“Walk straight down the hall, turn right at the third room, and her eyes will meet yours,” an employee at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. told me when I asked her where I would find “the Leonardo da Vinci painting.”
When I turned right, Ginevra de’ Benci, the subject of the Renaissance master’s only painting in the Americas, stared at me from a distance through her glass enclosure atop a marble pedestal in Gallery 6.
Fittingly, the museum employee referenced Ginevra’s eyes, which relate to one of the groundbreaking features I was eager to observe firsthand in da Vinci’s first secular portrait, that of a wealthy Florentine banker’s 16-year-old daughter. Ginevra’s three-quarter pose and gaze directed at the viewer were bold features when portraits of aristocratic women in Italy were conventionally painted in profile. Da Vinci lent her a greater psychological dimension that he strove to imbue in all of his subjects.
“Ginevra was perhaps the first Italian woman to be depicted in the new, more open pose,” read a sign on the wall in the gallery. Gallery 6 features paintings of subjects in three-quarter poses that “afford a more complete view of the face and a greater insight into personality and character.”
Ginevra de’ Benci was the young da Vinci’s first secular portrait, painted in 1474, the year she was married. (Photo courtesy of National Gallery of Art)
Ginevra de’ Benci is the seventh of da Vinci’s paintings that I’ve seen in person, the latest in my quest to view his oeuvre of about 20. As usual, I wanted to see what more I may learn from viewing his artworks in the flesh. What more could I discover about the artist, his subject(s), and the history of the painting at the museum and elsewhere?
The 22-year-old da Vinci was an apprentice at the flourishing Florentine workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, a sculptor, painter, and goldsmith, when he painted Ginevra’s likeness, possibly on her engagement or marriage to cloth merchant Luigi Niccolini in 1474. Art historians debate whether Niccolini commissioned the portrait or one of her male admirers, Bernardo Bembo, a Venetian ambassador to Florence with whom the literary-inclined Ginevra exchanged platonic love poems. Armed with this information, I wonder whether da Vinci captured in Ginevra’s melancholy expression her repressed desire to marry Bembo instead.
On the back of the poplar panel, da Vinci painted Ginevra’s emblematic wreath and a Latin motto that translates to “Beauty Adorns Virtue.” (Photo: Joseph Kellard)
On the reverse side of the poplar panel, the young artist also painted Ginevra’s emblematic wreath of a juniper sprig and laurel and palm branches wrapped in a scroll bearing a motto in Latin translating to “Beauty Adorns Virtue.” Just as the juniper tree that frames Ginevra’s glowing, porcelain-skinned face puns on her name (“ginepro” is Italian for juniper), the sprig also serves to symbolize chastity. The laurel indicates her artistic, literary and intellectual interests; the palm represents moral virtue.
“Young women of the time were expected to comport themselves with dignity and modesty,” reads the museum’s webpage on the portrait. “Virtue was prized and guarded, and a girl’s beauty was thought to be a sign of goodness.”
Da Vinci’s decision to place Ginevra outdoors was also new for portraits of Italian Renaissance women, who typically appeared in the confines of their family homes. This breakthrough opened the door for landscapes to play a more prominent role in portraiture. Over her left shoulder are trees, steeples, and a mountain all painted less sharply and in assorted blue hues. These conditions reflect da Vinci’s observations of atmospheric effects on distant objects that informed his ideas on aerial perspective. Her curly, highlighted hair resembles light reflecting on moving water, whether waves or vortices. These were interests that would morph into the scientific artist’s intensive studies and experiments in optics and hydrology.
In one of his notebooks, next to a drawing of water that assumes the appearance of hair, he wrote: “Observe the motion of the surface of the water, how it resembles that of hair, which has two movements—one depends on the weight of the hair, the other on the direction of the curls…”
With this new knowledge, I’d come to realize that Ginevra de’ Benci is among the portraitist’s earliest attempts to integrate his female subjects with their natural surroundings, a striving that culminated in his masterpiece, the Mona Lisa.
As I walked around the gallery, shooting photos of the portrait from various perspectives, an elderly couple stepped close to Ginevra’s protective glass. They were searching for finger or palm prints the artist left on the panel, knowing he pressed his hands on the wet oil paints to produce surface effects. This unusual, perhaps unprecedented use of hands to blur edges and blend colors indicates da Vinci was developing one of his major innovations, sfumato, which produced smooth, fine transitions between light and shadow as well as colors.
A couple search for finger and palm prints that da Vinci left while using his hands to create surface effects with oil paints that he helped to pioneer in Italy. (Photo: Joseph Kellard)
“...[T]he careful observation of nature and subtle three–dimensionality of Ginevra's face point unmistakably to the new naturalism with which Leonardo would transform Renaissance painting,” reads the museum’s website. “Ginevra is modeled with gradually deepening veils of smoky shadow—not by line, not by abrupt transitions of color or light.”
Da Vinci was also among the artists who pioneered in Italy the use of oil-based paints, whose more vivid, richer colors were already transforming paintings in northern Europe, particularly Belgium and the Netherlands. With longer drying times than traditional tempera or fresco, oil paints also gave artists greater flexibility to create more subtle variations and exact details.
Another unusual feature of his portrait is Ginevra’s lack of jewelry or a luxurious dress that would flag her family’s affluence. The absence of such finery became standard in his female portraits. This made me think: could a fledgling Renaissance artist take such liberties with a commissioned work? No matter, he practiced the advice he would offer artists in his posthumously published book on painting, wherein he wrote:
“And I say to you as you adorn your figures with costly gold and other expensive decorations, do you not see the resplendent beauty of youth lose its excellence through excessive devotion to ornament? Have you not seen the women who dwell among the mountains wrapped in their poor rude draperies acquiring greater beauty than women who are decked in ornament?”
Ginevra’s 42.7 x 37 cm panel was originally longer and almost certainly featured her torso, arms, and hands. But at some unrecorded time the lower section was cut off, perhaps due to damage. Some scholars believe da Vinci’s silverpoint drawing of a woman’s hands, housed at the British Royal Collection at Windsor, is possibly a preliminary study for the portrait.
“The careful observation of nature and subtle three–dimensionality of Ginevra’s face point unmistakably to the new naturalism with which Leonardo would transform Renaissance painting”
When I first walked into Gallery 6, I expected to find the portrait to hang on a standalone wall, just as it had appeared in photos and videos I had long viewed online before my inaugural visit to the National Gallery. Instead, Ginevra de’ Benci has remained in a glass case on a pedestal in the gallery ever since the painting was moved temporarily to display as such in a Verrocchio exhibit at the museum in 2019.
Unfortunately, reflections in glass-covered paintings spell trouble for photographers. Sure enough, Ginevra de’ Benci’s surroundings and other Gallery 6-visitors were reflected in my snapshots of the portrait. The National Gallery failed to comment when I later asked, via email, if the glass case speaks more to the museum’s efforts to better protect its jewel artwork given the astronomical prices da Vinci’s paintings (and drawings) continue to fetch at auctions. In 1967, the museum paid a then record price for a painting when it purchased Ginevra de’ Benci for $5 million from the royal family of Liechtenstein that had owned the portrait since at least 1733.
Despite my struggles photographing the glass-protected portrait, I was simply excited and satisfied to view firsthand and learn more about yet another da Vinci painting. My experience speaks to the new, sometimes unexpected levels of understanding and appreciation art-lovers can acquire when they come eye-to-eye and engage with an artwork at its home and alongside fellow admirers.