Beauty, elegance and intelligence are qualities that admirers are willing to recognize in the powerful and, even more, in anyone who is an object of desire for the powerful. Adulatory and elegiac texts enjoyed considerable success at the Renaissance courts, so much so that suspicions often arose regarding their sincerity. It was a different matter when these qualities were recognized by enemies who surrendered to the fact that such attributes formed an obstacle to their designs and to the attainment of their interests. The beauty, intelligence and elegance of Cecilia Gallerani, the young favourite of Ludovico il Moro around 1490, were not the result of courtly exaggeration, given that these gifts were acknowledged by the Ferrarese ambassador in Milan, Giacomo Trotti, who in 1490 described her to his master, Ercole d’Este, as being ‘as beautiful as a flower’. Ludovico il Moro was passionately in love with her and could not bring himself to marry Ercole’s daughter, Beatrice d’Este, to whom he had been betrothed per verba since 1480. Beatrice was not very beautiful, nor did she possess courage – like her sister, Isabella d’Este. Isabella was renowned for her extraordinary personality; indeed she was so unconventional that she maintained a long and affectionate friendship with Gallerani after the latter had left the Milanese court, thus leaving the way clear for Beatrice, who settled there in 1491.
Cecilia was a girl of bourgeois origins, the granddaughter of a Tuscan exile and Ghibelline supporter, Sigerio, who had left Siena to move to Lombardy. Cecilia’s father, Fazio, held various administrative positions at the Sforza court and had a number of sons who embarked on ecclesiastical and administrative careers. He died on 5 December 1480, aged 66, leaving six children, two of them daughters: Cecilia and Zanetta. Cecilia had Latin, a rare accomplishment at a time when girls were taught to read and write just enough to be able to correspond and, if necessary, give orders for the running of a household. She also had a great passion for literature and poetry, even composing verses that were never made public but were well known in late fifteenth-century Milanese literary circles. The time had not come for the public consideration of female creativity, but Cecilia was opening the way to the poetesses of the following generation: Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara and the others. The lack of public acclaim played in her favour: it exempted her from the competition that oppressed male poets, who were compelled, like Bellincioni, to challenge one another in rhetorical and artificial compositions that did nothing to improve the quality of their work.
Cecilia’s innate grace and her genuine love of literature soon made her the doyenne of letters at the Sforza court in the late 1480s, when she was barely 17 years old (she was born in 1473). She managed to keep this position even in the 1490s, when she was no longer Ludovico’s lover and married, in 1492, Count Ludovico Carminati of Brambilla, known as Bergamino, with whom she had three sons. Cecilia’s affair with Ludovico il Moro dated from around 1487–8, when she was little more than an adolescent, and continued until 1491, when she gave Ludovico a son, Cesare. This relationship caused considerable concern to Ercole d’Este and did not help Ludovico’s political position, since he could not renege on his betrothal to Beatrice without risks. Beatrice, on the other hand, even after she had moved to the Sforza court with considerable ceremony, did not tolerate the presence of her rival, whose charms were still all too apparent. Beatrice’s jealousy was matched by Ludovico’s intolerance, as he continued to court Cecilia, showering her with benefices, helping her brothers and even offering her the lands of Saronno as a farewell gift in 1491.
Renaissance society was prudent and tolerant in distinguishing between amorous relations and matrimonial ones and in accepting the former – the latter were almost always the product of political alliances – provided they were contained within formal limits. However, Ludovico showed a tendency to overstep these limits, blinded as he was by genuine love for his young favourite. For example, after marrying Beatrice at a sumptuous ceremony held at the Castle of Pavia on 17 January 1491, the future duke of Milan showed complete lack of tact by gifting the same dress to both women. We can imagine the pride with which Cecilia displayed the precious love token in public and Beatrice’s irritation at having to endure public comparison between herself and this beautiful rival, whose looks were naturally enhanced by such a garment. Blinded by jealousy, Beatrice wrote a letter, dated February 1492, in which she stipulated that Cecilia should no longer wear the dress, threatening that, if this were to happen, then she herself would no longer wear it either. The ban and destruction of Cecilia’s dress may have resolved the problem of the unequal comparison between the two women, but Beatrice could never destroy Leonardo’s portrait of Cecilia, which presents her not only for Ludovico’s delight and lifelong admiration, but for that of the entire world ever since [Plate 29].
