5

The Painting of the Young Bride-to-Be

Starting in the mid-fifteenth century, artists, especially those in Germany and the Netherlands, understood that to take the viewer into the mind of a subject, you had to let him or her look into the subject’s eyes. So they started to paint male subjects of all ages and origins gazing straight out at their viewers. But these supposedly “eye-to-eye” portraits were not truly “psychological” in a way we would recognize today. The portraitists were not trying to strip away pretense to reveal inner states of being. Their goal remained what it had always been: to acknowledge the subject’s social standing, or convey some other aspect of his life that he wanted memorialized.

When it came to women, the very notion of an inner portrait had no meaning because, back then, women’s identities came from the identities of their fathers or husbands. Women were certainly painted, but the rules called for them to look down to avoid the eyes of the viewer. This positioning focused the viewer on what the men in their lives wished to communicate—wealth (made evident by the expensive jewels a woman wore) and position (the family coat of arms embroidered on her wide-sleeved gown). In only one instance could a woman’s gaze be directed upward—when her husband was posed next to her.

Marriage and betrothal were the main occasions for commissions of portraits of women. The portraits would usually hang either in the woman’s house of origin, so that her family could remember the daughter who had left home, or in the woman’s new home, to show off the dowry she had brought to her husband. As odd as it may seem to us today, though, these portraits were visible only on special occasions—birthdays, weddings, funerals, or other exceptional family events. At all other times they were covered by curtains or hung with the reverse of the panel showing. In the Renaissance, people believed portraits had the special power of making an absent person present, and they found it disquieting to look at them too often, especially if they represented a beloved daughter who had moved far away or a dead family member. This is the reason a portrait’s reverse was as important as its front—and why it made reference to the sitter through either her husband’s coat of arms or symbols of chastity and marital fidelity.

It was with these customs in mind that Leonardo was approached to make the portrait of a member of the Benci family, sixteen-year-old Ginevra, who was about to get married (Figure 5).

The Benci family lived in the neighborhood of Santa Croce, not far from Sant’Ambrogio, and for years they had been clients of Ser Piero. They were also committed patrons of the arts. Ginevra’s younger brother, Carlo (born in 1458), was interested in architecture. Her older brother, Giovanni (1456–1523), who was five years younger than Leonardo, was also a collector of science books. Leonardo jotted down his name in one of his early folios on the making of burning mirrors: “Giovanni d’Amerigo Benci and company.” Perhaps Leonardo did not write Giovanni’s name himself—scholars are unsure about the authorship of this note—but clearly Leonardo and Giovanni knew each other in the 1470s. They kept in touch throughout their lives, and in the early 1500s they were so close that they exchanged books, maps, and precious stones. Giovanni kept in his palace one of Leonardo’s unfinished paintings, a large altarpiece representing the Adoration of the Magi. Unlike Leonardo, though, Giovanni d’Amerigo Benci was the scion of a wealthy family and had easy access to a large network of scholars, philosophers, and patrons.

Ginevra de’ Benci herself (1457–1520) was a young woman of complexity and depth, qualities important to Leonardo because they meant he would not paint a typical portrait of a bride, in which she would be represented indoors covered in jewels from her dowry, her dress embroidered with her husband’s coat of arms. Still, no one—not her brother, not Ginevra herself, and not even Leonardo—was prepared for the reactions this portrait would elicit once complete. As an early biographer reported, the portrait was “painted with such perfection that it was none other than she.” According to another, it was “a most beautiful thing.” Many similar works appeared soon after Leonardo portrayed Ginevra this way, even though not every portrait showed Leonardo’s level of skill. This portrait is often called the first modern psychological portrait, as Leonardo thought that “a picture or representation of human figures ought to be done in such a way that the viewer may easily recognize, by means of their attitudes, the purpose of their soul [concetto dell’anima loro].”

What made this portrait so special was Leonardo’s ability to reveal Ginevra’s unique personality and to capture the environment in which she had grown up. It was not just that Ginevra came from a wealthy and influential family, though she did. Her grandfather, Giovanni de’ Benci (1394–1455), was Cosimo de’ Medici’s business partner, and by the time Ginevra was born his fortune of 26,338 florins made him the second-wealthiest man in Florence. Cosimo was the first.

