Audio Stop 211

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This square portrait shows the head and shoulders of a young woman in front of a spiky bush that fills much of the background except for a landscape view that extends into the deep distance to our right. The woman's body is angled to our right but her face turns to us. She has chalk-white, smooth skin with heavily lidded, light brown eyes, and her pale pink lips are closed. Pale blush highlights her cheeks, and she looks either at us or very slightly away from our eyes. Her brown hair is parted down the middle and pulled back, but tight, lively curls frame her face. Her hair turns gold where the light shines on it. She wears a brown dress, trimmed along the square neckline with gold. The front of the bodice is tied with a blue ribbon, and the lacing holes are also edged with gold. A sheer white veil covers her chest and is pinned at the center with a small gold ball. The bush fills the space around her head with copper-brown, spiky leaves. A river winds between trees and rolling hills in the distance to our right. Trees and a town along the horizon, which comes about halfway up the painting, is pale blue under an ice-blue sky.

Leonardo da Vinci

Ginevra de' Benci [obverse], c. 1474/1478

West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 6

Curator and head of Italian and Spanish paintings Eve Straussman Pflanzer explores the life and loves of the woman at the center of Da Vinci’s portrait.

Read full audio transcript

EVE STRAUSSMAN-PFLANZER:
I'm Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, Curator and Head of Italian and Spanish Paintings at the National Gallery of Art.

NARRATOR:
This tranquil, richly detailed portrait depicts Ginevra de’ Benci, the daughter of a wealthy banker in Renaissance Florence. Just around the time of her marriage to Luigi Niccolini in 1474, she was painted by the young Leonardo da Vinci.

EVE STRAUSSMAN-PFLANZER:
It's the first of only three surviving portraits of women by Leonardo.

NARRATOR:
Previously, portraits were usually presented in profile.

EVE STRAUSSMAN-PFLANZER:
Leonardo takes the step of pivoting Ginevra ever so slightly, so you see her at a three-quarter angle, and therefore, get a greater expanse of her face, her body, as well as the landscape in the background behind her. We see the care that Leonardo put into building up the soft modeling of the contours and the shading of Ginevra’s face.

NARRATOR:
He also emphasized her smooth, pale skin by placing her against a background of dark juniper leaves. Ginevra’s name is a variant on ginepro, the Italian word for juniper. Leonardo’s visual play on his sitter’s name and the plant behind her seems especially appropriate, since the precision and beauty of words were very important to Ginevra, who wrote poetry.

The painting may possibly have been commissioned by another poet - one of Ginevra’s admirers: the Venetian ambassador to Florence at the time, Bernardo Bembo.

EVE STRAUSSMAN-PFLANZER:
This was common in the Renaissance period - that a woman would be married but then also have a platonic lover who she would exchange letters with - they might exchange poetry.

What I find fascinating is how people interpret or analyze her facial expression as being austere or cold or remote. But one could also just see her as confident or direct or composed. And I think that complexity of both form and then viewer reception is really Leonardo’s gift with this portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci.

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