We do not know the exact date of the painting, although it was praised in superlative terms by the court poet Bellincioni in a sonnet published in 1493. However, Pietro Marani offers good grounds for dating it around 1490, when Cecilia was still about 17 and her adolescent beauty was made irresistible by her refined intelligence.12 The structure of the portrait is radically innovative by comparison to that of other female portraits from the last quarter of the fifteenth century, which tended (above all in Florence) to show the sitter in profile or in a three-quarters pose, as in the Flemish style of painting, which was highly appreciated in Milan; it was epitomized in the portraits by Antonello da Messina, which Ludovico il Moro himself had brought to the city. Enamoured of Antonello’s style and knowing that the Sicilian painter had a workshop in Venice at the time, Ludovico had used his brother, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, as an intermediary to ask the Milanese ambassador in the lagoon city to engage the Sicilian painter and bring him to Milan.
Ludovico’s admiration for Antonello da Messina (1429–79) not only suggests what models Leonardo may have used as the basis for his portrait of Cecilia but confirms Ludovico’s artistic taste, an essential condition to stimulate the artist’s creativity. What had drawn Antonello’s paintings to the attention of many collectors was on the one hand their astonishing realism – the artist’s ability to reproduce the models’ physiognomies almost without showing the effort and artificiality of painting on the panel – and, on the other, their successful attempt to reveal, simply through facial expression, the psychological character of the individuals portrayed [Plate 30]. The use of oils, a painting technique that Antonello brilliantly mastered, allowed him to create soft and very natural transitions between colours, and there are no visible lines between the various tonalities and degrees of shadow. This closely resembles what happens in real life; moreover, the absence of background enhances the animated gaze of the figures, offering greater psychological insight. The painter focused all his research on this gaze, and his portraits stare out at the viewer unabashed, provoking sensations and emotions that are sometimes disturbing.
It seems natural to imagine that Ludovico showed Leonardo the portraits by the painter from Messina, whom he so admired, and asked him to pay heed to this manner of painting. Leonardo knew how to do this superbly but went well beyond Antonello’s psychological naturalism, because his Florentine roots prompted him to accentuate the idealistic aspect of [Cecilia’s] painting. He included a dark background, although luminous in some respects, so as to concentrate the viewer’s attention on the model; but the light in which he bathed her seemed to emanate from within rather than fall on her from outside. The static pose of the slightly foreshortened three-quarters position receives movement from the bust’s twisting towards the viewer and from the head’s turning even more radically away from the bust. Cecilia turns to look not at the viewer but at something that is approaching from behind her, perhaps just a thought or a memory, because her gaze seems lost in space, not alert as it would be in front of a living presence.
The young woman holds an ermine in her arms, and this creature is key to unravelling the symbolism of the portrait. It stands for uncontaminated purity and, according to medieval legend, it will waste away rather than dirtying its white coat. The ermine was also Ludovico il Moro’s heraldic symbol, and Leonardo himself had sketched an emblem with an ermine for the duke. Lastly, as many scholars have noted, Cecilia’s surname, Gallerani, alludes to the Greek word galē [‘weasel’], which designates the small animal prized for its coat. Cecilia cradles it in her arms and the creature is seduced by her distracted caresses, like the mythical unicorn that let itself be stroked by virgins.
Cecilia’s garments and hair are typical of what was in vogue in Milan at the time; they are influenced by Spanish fashion, like the silk cloak that rests on her right shoulder and is tied at her waist. According to an inventory of her wedding trousseau, Cecilia owned at least 15 – more than Beatrice herself. Round her neck she wears a black necklace that highlights her pale skin and delicately reflects the gleams of light, expertly calibrated both in the part exposed to the light and in the penumbra. Her hair is caught in a gauze cap tied under her chin, while the rest falls onto her shoulders and is gathered into a thick plait.
By overcoming the naturalism required of the portrait, Leonardo gives it a gentleness that natural imitation alone could never have achieved. Painted in transparent layers of colour, the girl’s face contains no shadows to spoil the perfect oval of her cheeks, nose and chin; with its compact inner luminosity, her face resembles a precious gem. There is virtually no sign here of the line: that ‘drawing’ line, which was the key to Tuscan figure painting, has no place in a painting constructed through elusive passages of light. Cecilia’s silky skin is barely dusted by light ripples of shade and colour that exalt the geometric regularity of her features; here the forced anti-naturalistic approach is quite evident and clearly separates Leonardo from Antonello da Messina and Flemish painting. Her nose is only hinted at in a faint darkening of the profile, so elusive that one wonders what brush Leonardo could have used to trace that impression of shade – which, miraculously, restores classical pride to the profile. The shadow of her eyelids is slightly more marked and follows the curve of the eye sockets, highlighted by the paler tone of the skin around the eye.
