 

has swung too far,” she agrees, “it’s another show 

about another woman artist. And Kauffman is a 

safe target at whom to aim superficial judgments 

because at first glance she is not easy to 

understand. Her work has a light touch which is 

not at all fashionable. It seems different because 

it’s both theatrical and nuanced. It helps if you 

understand the context.” 

Kauffman was influenced by the theatre and the 

poetry and music of her time. A gifted musician, 

she famously depicted her own struggle to 

choose between her two competing passions in 

her Self-portrait at the Crossroads Between the 

Arts of Music and Painting, 1794. Unlike Artemisia 

Gentileschi (to whom Wullschlager unfavourably 

compares her), Kauffman is not a ‘photographic 

artist’. “I do prefer Gentileschi as an artist,” says 

Pickstone. “She brings an aggression and drama 

to her work. There is a filmic quality to it that 

matches contemporary taste. But the comparison 

Left: Sarah Pickstone, The Rainbow, 2018, 

Royal Academy of Arts, London, ph. Justine Trickett 

Above: Angelica Kauffman, Colour, 1778-80, 

ph. John Hammond 

© Royal Academy of Arts, London 


with Kauffman is not helpful because she’s a very 

different artist from a different century. 

“I think the four roundels that Kauffman 

painted for the ceiling are brilliant. And I love 

imagining the conversations that might have 

taken place between her and [Joshua] Reynolds 

[the first President of the Academy] – how she 

could incorporate some of the ideas they talked 

about into the works. I know as an artist, if you’re 

sitting in the studio late at night, you’re talking 

about art. I’m sure many of her ideas fed into 

the Discourses. That cross pollination happens – 

artists rarely work in isolation.” Reynolds is famous 

for the Discourses he delivered to students of the 

Royal Academy on the education of artists and 

the nature of the creative process. Given their 

strong friendship (and Kauffman’s reputation as 

‘the most cultured woman in Europe’), it is not 

fanciful to think that he and Kauffman would 

have discussed the theoretical underpinnings 

of Invention, Composition, Colour and Design, 

as well as how they might be personified. In the 

end, Kauffman radically broke with tradition by 

personifying all four as women – who are not 

passive but actively painting and drawing. 

When Pickstone was approached about 

working on her own version of the ‘Elements’, she 

began by looking at the newly restored Kauffman 

works in the RA storage. “It is astonishing to have 

the work in front of you, to see the back of it, 

where the linen attaches to the original stretcher. 

I particularly enjoyed working on Design because 

it is about the female gaze. Kauffman has shifted 

the controlling viewpoint to that of the woman 

artist. What could be more contemporary? This is 

a woman drawing a male torso, and it’s the male 

ideal, but the man is turned away from her.” It is 

also perhaps a dig at her fellow Academicians 

Above: Angelica 

Kauffman, Self-portrait 

at the Crossroads 

between the Arts of 

Music and Painting, 

1794. National Trust 

Collections (Nostell 

Priory, The St. Oswald 

Collection) through a 

grant from the Heritage 

Lottery Fund 2002, 

ph. John Hammond 

© National Trust Images 


Above: Angelica Kauffman, 

Design, 1778–80, 

ph. John Hammond © Royal 

Academy of Arts, London 

Right: Sarah Pickstone, 

Belvedere, 2018, Royal 

Academy of Arts, London, 

ph. Justine Trickett 

who, in line with social convention, prevented 

her and Mary Moser from drawing in the life 

room – as is graphically depicted in Johann 

Zoffany’s group portrait of the founding members 

in which Kauffman and Moser are represented 

by two sketches high on the wall, where even 

their sightless eyes can’t glimpse the nude male 

models seated below. 

Pickstone made her homage to Kauffman’s 

Colour larger than life in order to give her 

greater visibility. “When people walk into the 

museum, they don’t look at the ceiling. I wanted 

to fill the allotted space to match her reputation 

at the time. The idea was – once you see it, you 

can go back and look up. It wasn’t supposed to be 

a beautiful painting, it was meant to draw people’s 

attention, which it did brilliantly. Halfway through 

the work, the figure became too big within the 

picture space and I realised I had to return to the 

original painting. It was as though Angelica was 

saying, Hey – pay attention! You have to be more 

faithful to my original. At one stage, I thought I’d 

lost it. But, in the end, it worked.” 

