Painting and Sculpture

Lady with an Ermine

The Lady with an Ermine is a portrait painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci. Dated to c. 1489–1491, the work is painted in oils on a panel of walnut wood. Its subject is Cecilia Gallerani, a mistress of Ludovico Sforza ("Il Moro"), Duke of Milan; Leonardo was painter to the Sforza court in Milan at the time of its execution. It is the second of only four surviving portraits of women painted by Leonardo, the others being Ginevra de' Benci, La Belle Ferronnière and the Mona Lisa. The sitter is depicted at half-length, her body turned toward her right at a three-quarter angle and her face toward her left; the animal in her arms twists in a similar manner. As in many of Leonardo's paintings, the composition forms a pyramidal spiral, reflecting his lifelong preoccupation with the dynamics of movement. The painting was long considered badly damaged and repainted. A 1992 technical analysis at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. established that the damage was largely confined to the background, which was likely originally bluish-grey and was later overpainted in black. It had always been known that Leonardo painted a portrait of Cecilia Gallerani. However, the Lady with an Ermine remained largely unknown to scholars until nearly the 20th century, and only then was it widely accepted as his work. Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski acquired the painting in Italy in 1798, and it entered the Czartoryski family collections at Puławy in 1800. It travelled widely during the 19th century, including to the family's place of exile at the Hôtel Lambert in Paris, before being brought to Kraków in 1876. The Nazis seized it in 1939, and it hung in the Wawel Castle offices of Hans Frank, Governor-General of occupied Poland. Allied troops recovered it at Frank's country home in Bavaria at the end of the Second World War, and it was returned to Poland in 1946, where it remained on display in Kraków. In 2016 the Princes Czartoryski Foundation, which legally owned the painting, sold it to the Polish government, together with other works from the collection, for €100 million. Lady with an Ermine is on permanent display at the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków, a branch of the National Museum in Kraków, and is considered one of Poland's national treasures.

Also on this shelf

See also

• ▸In Front of Yorktown
• ▸Dewing Woodward
• ▸Jean Siméon Chardin

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Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.