Both sides
What is on the back?
An emblem. The panel is painted on both sides, and the National Gallery of Art calls the back an emblematic portrait of Ginevra. [1]
In the middle stands a sprig of juniper, a pun on her name: juniper is ginepro in Italian. A wreath of laurel and palm frames it. [2] The Gallery says the laurel and palm symbolise intellectual and moral virtue. [1]
A scroll winds across the wreath. The Gallery calls its Latin words, VIRTVTEM FORMA DECORAT, her motto, and translates them as “Beauty Adorns Virtue”. [1]
The laurel and palm were also the personal emblem of Bernardo Bembo, the Venetian ambassador to Florence and one of Ginevra’s admirers. [2] Scientific analysis showed that the scroll first carried Bembo’s own motto, which means virtue and honour. The Gallery says these clues suggest he may have commissioned the portrait. [2]
No one knows for sure who commissioned it. [2] The Gallery’s object record gives another occasion: it says Ginevra sat for the portrait to commemorate her upcoming marriage. [3] She was engaged to Luigi Niccolini in 1474. [2]
The historian Mary D. Garrard doubted the Bembo reading in an essay published in 1992. If Bembo commissioned the picture, she asked, why did he not take it back to Venice? She proposed reading it as an honour to Ginevra herself, a young woman known as a poet. [4]
The sitter
Who was Ginevra?
Ginevra de’ Benci was the daughter of a Florentine banker. Her family’s wealth allowed her an education, and she was known as a poet and a good conversationalist. [2]
Her family carried weight in Florence. Her grandfather Giovanni de’ Benci was general manager of the Medici bank, and her father Amerigo was a patron and friend of the philosopher Marsilio Ficino. [4]
Many men wrote poems about her. [2] Ten were written by members of the Medici circle, Cristoforo Landino and Alessandro Braccesi, and commissioned by Bembo. Lorenzo de’ Medici wrote two sonnets. [4]
“I ask your forgiveness and I am a mountain tiger.” [2]
That line, the opening of a sestina, is the only line of her own poetry that survives. [2] [4] It is known because a writer quoted it in a letter to her in 1490. [4]
She had no children, and she died around 1520. [4]
Look closely
Five details
Three details from the front and two from the back, cut from the Gallery’s photographs. Each note says what you can see.
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Detail 1 of 5 · the front
The juniper against the sky
The Gallery calls the bush behind her “a halo of juniper leaves, a reference to her name”. [3] Each cluster of needles is painted as a small star, with the blue sky showing between them.
The Gallery says Leonardo sometimes blended the paint with his fingers, for example where the sky meets the juniper above her shoulder, and that his fingerprints can be seen. [2] [3] No print is clear in this photograph.
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Detail 2 of 5 · the front
The face and the curls
The Gallery points to the delicate modelling of her face, and quotes a critic who said the work seemed “not a portrait but Ginevra herself”. [3] Her hair falls in tight curls, each a small spiral lit along its upper edge. The Gallery notes that in Renaissance Italy blonde hair was considered the height of beauty. [3]
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Detail 3 of 5 · the front
The pin at her neck
Her dress looks more like an everyday outfit than something worn for a formal portrait, the Gallery says, and the only adornment is a gold pin at her neck. [3] Find it where the folds of her sheer veil cross. Below it, blue laces run through small gold rings.
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Detail 4 of 5 · the back
The motto
The scroll reads VIRTVTEM FORMA DECORAT, with FORMA split across two turns of the ribbon. The Gallery calls the words the beginning of a hexameter, a line of Latin verse. [1] It translates them as “Beauty Adorns Virtue” in one place and as “She adorns her virtue with beauty” in another. [1]
Garrard notes that the Latin can be read either way, and argues that the juniper, which stands for Ginevra, supports the second reading. [4]
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Detail 5 of 5 · the back
The seal
A red wax seal is pressed into the top right corner. The Gallery dates it to 1733 and says it bears the arms of the princes of Liechtenstein. [1] The painting stayed in their collection until 1967. [2]
What survives
What is missing?
The painting we see today is only part of the original portrait. At some point the panel was cut down along the bottom. [2]
The back shows the cut too. The laurel on the left and the palm on the right run off the bottom edge, and a smooth brown shape without the pink speckles covers the foot of the juniper.
What did the lost strip show? The Gallery says a surviving drawing by Leonardo suggests that he painted her hands cradled at her waist, and it thinks she may have held a small flower, perhaps a pink. [2]
A drawing often connected with the portrait is a study of a woman’s hands in the Royal Collection. Its owner agrees that the painting probably once included the sitter’s hands. But it dates the drawing to about 1490, calls its style significantly later than the painting, and suggests it may be a study for Leonardo’s portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, the Lady with an Ermine. [5]
So any picture of the complete portrait is a reconstruction.
Common questions
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Why does the portrait stop at her chest?
The panel was cut down along the bottom at some point. The Gallery says a surviving drawing by Leonardo suggests that the lost part showed her hands cradled at her waist. [2] The Royal Collection, which owns a drawing of hands often connected with the portrait, dates it to about 1490, later than the painting. [5]
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Is it Leonardo’s only painting in the Americas?
Yes. The National Gallery of Art in Washington describes it as the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas. [2]
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Where can I see it?
At the National Gallery of Art in Washington. [3] Its display status changes, so check the Gallery’s own page before you visit.
This painting is available as a print. View the print →
