Renaissance

Lady with an Ermine

The sitter is almost certainly Cecilia Gallerani, the teenage mistress of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, who commissioned the portrait from his court painter.

Leonardo da Vinci · 1490

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Intro source: Wikipedia (EN)

Author

Czartoryski Museum, Krakow

The animal is a double pun: the ermine was Ludovico's own emblem after his election to the Neapolitan Order of the Ermine, and the Greek word for it, galé, echoes Gallerani.

Highlights

Facts & legends

The sitter is almost certainly Cecilia Gallerani, the teenage mistress of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, who commissioned the portrait from his court painter.
The animal is a double pun: the ermine was Ludovico's own emblem after his election to the Neapolitan Order of the Ermine, and the Greek word for it, galé, echoes Gallerani.
The coal-black background is not Leonardo's idea. X-ray and infrared imaging found a door opening behind her shoulder, painted over long after his death.
The same imaging showed the creature was an afterthought: Leonardo introduced the ermine mid-work and reworked Cecilia's fingers until they gripped its body convincingly.
The Nazis carried the walnut panel off during the Second World War. It decorated the rooms of Governor-General Hans Frank, Wawel Castle among them, and had to be recovered for Poland after 1945.
In 2016 the Polish state bought the entire Czartoryski collection, this Leonardo included, for 100 million euros, a fraction of what the painting alone is worth.

Source: Wikipedia (EN)

Estimated value

What it is worth today

In 2016 the Polish state acquired Lady with an Ermine as part of the entire Czartoryski collection, bought for €100 million. The Leonardo alone is valued in the hundreds of millions, but it is now Poland's national heritage and not for sale.

More details Who Cecilia Gallerani was, why the ermine points to the duke, the sitter's name, and virtue at once, how a black repaint altered Leonardo's design, and which letters restored her identity.

The portrait hears footsteps

Cecilia turns toward someone outside the frame

Leonardo replaced the fixed profile with a three-quarter turn: shoulders, head, and ermine respond to an unseen arrival.

The picture catches attention in motion rather than freezing social rank.

The sitter is Cecilia Gallerani, an educated young woman at the Milanese court and Ludovico Sforza's mistress, about sixteen or seventeen. Contemporaries called her donna docta and compared her with Sappho and learned women of antiquity. The portrait records an intellectual participant in court life.

She was about sixteen

A poet as well as the duke's mistress

Cecilia Gallerani was praised as a learned woman who wrote poetry, knew Latin, and later hosted an intellectual salon.

Her poems are lost, making the portrait an unusually vivid witness to a reputation preserved mostly in documents.

The ermine carries several meanings. It signified purity; Ludovico had received the Order of the Ermine and was called the White Ermine; Greek galé may pun on Gallerani. The layers can coexist, tying sitter, patron, and emblem without one final answer.

The animal speaks three names

Duke, sitter, and purity meet in the ermine

Ludovico Sforza held the Order of the Ermine and was nicknamed the White Ermine.

The animal also signified purity, while the Greek galē may pun on Gallerani; these remain layered interpretations rather than one solved code.

Cecilia and animal turn together toward something outside the frame. This three-quarter movement gave unusual life to portraiture. We do not know who entered, but both bodies have reacted. Leonardo replaces static status with an event already underway.

The black background is later

Repainting cut the figure out of Leonardo's atmosphere

The background was darkened after Leonardo, probably in the nineteenth century.

The inscription naming La Belle Ferronnière was also added during an early misidentification of the sitter.

The black background is not entirely original. Kraków's museum says it was repainted in the nineteenth century; light once modelled a semi-dark space. The change made a stronger silhouette while reducing transitions around the shoulders.

Two documents restored her name

A letter and a poem reconnected Cecilia to the panel

In 1498 Isabella d'Este asked Cecilia to lend her Leonardo portrait for comparison, while Bernardo Bellincioni praised it in verse.

Bought by Adam Jerzy Czartoryski around 1800, it is now the only Leonardo painting in a Polish collection, displayed in Kraków's Czartoryski Museum.

Adam Jerzy Czartoryski bought the picture in Italy around 1800 and gave it to his mother's museum. Letters and a sonnet confirmed Cecilia's identity only near 1900. Moved and looted during wars, it is now the only Leonardo painting in a Polish collection.

Official sources