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"As a skilled botanical illustrator, Anna was part of a largely invisible community of women whose significant contributions to scientific advancement have gone mostly unnoticed." By Margie MacKinnon Originally published in RESTORATION CONVERSATIONS magazine SPRING/SUMMER, Issue 9 Anna Atkins, Carix (America), c. 1848-1853, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York In 1842, scientist John Herschel coined the term ‘cyanotype’ to d

Until July 2026, the retrospective exhibition Ruth Orkin: The Illusion of Time is on show in Bologna’s Palazzo Pallavicini, following major European exhibitions over the last five years, in France, Spain, Portugal, Hungary and several other stops in Italy. By Linda Falcone Originally published in RESTORATION CONVERSATIONS magazine ISSUE 9 SPRING/ SUMMER 2026 Ruth Orkin, Jinx and Justin in MG, Florence, Italy, 1951, courtesy of © Ruth Orkin Photo Archive This interview begins

Relative Ties, the current exhibition at the Women’s Art Collection (WAC) at Murray Edwards College in Cambridge, explores the work of four women of the Nicholson family. By Margie MacKinnon Originally published in RESTORATION CONVERSATIONS magazine SPRING/SUMMER, Issue 9 EQ Nicholson, Runner Bean, c. 1950, wallpaper, © Estate of EQ Nicholson, private collection Relative Ties, the current exhibition at the Women’s Art Collection (WAC) at Murray Edwards College in Cambridge, e

Infranco and Gulacsy see art as a quest By Linda Falcone Originally published in RESTORATION CONVERSATIONS magazine Spring/Summer 2026 - Issue 9 On mornings at Il Palmerino, as soon as the weather improves, many a landscape artist from various corners of the globe, come to capture its gardens, immortalised on page by author Vernon Lee, and on canvas by painter Lola Costa, successive owners of the Tuscan estate, over the course of 115 years between them. In Autumn, still-lif

Renaissance Women: From d’Este to Dunant By Eleanor Walker Originally published in RESTORATION CONVERSATIONS magazine Spring/Summer 2026 - Issue 9 Renowned British author Sarah Dunant is known for her writing featuring strong, independent women in important Renaissance centres. Rubens (after Titian), Isabella in Red, c. 1605, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna. Source: Wikipedia From In the Company of the Courtesan, and Sacred Hearts, to In the Name of the Family and The Birth o

Photo Gallery for the Exhibition at Cultural Association Il Palmerino THIS PHOTO GALLERY IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION

The catalogue 'Relative Ties', an exploration of the Nicholson women’s artistic legacy across three generations, highlighting matrilineal influence, creative collaborations, textiles, and painting. Relative Ties highlights the work of three generations of women artists from the illustrious Nicholson family—Mabel Nicholson, Nancy Nicholson, EQ Nicholson, and Louisa Creed—and explores what women inherit from their mothers, what can be passed down matrilineal lines, and the impo

This catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition Ketty La Rocca, held at the Estorick Collection in 2025. Born in La Spezia, La Rocca moved to Florence in 1956 where she began working with the avant-garde collective Gruppo 70. Her initial experiments included works of visual poetry and collages that explored the pervasive influence of the mass media on daily life, with a particular focus on gender issues and socio-political themes. During the early 1970s, she turned t

This publication, together with the exhibition it accompanies, presents the largest ever survey of work by Vanessa Bell (1879–1961). Described in 1923 as ‘the most important woman painter in Europe’, Bell was a pioneering modernist and founding member of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of influential English artists, writers and intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century. The book traces Bell’s explorations into the Italian Renaissance, her encounters with the Eu

By Linda Falcone Originally published in RESTORATION CONVERSATIONS magazine ISSUE 9 SPRING/ SUMMER 2026 Elena Salvini Pierallini, From the ‘Murabile’ wall series, Still Life with Onions and Bananas, detail, 1995, ph. ESP From ‘upright’ artbooks to time-lapse photographic series and larger installations, Florentine artist and photographer Elena Salvini Pierallini – known as ESP – produced a multi-faceted oeuvre, that was more than fifty years in the making. From June 15 to Sep