It was also not just that the Benci were discerning patrons of art and architecture, though they were. They commissioned paintings and modeled their family palace after that of the Medici, although on a smaller scale (as was appropriate). Like the Medici, they supported a convent in their neighborhood (the Benedictine convent Le Murate, or the Walled In). This shielded the family from the accusation of usury, a Christian sin to which bankers were seen as susceptible. As Ginevra’s grandfather, who gave lavishly to Le Murate, put it, “The Lord, in a short time, had miraculously paid him back with more than he had put in.”

And it was not just that Ginevra was educated at Le Murate, though she was. The convent had become an elite boarding school for patrician girls from across Italy, who learned there how to embroider, play music, sing, copy manuscripts, and possibly also write poetry, until they came of age to return to the world as wives or, alternatively, take their vows as nuns.

No, what ultimately elevated Leonardo’s portrait was all of this—the cultural environment in which Ginevra grew up, an environment that mingled poetry, science, politics, and love. Her father, Amerigo de’ Benci (1433–1469), was steeped in Florence’s avant-garde cultural circles, and its atmosphere filtered down to the younger generation—not just to the boys, who routinely received a formal education, but also to the girls, who were exposed to much more than grammar and prayer books.

As firstborn and family heir, Ginevra’s father, Amerigo, took over the family business and continued to support Le Murate, where he built a private cell for the Benci girls, la cella de’ Benci (where Ginevra would live for a time). He worked for the Medici bank in Geneva, but oddly, in 1458, he joined a plot led by Luca Pitti to overthrow the Medici. The plot failed, and Amerigo went to prison. Two years later, he was released and went back to business, but he was no longer a Medici partner. Often, between 1458 and 1465, he hired Ser Piero, Leonardo’s father, to draft legal documents. All the while, he mingled with the most exclusive literary group in Florence.

This was the Platonic Academy, a group of like-minded people who gathered to read the works of Plato. A Byzantine scholar named George Gemistus Plethon had brought these works from Byzantium to Florence in the early 1430s, when he came to the city for a gathering of church officials who attempted to reconcile the schism between the Roman Church and the Orthodox Church. The effort failed, and today these two churches still practice different rites. One positive outcome of the failed council, though, was that Cosimo de’ Medici, who received a Greek copy of Plato’s Dialogues as a gift, became an enthusiast of Plato’s philosophy. Because few Florentines mastered Greek, he hired Marsilio Ficino, a doctor turned philosopher who was fluent in Greek, to translate Plato’s Dialogues into Latin and supported public lectures on Platonism. He also sponsored another Greek scholar, John Argyropoulos, to give public lectures on Aristotle. As we have seen, Leonardo was familiar with Argyropoulos, as he jotted his name down, alongside Toscanelli’s, in one of his early folios.

Plato liked to teach philosophy around a dinner table, in private houses in Athens, conducting dialogues with guests who were usually prominent figures in politics and culture. The title of Plato’s works—Dialogues—referred to these dinner conversations, each dinner devoted to a weighty topic: love, government, democracy, knowledge, ethics, beauty, the state. To kick off the Platonic Academy in 1462, Ficino hosted a banquet, a banchetto platonico, in his villa at Careggi, on the outskirts of Florence.

Ginevra’s father was one of the diners at this inaugural banchetto platonico.

A few months after the inaugural banquet, in September 1462, Amerigo gave Ficino a special gift, a sumptuous codex of Plato’s Dialogues made of carta bambacina, a high-end paper from Amalfi. Ficino valued this codex greatly and wrote in his will that, after his death, it had to be returned to Amerigo’s heirs—that is, to Ginevra and her brothers Giovanni and Carlo.

Two other members of the Benci family were in Ficino’s immediate circle, the brothers Tommaso and Giovanni Benci. Ficino called them “our co-philosophers”: Ficino translated philosophical texts from Greek into Latin, and the brothers translated them into Italian, often working at record speed. They attended platonic banquets, which had become a staple of Ficino’s academy. Although these brothers belonged to a different branch of the Benci family than Ginevra’s father, to Ficino they were all from the same family. “Amerigo and Tommaso […] both Benci” is how he described them to another friend.

Ginevra’s father did not translate Ficino’s works into the vernacular. He was not an author of original philosophical works. He did not write poetry. But he was close enough to many members of the Platonic Academy to be well informed of the conversations that animated the group, as well as of Ficino’s own philosophical work, which reinterpreted Plato’s philosophy in the context of Christianity.