During her lifetime, Angelica Kauffman’s 

art influenced artistic thinking, not just within 

her circle of creative female friends, but also 

amongst her fellow Academicians. In the years 

since her death, appreciation for her Neoclassical 

pictures has waxed and waned. Yet, she has 

never faded away and, since 1780, her work has 

been presented in some 30 solo exhibitions. She 

continues to inspire contemporary artists such 


as Sarah Pickstone and Kaye Donachie. In Selfportrait 

in the Character of Design Listening to 

the Inspiration of Poetry, Kauffman, allegorically 

representing Design, leans in attentively to the 

muse of Poetry. The painting captures a moment 

of inspiration and possibility. Writing in RA 

Magazine, Donachie says, “through her visual 

narrative, Kauffman engages with the myth of 

poetry as a conduit for artistic revelation … 

Women need each other and urge each other on, 

whether in friendship or mutual inspiration.” 

“Kauffman may not be to everyone’s taste,” 

says Pickstone, but the RA show is “an incredibly 

interesting exhibition, beautifully curated with 

works that illustrate the breadth of her artistic 

project.” Among those who would agree with this 

view is Christian Levett, the exhibition’s principal 

sponsor. “Kauffman inspired generations of 

women artists who came after her,” he notes. 

“This exhibition will reward anyone who takes 

the time to study the works and to understand 

the narratives and quiet drama that Kauffman 

brought to them.” 


Sarah Pickstone is a London-based artist, author 

and teacher at the Royal Drawing School (among 

others). A screen print, commissioned by the RA 

entitled Angelica, which is a composite of all four 

of Kauffman’s ‘Elements’, is available to purchase 

from her studio. Info@sarahpickstone.co.uk 


The Unfinished Space 

An interview with CasermArcheologica curator 

Laura Caruso 

When you are in the business of rediscovering 

and promoting the contributions of women in the 

fields of art, science and history, Virginia Woolfe’s 

idea of ‘a room of one’s own’ is like currency, a 

token of exchange for use almost everywhere. 

Yet, as an author, I have been toying with the 

concept for a long time, because as any writer 

with a looming deadline knows, there never 

seems to be the space in which to get writing. 

More than 30 years ago, in fact, my university 

reading list included a book for writers by US 

author Janine Goldberg and to paraphrase, on 

every page, she basically told us: “Get to it!” 

Goldberg knew that any self-respecting writer 

would much prefer to clean out their wardrobe, 

make a casserole for the hungry, or even paint 

the Tom Sawyer fence, before sitting down to that 

daunting blank page. Goldberg initially thought 

her own resistance was space-based. She needed 

a room to write in peace, and to raze the writer’s 

block, she had the builders in. They installed 

crown moulding and plush carpets. And when 

they were done making a studio-sized Writer’s 

Paradise, Goldberg found she couldn’t write 

there. It was too perfect, she said. To actually get 

something on her page, she had to escape to a 

café every morning, to comfortably write in the 

midst of imperfection. 

The brand of imperfection to which Goldberg 

was referring, those three decades ago, is the 

kind that can be found at the ‘unfinished’ creative 

space called CasermArcheologica, located in the 

Tuscan town of San Sepolcro. 

In 2013, after a visit to the abandoned Palazzo 

Muglioni, artist and professor Ilaria Margutti 

(see p. 42) got permission to use it. With elbow 

grease and good will, Ilaria and her students from 

‘Città di Piero’ high school cleaned up the betterlooking 

spaces and hosted their first student 

shows there. Municipal firefighters would ruin 

their fun just two years later, in 2015, by deeming 

the building unfit for public access. From there, 

the quest for the palazzo’s accessibility officially 

began, thanks to an ‘urban regeneration project’ 

involving the town’s municipality and numerous 

other players, with Ilaria Margutti and Laura 

Caruso at the forefront. To get the money they 

needed, Caruso, a professional curator, started 

applying for public grants… and winning them. 

