Speaking Of Travel ®

Jane Adams, former director of Partnership Relations with Jane Fortune and Advancing Women Artists,  a non-profit organization that was dedicated to rediscovering, restoring, and exhibiting works by women artists found in Florence’s Museums and State deposits, shares how she is continuing to raise awareness about forgotten artists and reclaim their rightful place in history.Jane explains how meeting Jane Fortune and Advancing Women Artists led to one of the most recent examples of lost art and also one of the most impressive. Sister Plautilla Nelli’s (1524-1588) The Last Supper is the only known depiction of Christ’s last meal by a female artist in the pre-modern age. The self-taught artist’s massive canvas—about 21 feet long and 7 feet high—is one of the largest works by a woman artist of the pre-modern era in the entire world. Though women were banned from studying anatomy, Nelli defied conventions of the time by taking on a theme reserved for male artists and creating 13 life-size male figures. There are s