Ficino’s main work was a monumental book titled Platonic Theology. It was concerned with a metaphysical world of pure ideas and divine contemplation that was separated from the physical world of objects, passions, and people. He conceived the divine as an infinite eye, an oculus infinitus, that contained the entire universe in itself. Humans could access it only through the physical instrument of the human eye. If one understood how the eye worked, how light dispersed, how shadows were created, one could begin to contemplate the workings of the divine eye. In other words, optics was essential to Ficino’s understanding of God.

Ficino was an expert in optics. One of his earliest works was a short essay, “Questions on Light” (Quaestiones de lumine), which dealt with light, sun rays, sound, touch, and smell, and which offered a comparison of the senses, especially sight and hearing—all topics that were discussed in optical manuals and that interested Leonardo. Early biographers reported that at age twenty-one, Ficino wrote “a work on optics […] on vision and on concave and convex mirrors,” but it has been lost.


If optics was the science that helped with the contemplation of the divine, love was the force that predisposed the soul to move from the physical world to the world of pure ideas.

This love was contemplative—platonic, as it were. It transcended physical and sexual love. It was, in Ficino’s words, the “perpetual knot and [bond] of the world.” Beautiful women, it was said, inspired platonic love: their beauty was a vehicle for personal religious uplift. The platonic lover was not just an ideal, but an actual social role. Leading figures, the Medici first among them, selected beautiful women as their platonic lovers. Their role overlapped almost seamlessly with the chivalric view of idealized lovers that the great vernacular poets of the previous century had held; Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura were the unsurpassed models of idealized feminine beauty who inspired the creativity of their lovers. Often these modern platonic lovers were married to other men. Lorenzo de’ Medici’s was Lucrezia Donati, who was married to Niccolò Ardinghelli. His brother Giuliano’s was Simonetta Vespucci, who was married to Marco Vespucci, one of Ginevra’s first cousins (Marco was the son of Piero Vespucci and Ginevra’s aunt Caterina).

These Renaissance men declared their ideal love publicly. They wrote love poems and often organized public events in honor of their beloved. The most lavish public events were chivalric tournaments or jousts: men fought with lances on horseback in public squares and ceremoniously offered their victory to the platonic beloved. Lorenzo de’ Medici organized a joust for Lucrezia in 1469, and his brother Giuliano another for Simonetta. The latter took place in Piazza Santa Croce on January 29, 1475. The author Angelo Poliziano wrote a poem about it, and Verrocchio designed a banner, to which Leonardo contributed; art historian David Alan Brown notes that “the younger artist’s characteristic left-handed hatchings are visible in the landscape.” Among those who attended the tournament was the recently appointed Venetian ambassador to Florence, Bernardo Bembo, who was inspired to find his own platonic lover. Bembo settled on Ginevra de’ Benci. Some think Bembo was the patron who commissioned Leonardo’s portrait of Ginevra, but others think that Ginevra or members of her family were the patrons.


This is the environment in which Amerigo brought up his three children—Giovanni, Ginevra, and Carlo. Although Amerigo died unexpectedly at age thirty-six, his sophisticated artistic patronage, heartfelt religious beliefs, and intellectual curiosity continued to inform the lives of his children.

Ginevra’s older brother and Leonardo’s acquaintance, Giovanni, seemed the most attuned with his father’s philosophical inclinations and developed a strong interest in science and medicine. Life had forced him to grow up quickly—he was only thirteen years old when his father died. It is possible that, until he came of age, his uncle Francesco was in charge of the family inheritance, and that this uncle negotiated Ginevra’s marriage and commissioned her portrait. But when Giovanni took over, he continued the family tradition. He supported Le Murate, and in 1462 he moved the family to the new Benci palace that his father had started to construct. He wrote orations and petitions to the Signoria and was well informed on civic matters. He also acquired beautifully illustrated manuscripts on scientific topics; one by Giordano Ruffo di Calabria is still kept in a Florentine library and bears Giovanni’s hand: “This book belongs to Giovanni di Amerigo de’ Benci, year 1485.” Later, he chose to be buried at Le Murate, where his father and sister were buried, too.

Among Giovanni’s duties was the care of his younger siblings, Ginevra and Carlo. Carlo, the youngest, was destined for the church, but like his siblings he was deeply interested in the arts. As a canon of the Florence’s cathedral, a post he obtained in 1479, he contributed architectural designs for the cathedral’s façade.

