Women Do It Anyway.
What does a 16th-century Italian painter nun tell us about business?
When I studied Italian Studies, we spent years on the three greats: Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio. The canon. The men who shaped literature.
But what about the women?
They weren't in the textbooks. They weren't in the syllabi. Out of so many professors at the University of Belgrade, only one mentioned women authors extensively (PhD Dusica Todorovic - thank you for introducing Natalia Ginzburg). However this one, I found on my own while reading Giorgio Vasari's 'Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori' - Plautilla Nelli was one of them.
The Paintress
She was a 16th-century nun in Florence. Self-taught, because women couldn't study art. Barred from drawing male models, because that would be inappropriate. She copied what she could – paintings by Fra Bartolomeo left to her convent – and taught herself anyway.
She founded an all-woman workshop inside the convent walls. Taught other nuns to paint.
Then she painted the Last Supper. Twenty-two feet long. The only one ever painted by a woman. Oil on canvas, not fresco – because she didn't have the training for fresco, so she innovated. She filled it with Tuscan food, Chinese porcelain, apostles with wrinkled foreheads and red-rimmed eyes. Compare it with other paintings and you'll see the difference. She was an outsider, so she innovated.
And she signed it: Orate pro pictora – "Pray for the paintress" – using the feminine form of the word, insisting on her identity.
Plautilla Nelli, The Last Supper, c.1568. Oil on canvas, 200 × 700 cm. Museo di Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Image: Rabatti-Domingie Firenze / Wikimedia Commons.
Giorgio Vasari, the father of art history, included her in his Lives of the Artists. He wrote that she 'would have done marvellous things if, like men, she had been able to study and to devote herself to drawing and copying living and natural things.' (Vasari, 1568)
Then she was forgotten. Due to many circumstances, but mainly due to mainstream practices that favoured secular artists and men who had the exposure to be in the presence of art. At university we spent so much time explaining how the Renaissance was only available to some, and not to confuse it with the general conditions of how people lived at the time – because for the popolo, it was still mediaeval times.
But here's the thing: Plautilla did it anyway.
Plautilla Nelli and workshop, Santa Caterina da Siena/de’ Ricci
The Outsiders Who Built Anyway
The stories we usually hear about founders are a certain kind. The person who spent years in an industry, learned the ropes, then struck out on their own with a clear plan and insider knowledge.
But some of the most transformative people weren't insiders at all. They were the ones left out of the textbooks.
Steve Jobs was a college dropout with no formal engineering training. He wasn't the insider – Wozniak was the tech genius. But Jobs understood something others didn't. At 12 years old, he cold-called Bill Hewlett (co-founder of Hewlett-Packard) asking for spare parts. Hewlett was so impressed he gave Jobs a summer job. Jobs later said: 'Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask. And that's what separates the people who do things from the people who just dream about them.' (Stanford University, 2005)
Mira Murati grew up in communist Albania, where her parents taught literature while she taught herself math and physics. She moved countries twice, worked at Tesla and a virtual reality startup, then joined OpenAI – not as a researcher, but in product management. She had no traditional AI background. Yet she became the company's CTO and pushed to release ChatGPT to the public, changing the world overnight. (Time Magazine, 2023)
Laney Crowell had the dream job at Estée Lauder. The title, the salary, the prestige. But while pregnant with her first daughter, she walked away. No industry connections. No startup experience. She started a blog that became a community that became Saie – now a cult clean beauty brand backed by Gwyneth Paltrow and Unilever. She built it anyway. (Forbes, 2021)
Peter Thiel, in his book Zero to One, observes that almost all successful founders are 'simultaneously insiders and outsiders.' They don't quite fit. The PayPal founding team included four people born outside the US, three who escaped communist countries, and one who built bombs as a teenager. Not exactly the usual suspects. (Thiel, 2014)
These weren't people handed a seat at the table. They weren't insiders with a clear path. They were outsiders who looked at something broken – a market, an industry, a product – and said: I can do this better.
They didn't wait for permission. They didn't wait for the industry to welcome them.
They did it anyway.
Plautilla Nelli painted anyway. In her convent, without training, without access, she created the only Last Supper by a woman and taught other nuns to do the same. Then she was erased. But she did it anywa
I'm building ROBE anyway. No insider connections. No fashion background. Just a deep frustration with a market that forgot about mothers, and a refusal to accept that 'this will do' is the best we deserve.
References
Advancing Women Artists. (2021) 'Adopt an Apostle: When and Where'. Available at: advancingwomenartists.org
DailyArt Magazine. (2025) '5 Women Artists Whose Works Were Misattributed to Men'. Available at: dailyartmagazine.com
Forbes. (2021) 'How Laney Crowell Built Saie, The Clean Beauty Brand Beloved By Gwyneth Paltrow', 22 April. Available at: forbes.com
Gallerie degli Uffizi. (2017) 'Plautilla Nelli. Art and Devotion in the Convent in Savonarola's Footsteps'. Available at: uffizi.it
Konzen Dill, V. (2026) 'Everything You Need to Know About Plautilla Nelli', DailyArt Magazine, 5 March. Available at: https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/plautilla-nelli/
Stanford University. (2005) ''You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says'. Stanford Report, 14 June. Available at: news.stanford.edu
Strocchia, S.T. (2000) 'Review of *Plautilla Nelli (1524–1588): The Painter-Prioress of Renaissance Florence*', caa.reviews. Available at: caareviews.org
The News Journal. (2016) 'Revealed: Hidden history of art by women'. Available at: delawareonline.com
Thiel, P. (2014) Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. London: Virgin Books.
Time Magazine. (2023) 'Mira Murati Is Time's 100 Most Influential People in AI', 7 September. Available at: time.com
Vasari, G. (1568) Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori. Florence. English translation: Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, translated by G. du C. De Vere (1912). London: Macmillan and Co. / The Gutenberg Project.