But it is in the mouth that Leonardo, after lengthy studies, successfully created his first peerless masterpiece of pictorial sfumato. Cecilia’s lips are barely suffused with a hint of darker pink and they lift slightly in a delicate smile, or rather in the impression of a smile, suggested by the slight emphasis given to the shadow at the corners of her mouth and to the two highlights on the right side of the upper lip. These almost imperceptible touches of colour, for which the artist must have used vair brushes containing just a few tail hairs, manage to convey vibrancy to that elusive smile and to the anxiety that surfaces on Cecilia’s face; and it surfaces only to be banished, as her mind brings a sensation of peace and serene abandonment, if not true happiness, expressed in ways that befit her elegance.
This sensation of calm is underlined by the presence and physiognomy of the creature, which, thanks to the painter’s magical distortion (of which we are almost unaware), is humanized to the point of resembling the girl who has subdued it. We would never have expected an acute observer like Leonardo, ‘scientific’ to the point of obsession, to produce a representation quite as an unnatural as the ermine held in Cecilia’s arms. The animal’s paws do not resemble those of a real ermine, and its profile recalls a dog more than an ermine. This distortion [forzatura], which is almost unnoticeable thanks to the artist’s expertise, is purely a ‘mental’ ploy used by him to draw the animal closer to the girl and to pass not only the symbolism of chastity, beauty and elegance from one to the other, reinforced as it is by their physical resemblance, but also an estranged beauty that relegates both to a slightly oneiric dimension. Natural verisimilitude, which Leonardo coveted through his empirical studies, was only a starting point in the process of revealing an ideal sentiment, which overcomes natural reality and gains access to a superior world in which only the artist, not nature, can be the creator.
The portrait had a dazzling effect at the Sforza court; even the poet Bellincioni set aside his usually superfluous rhetoric and captured the novelty of its creative process in a sonnet:
What are you angry with? Whom do you envy, Nature?
It is Vinci who has portrayed one of your stars;
Cecilia today is so beautiful that
Her lovely eyes make the sun seem like a dark shadow! …
Whoever sees her like this, although it is too late
to see her alive, will say: This shall suffice for us
now to understand what are nature and art.13
From then on, the theme of a challenge between artist and nature would engage all Renaissance artists and art critics. Moreover, what the portrait of Gallerani demonstrates is the artist’s absolute autonomy from natural representation – even in an artist like Leonardo da Vinci, who has always been seen as having an obsessive urge to penetrate the secrets of nature. On the contrary, Leonardo uses his research into nature only to give credibility to the representation of an idea that belongs in a world that is above the natural one, the world of the mind and of human inventiveness. Leonardo’s ability to surpass nature and to glimpse into what nature reveals, in this case Cecilia’s soul and her personality, seems to have been clearly understood by Cecilia and by contemporary collectors, as we learn from a letter written by Cecilia a few years after the portrait was painted and sent to Isabella d’Este. Isabella was the sister of Cecilia’s former rival, Beatrice, but this fact certainly did not prevent her from appreciating Gallerani’s spirit and Leonardo’s talent in portraying her.
Isabella, who was a passionate collector, had heard astonishing rumours about this portrait even in Mantua, where she lived; and she asked Cecilia to lend it to her so that she could admire it and compare it with the portraits painted by Bellini and other artists from the Veneto. Cecilia, who was at the height of her fame, willingly lent the painting to Isabella and sent an accompanying letter that reveals her perfect understanding of Leonardo’s art and of his ability to capture the quintessence of her personality and to reveal it more clearly than herself, in flesh and blood. This process whereby the artist surpasses nature, started by Antonello da Messina and carried to new heights by Leonardo in the portrait of Cecilia, would reach its apex a few years later, in Raphael’s portraits. It would also find its perfect critic in the words of one of the most astute observers of the mores of his time, Baldassarre Castiglione, who, commenting on Raphael’s portrait of Bernardo Navagerio, wrote that it resembled Navagerio much more than Navagerio resembled himself. Cecilia’s letter to Isabella in 1497 anticipates that comment, marking the ideal progress made by Italian artists in challenging nature:
My most illustrious and most excellent, most honoured Lady. I have seen what Your Ladyship has written regarding your desire to see my portrait, which I am sending you, yet I would send it more willingly if it resembled me. Your Ladyship must not believe that this is the result of a failing of the master, whom I truly believe to have no peer, but only that this portrait was made at such an immature age that I have since changed completely in appearance, so much so that, seeing it and myself together, no one would judge that it had been made for me.14
Even if the modesty that emerges from Cecilia’s letter simply attests to her elegant courtly manners, her words were prophetic to the extent that the portrait has far surpassed her natural life and has consigned her to the imagery of later centuries as one of the most fascinating women to appear on earth.