Ginevra was twelve years old and a student at Le Murate when her father died. Like other boarders, she learned embroidery but also how to write and read, and possibly also how to copy and illuminate manuscripts, as these were activities for which the nuns’ scriptorium was renowned. Perhaps she also learned how to sing, as the nuns’ chorus was so famous in the city that many Florentines came to the convent’s church for Sunday Mass to hear it. If she did, she sat with her female companions behind the main altar, in a screened oratory, invisible to lay Florentines who sat on the screen’s other side. Her family members may well have been in attendance, listening to her voice.

She herself was a poet, although only one of her verses has survived. It is an unusual verse, its meaning ambiguous, but it betrays an independent spirit: “I ask your forgiveness, and I am a mountain tiger,” she wrote.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ginevra would leave Le Murate to marry.

The husband her family had chosen for her was the widower Luigi di Bernardo di Lapo Niccolini (1442–1505), who belonged to a family of Medici supporters that lived in the neighborhood (Luigi’s uncle Otto had been Cosimo’s trusted advisor). Not much is known about Luigi, apart from that he was a silk merchant, that his drapery shop and house were close to Verrocchio’s, and that he served the republic during a trying moment of political unrest. He was the chief magistrate, or gonfaloniere, in May and June 1478, right after the Pazzi lead a conspiracy against the Medici. On Sunday, April 26, 1478, during Mass in the cathedral, Giuliano was killed and his brother Lorenzo wounded. Later, the conspirators were caught, and one of them, Bernardo Baroncelli, was hanged at the Bargello on December 29, 1479. Leonardo sketched Baroncelli’s body and wrote a lengthy note about his attire—the third of his notes to have been firmly dated.

Luigi married Ginevra on January 14, 1474, only six months after his first wife’s death, and received a sizable dowry of fourteen hundred florins. As was often the case in the Renaissance, their marriage sealed well-established relations between the two families. Both families sent their girls to board at Le Murate. Both had their family tombs a few feet away in the church of Santa Croce, in the north transept, just off the main chapel. Both often shared the services of the notary Ser Simone Grazzini di Staggia, who drafted the marriage agreement between Luigi and Ginevra as well as the wills of their respective fathers.


Though the wedding took place according to long-standing custom, the portrait Leonardo made of Ginevra can hardly be called a marriage portrait. The expectations of a wife at the time were that she would dedicate herself to giving birth, raising children, and being chaste outside marriage, all virtues a marriage portrait represented. Intellectual pursuits were not intended for married women. And yet those were precisely what Leonardo chose to represent when he was asked to portray his friend’s sister. At a minimum, Leonardo was familiar with the environment in which Ginevra was brought up because of his friendship with her brother Giovanni. At a maximum, he was aware of the specificity of her intellectual interests as well as her role in Florence’s cultural sphere.


Giovanni, for one, interacted with intellectuals in the orbit of the Platonic Academy. Many among them were committed to promoting the use of the Italian language, especially the Tuscan dialect, in writing about literature, philosophy, and science. They hoped that Italian would replace Latin as the language of culture, and they took as their mission translating Ficino’s writings as well as a myriad of other science books dealing with cosmology, astronomy, and cartography by famous authors such as Ptolemy, Pliny, Gerard of Cremona, and Isidore of Seville, as well as by obscure ones such as Sidrac and Alfagrano. Some of these literary men were Dante experts. Some wrote poems in the vernacular. All were versed in optics. Many had either direct or indirect relations to the Benci, or to people Leonardo knew. In other words, all were within Leonardo’s orbit.

Leonardo read and owned Italian books translated by members of this group. Cristoforo Landino (1424–1498) was Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici’s tutor but also the translator of Pliny’s Natural History; he also wrote six poems extolling Bembo’s love for Ginevra de’ Benci. Francesco Berlinghieri translated Ptolemy’s Cosmography from Latin into Italian.

Others were versed in topics that were of great interest to Leonardo. Antonio Manetti was regarded as an influential “master of optics” of his day, his library a trove of literary rarities and obscure scientific texts, including books Leonardo read and owned. Manetti had been Brunelleschi’s good friend and the author of the architect’s first biography, but he was known mainly for having used optics to explain confusing passages of Dante’s Comedy. Dante had described the shadows that the mountains of Hell cast on one another, and Manetti applied the rules of optics to these shadows in order to map Dante’s infernal rings, which nobody had been able to fully understand before. For Manetti, optics was an instrument of literary criticism.