Restoration Conversations sat down with Laura 

Caruso to learn more about the unique exhibition 

space she helped create. 


Left: Laura Caruso, ph. Silvia Noferi 

Below: The abandoned Palazzo Muglioni which is now home to 

CasermArcheologica, ph. CasermArcheologica archives 

Restoration Conversations: While renovating 

the building as a venue for art and cultural 

conversation, what kind of a space were you 

trying to achieve? 

Laura Caruso: When Ilaria first became 

acquainted with the building, it was empty, and 

had been stripped. She saw it without windows, 

without flooring, without shutters. But she has 

the artist’s gaze, and she became committed to 

renovating the space, because she could see 

what it was going to be! We decided to design a 

building project that would look ‘unfinished’, to 

give the venue an imperfect face… the kind that 

triggers creativity. That was a deliberate choice, 

because the space itself has many stories to tell. 

The building was once a noble residence – 

Buitoni heiress Minerva Muglioni was the last to 

live here. On its first floor, for a time, it was the 

first laboratory for industrially produced pasta, 

hosting all of Buitoni’s state-of-the-art machinery. 

Then it became headquarters for the Carabinieri – 

barracks for Italy’s military police, and later, in the 

1980s, it was a school gymnasium. So, we wanted 

to preserve its ‘many hats’. Instead of covering 

evidence from the past with a fresh layer of paint, 

we decided to renovate it in a way that would tell 

its layered history. 

CasermArcheologica’s walls are stratified 

under recent stucco, and in some places, you 

can see decorative details emerge, like a phoenix 

from the fire. It is a dialogue with the whole 

of San Sepolcro, and one of our guiding goals 

is the passage of knowledge and experience 

through the generations… almost from an 

archaeological perspective. The whole building 

has an ‘archaeological feel’. History’s layers reveal 

themselves here. 


Above: Installation views of Art book ‘diaries’ by San Sepolcro high school students, various editions, ph. CasermArcheologica Archives 

Right: Students enjoying their hanging display, ph. Massimo Radicchi 


RC: Tell us more about CasermArcheologica’s 

first shows. 

LC: We organised our first book art show, with 

Ilaria’s students from a high school in San 

Sepolcro specialised in science. Maria Lai was 

one of the names she introduced to students, 

before they began a six-month project, in which 

they crafted words and pictures for their own art 

journals. These were not to be ‘private’ objects, 

as journals often are. The invitation was to 

display them, to use them as an instrument of 

awareness and self-awareness. We have been 

doing student shows of this sort for 10 years 

running, and each year we change the exhibition 

design. Now, with 1,300 square meters, we have 

space in which to experiment! 

RC: Although you started as a student venue, 

CasermArcheologica is principally a space 

for professional artists. How does that work? 

LC: Well, firstly, we pay our artists as professionals. 

We pay our collaborators and those who design 

and impart our seminars – because we ask 

for a significant commitment that needs to 

be recognised, even financially. All too often, 

culture at the grass-roots level is not properly 

compensated. We cannot expect people to use 

the best, most productive hours of their day for 

us, without compensation, says Laura. Culture can 

feed the world, but it won’t, unless we consider 

culture a job, and not a hobby. 

RC: What kind of works have you exhibited 

recently and which of your upcoming events 

should be on our readers’ mind screen for the 

future? 

LC: One interesting Narrative Photography 

show, ‘Corpo Celeste’ (Celestial Body) by resident 

photographer and poet Alessandra Baldoni, 

features portraits of students from San Sepolcro. 


Baldoni has an aesthetic eye. She studies shapes 

and finds surprising structural affinities. The 

artist combines her portraits with fragments of 

local artworks or ‘details’ from today’s world. For 

instance, Baldoni compared the image of an agave 

from the Herbal Medicine Museum – the Aboca 

Museum in San Sepolcro – with a galaxy from 

NASA’s archives and a turban worn by a young 

student from the Ivory Coast. In another artwork, 

she pairs a young woman wearing a yellow coat 

with an artwork featuring yellow birds, captured 

at the Diocesan Archive of San Sepolcro. 

