Plautilla Nelli

In the refectory of a Florentine convent, around 1568, a Dominican nun set life-size apostles around a table nearly 7 meters long, the first known Last Supper painted by a woman. Her name was Plautilla Nelli, and she had never trained in any workshop. Women were barred from studying anatomy from the nude, so she taught herself by copying drawings, above all those of Fra Bartolomeo, a friar-painter whose sheets her convent owned.

Nelli ran a busy workshop of painting nuns at the convent of Santa Caterina, and her devotional pictures sold well enough to help support the house. The painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari, writing in her own lifetime, noted the many Florentine homes that held her work.

For roughly 450 years the Last Supper stayed out of public view, darkened and folded away as the convent was dismantled. After a four-year restoration funded by donors in 19 countries, it went on permanent display in 2019 in the museum of Santa Maria Novella, where Nelli's signature asks the viewer to pray for the paintress.