Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo da Vinci

Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo da Vinci

Two turning figures

Cecilia Gallerani turns her head to her left, as if someone has just come into the room, while her body faces the other way. The ermine in her arms makes the same turn, its head up and alert, one front paw raised against her sleeve. Leonardo paints her long hand resting on its fur with the bones and tendons showing, a fine black band across her forehead, a sheer veil at her hairline, and a string of dark beads hanging in two loops from her neck. The flat black background is not his: it was painted over later, and the original was probably a bluish grey.

Leonardo at the Sforza court

Leonardo painted it in Milan around 1489–91, while he was in the service of Ludovico Sforza, the city’s ruler, whose mistress Cecilia was. The ermine works on several levels. It was an old symbol of purity; Ludovico had been made a member of the Order of the Ermine and used the animal as an emblem; and the Greek word for it, galê, echoes her surname. The inscription at the top left, “La Bele Feroniere”, was added by a later hand and names the wrong sitter. It is one of only four surviving portraits of women by Leonardo; the Mona Lisa is another.

Where it hangs

The panel is in the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków, part of the National Museum in Kraków. Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski bought it in Italy in 1798; seized during the Second World War, it was returned to Poland in 1946. It measures about 55 by 40 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 9,000-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 60 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Czartoryski Museum, National Museum in Kraków · Wikidata Q474338 · Wikimedia Commons