Our projects always begin with the artists’ 

ideas, and within that context, I have to say, 

Ilaria is our ‘poetic engine’. In short, we look for 

shows with the strength to generate something, 

like workshops or lectures, providing a window 

onto new worlds. All of our exhibitions are sitespecific, 

all of them seek to involve the public, 

not just as observers but as participants. Through 

the installations we exhibit, artworks become 

instruments enabling people to understand what 

they are seeing and how it is relevant to them. 

Above and right: CasermArcheologica,a community space, ph. Elisa Nocentini; Monica Dengo and Satsuki Hatsushima at work in Japan, ph. Marco Mensa 


This spring the venue is hosting ‘Books by Hand’, 

an exhibition and a week-long workshop [first 

edition starting May 18] that brings together two 

calligraphers from Italy and Japan, Monica Dengo 

and Satsuki Hatsushima. “Japanese ideograms and 

Italic writing are very different; the awareness in 

their gestures is their meeting point. 

The phrase ‘meeting point’ seems an appropriate 

end for our interview, because although we 

generally think of a ‘room of one’s own’ as a quiet 

oasis of alone time, it is actually a ‘meeting point’, 

first with one’s self, and then with the world. For 

what does an artist want with a lonely room, if not 

the space to conceive or craft something that will 

eventually make its way into the world? 

We shall see more of you, CasermArcheologica, 

for surely, the conversation will continue. 

LINDA FALCONE 

Laura Caruso (b. 1979), is project manager and director of 

CasermArcheologica, together with Ilaria Margutti. Since 2010 

she has been curating training and audience engagement for 

the project ‘Wandering Spectators’. Since 2016, Laura has been 

part of the management team of the Spectator Festival in Arezzo. 

She is the creator, together with Saverio Verini, of ‘Art Sweet Art’, 

artist residencies in private homes, accessible to visitors. 

CasermArcheologica is the organiser of LIFE ON mARTS: 

“Models of Science Teaching Through the Arts”, a webinar series 

in English dedicated to the creation of new models of learning 

science through the arts. 


Above: Emily Osborn, Nameless and Friendless, 1857 © Tate 


‘Now You See Us’ 

Women artists from 1520-1920 at Tate Britain 

Nameless and Friendless, painted by Emily Mary 

Osborn in 1857, contains an entire Dickensian 

novel within its frame. At its centre is a young 

female artist (YFA). Dressed in black, she could 

be in mourning for her father or husband – a 

casualty of the Crimean War? – and is now the 

sole support for her family which includes the boy 

beside her, perhaps her younger brother. Their 

muddy clothes and the umbrella dripping on the 

floor tell us they have walked some distance in 

the cold and wet to get here. YFA is hoping to 

sell the work, which she had carefully wrapped 

up in her ‘studio’ and is now in the hands of 

the art dealer. She fidgets with the string of her 

parcel as she awaits his appraisal. Her downcast 

expression and her brother’s beseeching look 

speak of their desperation and the expectation 

that the work will be rejected. The dealer’s 

sceptical face and the downward glance of his 

assistant on the ladder suggest their pessimism 

is justified. YFA herself is being appraised by two 

dodgy characters in top hats who look up from 

their perusal of a print of a ballet dancer in the 

style of Degas – any unaccompanied woman in a 

public space is fair game. 

Dickens would have found suitably lubricious 

names for these two ‘gentlemen’. The shop’s 

other patrons ignore YFA. In the corner, a clerk 

enters figures in his account book. A welldressed 

woman and her son have concluded 

their business and turn their backs on her as they 

exit the shop. It looks as if a carriage is waiting to 

take them home. The painting’s title suggests that 

the story does not end well. 

Osborn’s work is part of an exhibition entitled 

‘Now You See Us’, which will open in May this 

year at Tate Britain and run until mid-October. 

The exhibition includes some 200 works by 100 

women artists (mostly – but not all – British) 

painted between 1520 and 1920. It promises to be 

a ‘must-see’ show for anyone lucky enough to be 

in London at that time. 