Isabella D’Este, Nicole Farhi, Sepideh Farsi, Sarah Dunant, Juana Romani, Leonora Carrington, Anna Atkins, Cyrielle Gulacsy, Nancy Nicholson, Louisa Creed, Silvia Infranco and more…. Press the image to flip through Spring/ Summer 2026 Restoration Conversations is a digital magazine, produced by Calliope Arts, spotlighting the achievements of women in history and today. It has two issues a year Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter. Issue 9 of Restoration Conversations homes in on t

The restoration of Artemisia’s Hercules and Omphale, the dramatic backstory By Margie MacKinnon Originally published in RESTORATION CONVERSATIONS magazine Autumn/Winter 2025 - Issue 8 Getty’s senior conservator of paintings Ulrich Birkmaier cleans the surface of Hercules and Omphale , from Sursock Palace Collections © 2022 J. Paul Getty Trust Artemisia Gentileschi’s Hercules and Omphale , the star of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles’s exhibition, Artemisia’s Strong Women: R

Violante Siriès’ success in a changing art market An interview with Giulia Coco by Linda Falcone Originally published in Restoration Conversations Issue 8 Autumn/Winter 2025 Maria Theresa of Austria’s husband Francis Stephan decided to stay in Vienna with his wife in 1737, despite being proclaimed head of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Europe’s more powerful states had refused to recognise Anna Maria Luisa, the last of the Medici line, as the territory’s legitimate ruler, bec

Personal Reflections on Sarah Cecilia Harrison By Anne Chisholm In the tall house in Hampstead where I grew up hung a number of large, dark portraits in gold frames. The only one that caught my eye was that of a beautiful dark-haired woman, her lips parted, wearing a slightly decollete black dress. My mother told me that it was a portrait of my Irish grandmother, Eliza Beatrice Harrison, painted for her engagement to my English grandfather, Hugh Chisholm, by her younger sis

German botanical artist Marieluise Bantel comes to Il Palmerino with a new exhibition that celebrates the many phases of flowers

Vanessa Nicolson, Carla Danella, Anne Chisholm, Sarah Cecilia Harrison, Suzanne Valadon and more... Press the image to flip through Autumn Winter 2025/6 This issue of Restoration Conversations explores modern and contemporary art and film from women’s perspectives, with several thought-provoking shows, like ‘MARY MARY’ (quite contrary) at The Artist’s Garden and ‘Ketty La Rocca: you you’, the Estorick Collection’s retrospective on the Italian conceptual artist. In Florence,

Shubha Taparia and Cécile Davidovici at Museo Sant'Orsola, 'Beyond Bloomsbury, with Carrington and more... Press the image to flip through Spring 2025 A celebration of restoration and art production, our Spring 2025 issue delves into the Innocenti Hospital’s historic archives, in search of stories and ‘tokens’ belonging to its girl foundlings; then, we revel in the before-and-after glory of eighteenth-century painter Violante Siriès Cerroti’s newly restored Reading Madonna –

Lola Costa, Vernon Lee, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf... 'a garden of one's own' at Il Palmerino Cultural Association in Florence

Conservator Eugenia Di Rocco, Lavinia Fontana, Maria Luisa Raggi, Ethyl Smyth and more... Press the image to flip through Winter 2024 Today’s women, featured in the Winter 2024 issue of Restoration Conversations, have done their share of searching, and that may well be the reason they find themselves pictured between these pages. Violinist Ruth Palmer and scholar Claudia Tobin seek – through their research and performance – to bring female composers and poetic-minded ‘freedom

Alice Neel, Joan Mitchell, Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici, Lee Miller and more... Press the image to flip through Spring 2023 'Friends and Strangers’, the title of Margie MacKinnon’s article on the London-based exhibitions of painters Alice Neel and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, could be used to describe the whole of Restoration Conversations . Indeed, Issue 3, Spring 2023 comprises a series of ‘meetings’ with modern-day and historic women – both familiar and largely unknown. Many of