From the court painter of Tudor monarchs 

(Levina Teerlinc) to a war artist of the First World 

War (Laura Knight), the exhibition follows women 

on their journeys to becoming professional 

artists, challenging what it meant to be a working 

woman of the time by going against society’s 

expectations – having commercial careers as 

artists and taking part in public exhibitions. Many 


Above: Elizabeth Butler, The Roll Call, 1874. Royal Collection Trust © His Majesty King Charles III, 2024 

of them, including Osborn, also championed equal 

access to art training and academy membership 

for women artists. 

When Lady Elizabeth Butler’s The Roll Call 

was shown in 1874 at the Royal Academy 

Summer Exhibition, it became so popular that 

a policeman had to be stationed next to the 

painting in order to regulate the crowds that 

came to see it. The work, which was eventually 

acquired by Queen Victoria, depicts a row of 

beleaguered troops, regrouping after a battle 

during the Crimean War, an unusual subject for 

a woman artist. Previously, the many religious 

paintings Butler had submitted to the RA had 

been rejected, but with the favourable reception 

of her war paintings, she began to focus almost 

exclusively on military subjects. 


Butler’s battle scenes were generally realistic in 

detail, with aspects such as confusion, injuries and 

exhaustion being convincingly portrayed. As part 

of her extensive research, the artist purchased 

soldiers’ equipment and uniforms, read first-hand 

accounts from the war, and interviewed veterans. 

For a later painting based on an account of 

the Battle of Waterloo, Butler went so far as to 

study the anatomy of horses at the circus and 

to observe smoke patterns at army training 

exercises. She wrote in her autobiography that 

she “never painted for the glory of war, but to 

portray its pathos and heroism.” Butler’s Listed 

for the Connaught Rangers, a poignant depiction 

of child soldiers in Ireland, was exhibited at the 

Royal Academy in 1879, the same year that she 

came within two votes of being admitted as an 

Academician. Despite popular and critical success 


(noted art critic John Ruskin praised her work’s 

“refinement”), that honour eluded her. 

The show includes oil paintings, 

watercolours, pastels, sculptures, photography and 

‘needlepainting’. Along with familiar names like 

Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffman, Rosa 

Bonheur and Vanessa Bell, there are lesser-known 

artists such as Joan Carlile, one of Britain’s first 

professional portrait painters whose works are 

held by the National Portrait Gallery, and Ethel 

Sands, a painter of still lifes and interior settings, 

who was known as a hostess for the cultural elite, 

including John Singer Sargent, Henry James and 

Virginia Woolf. 

Among the lesser-known artists is Rebecca 

Solomon. Born into an artistic Jewish family in 

London’s east end in 1832, Solomon studied art 

at the Spitalfields School of Design, while her 

two brothers were able to enrol at the Royal 

Academy Schools. Despite being a single Jewish 

woman in Victorian society, Solomon achieved 

success as an artist, working first in the studio 

of John Everett Millais (one of the original Pre- 

Raphaelite Brothers) as a painter of draperies, 

and later with the second wave Pre-Raphaelite 

artist, Edward Burne-Jones. 

Solomon’s narrative-style paintings demonstrated 

her familiarity with class, ethnic and gender 

Left: Rebecca Solomon, A Young Teacher, 1861, 

ph. Tate and the Museum of the Home 


Far left: Ethel Sands, 

Tea with Sickert, 

1911–12, ph. Matt 

Greenwood and 

Seraphina Neville 

© Tate 

Left: Vanessa Bell, 

Still Life of Dahlias, 

Chrysanthemums 

and Begonias, 1912, 

ph. Philip Mould and 

Company, London 

discrimination. She was particularly sensitive 

to the plight of women and minorities, and she 

brought a humanising sentiment to her works 

which appealed to prospective purchasers. 

Her painting The Governess, exhibited at the 

Royal Academy in 1854, compares the lives of 

two women within a Victorian home. One is an 

isolated working-class woman with no prospects 

for marriage or children of her own, the other, 

married to a prosperous husband, basks in the 

light of his admiration in the comfort of their 

well-appointed home. 

The Young Teacher is another of Solomon’s 

works that focus on social issues and marginalised 

groups. At first glance, it appears to show a young 

Black woman reading to two white girls in her 

charge. There is a warm familiarity amongst 

the group with the younger girl nestled on the 

woman’s lap while her sister rests her hand on 

the woman’s shoulder. On closer inspection, it 

becomes clear that the teacher in the story is the 

older of the two girls who is helping her Black 

maid to read. The shelves of books behind the 

maid emphasise the learning from which she 

has been excluded by her lack of education. 

The model for the maid was Fanny Eaton, a 

Jamaican-born woman who sat for many of the 

Pre-Raphaelites. 

Solomon never married and was living with 

her brother Simeon, also an artist, when he was 

arrested and prosecuted for indecency in 1873. 

The subsequent disgrace tarnished her own 

career and left her struggling to make a living. 

In 1886, Solomon died, aged 54, from injuries 

sustained after being run over by a hansom cab 

on the Euston Road in central London. Poor, and 

rumoured to be afflicted with alcoholism, it was 

as if Solomon had become the subject of one of 

her own paintings. 


‘Now You See Us’ reflects Tate Britain’s commitment 

to expanding the canon by highlighting the 

contribution of women artists and diversifying 

British art history. The show will run from 16 May 

to 13 October 2024. 


Artemisia in Australia 

Left: Kelsea Blu Halfpenny Self-portrait after Artemisia, 

2024, ph. Sydney’s Hazelhurst Arts Centre 

Artemisia “ 

restoration is inspiring students 

worldwide,” writes Byron Hurst, chairman 

of Sydney’s Hazelhurst Arts Centre, in a 

press release he shared with Calliope Arts this 

spring. “The study of historical women artists by 

young female artists is gathering pace in Australia 

where students are studying the likes of Garzoni, 

Nelli and Gentileschi. Kelsea Blu Halfpenny is a 

student at De La Salle College in Cronulla and she 

is enjoying her first ‘15 minutes of fame’ with her 

graduation work on show at the gallery. Kelsea’s 

work, Self-portrait after Artemisia was inspired by 

Gentileschi’s self portraits. 

‘I followed the restoration of Artemisia’s Allegory 

of Inclination online through Calliope Arts and 

Casa Buonarroti,’ says Kelsea. [The young artist 

is referring to ‘Artemisia UpClose’ sponsored and 

conceived by Calliope Arts and Christian Levett, 

in conjunction with Casa Buonarroti Museum 

and Foundation]. ‘Artemisia’s good housekeeping 

and careful use of blue fascinated me,’ Kelsea 

remembers. ‘When the canvas came down for 

restoration, it was evident that Artemisia didn’t 

waste a scrap of the precious pigment. I found 

this related particularly well to my work, as I made 

liberal use of blue in the dress I am depicted in. 

The colour blue is self-referential for me, due to 

the association with my name!’ 

The reference for Artemisia’s painting was 

Cesare Ripa’s illustrated Iconologia. Pittura was 

portrayed in those pages as gagged, in reference to 

the fact that painting is mute. ‘Artemisia stripped 

off the gag and I have replicated that gesture to 

give historical and contemporary women artists a 

voice,’ Kelsea concluded.” 


A Day in the Life... 

Conservator Francesca Bongioanni, from the Alinari Foundation for 

Photography, is at work amongst the organisation’s stored treasures 

at Art Defender in Calenzano. A digital scan of a vintage snap can give 

away important hidden details, unseen by the naked eye. For more on 

Calliope Arts’ ‘5,000 Negatives’ project featuring early twentieth-century 

photographers Wanda and Marion Wulz, see p. 14. 

Front cover: 

Ilaria Margutti’s Variables of the Swan, ph. Elisa Nocentini, 2024 

Back cover: 

Installation view of the exhibition ‘Pre-Raphaelites. Modern Renaissance’ at Forlì’s 

San Domenico Museum, ph. Museo Civico San Domenico, 2024

Spring 2024

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