Then there was the humanist Giorgio Antonio Vespucci (1453–1512), a legendary educator in Florence. One of his nephews, Piero Vespucci, was married to Ginevra’s aunt Caterina; another nephew was the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who had Giorgio as his teacher. The Vespucci and the Benci bought country properties from and sold them to one another. In general, the Vespucci were great patrons of the arts with an interest in innovative works, and while they did not employ Leonardo, they did commission frescoes for their family chapel from a young, innovative painter who knew Leonardo well, Domenico Ghirlandaio. Botticelli dedicated to Giorgio Antonio his drawings for Dante’s Comedy. It is documented that years later Leonardo was in close contact with members of the Vespucci family, but it is not impossible that he knew some of them as early as the 1470s through the Benci family or his artist friends.

We know Leonardo was familiar with Toscanelli, who was at the center of this group of science-minded Florentines, and we know that the artist owned Toscanelli’s handwritten notes on burning mirrors.

In addition, an early biographer reported that Lorenzo de’ Medici invited Leonardo to the garden of San Marco, a property near the monastery of San Marco and the Medici palace, where the Medici displayed their collection of ancient works; visits to that garden would have provided Leonardo with additional opportunities for close knowledge of cultural and artistic matters in Medici circles. And, of course, Verrocchio was the Medici’s favorite sculptor. Recently, the art historian Cecilia Frosinini has argued that “Leonardo’s entry into the houses of the Florentine merchant aristocracy can be explained as an introduction warmly supported by [Lorenzo] the Magnificent.”

It should be made clear that Leonardo never participated in a platonic banquet. But the circumstantial evidence above suggests he may well have known some of the people who did, especially those who had strong interests in optics (Manetti), or who were close to him in age (Giovanni de’ Benci and Giorgio Antonio Vespucci), or who translated some of the books he read (Landino, Manetti, Berlinghieri). It is documented that later in life he did read the ancient and medieval authors (Pliny, Plato, Ptolemy, Isidore of Seville, Gerard of Cremona) that members of this science-minded group translated in the years in which he was in Verrocchio’s workshop. Perhaps he even flipped through some of these books as soon as they were translated in the 1470s.

At the very least, like any Florentine with a passing interest in cartography, astronomy, optics, vernacular poetry, and politics, he was familiar with the main ideas discussed in Platonic and literary circles and had heard, at least superficially, about platonic love and chivalric poetry. He was in Verrocchio’s workshop when his master designed the banner for the joust Giuliano de’ Medici dedicated to his platonic lover. This cultural milieu that blended poetry, love, religion, and optics informed Leonardo’s portrait of Ginevra, whether or not Bembo was the patron who commissioned it.


Leonardo painted Ginevra wearing a simple woolen dress with a chaste, square neckline, called a gamurra, and beneath it a thin undergarment fastened with a button, called a converciere. This was not an unusual dress for women of her standing. Verrocchio had portrayed a woman in a marble bust who wore exactly the same attire as Ginevra. But unlike most women, Ginevra wore above her dress a dark scarf. This scarf seems to resemble the long scarves nuns wore over their tunics, a scapular, which some laywomen put over their dresses as a demonstration of piety. If indeed Ginevra wore a scapular, as it seems, this scarf revealed more about her than any coat of arms or jewels or broad-sleeved brocaded dresses. Just as her poem revealed a creative mind and independent spirit, the scarf revealed another aspect of her personality: that she lived in the world but followed the rules of the convent.

The scarf had to be perfect.

Carefully, Leonardo sketched the dress’s neckline directly on the panel using a pencil. Then he outlined the scarf with large brushstrokes of brown wash but did not finish it. Instead, he went back to the dress, which he worked up to the edges of the dark stole; only when he was done with it he did return to the scarf, which he painted in black.

Although most likely Ginevra owned jewels, Leonardo did not paint them. Whether he did so simply to defy tradition or to avoid the distraction caused by jewelry—as we have seen, he thought that “the resplendent beauty of youth loses its excellence through excessive devotion to ornament”—we will never know. But a young woman without jewels was a rarity in Renaissance portraiture.

Ginevra’s face was a challenge. Leonardo had no trouble representing her in a three-quarter position, taking his inspiration from the work of Northern artists, but he did not paint her with the downward gaze that those same artists, especially Petrus Christus and Hans Memling, had selected for their sitters.

Ginevra gazed at the viewer frontally, or almost frontally.

He made a detailed, full-scale preparatory drawing of her face. Though the drawing is now lost, we can surmise that he made one because we can still see on the panel the tiny dots of carbon he used to transfer the drawing. He sought to capture on paper as precisely as possible each curl of her hair, each fold of the nostrils, the lips, the eye sockets, the tear ducts, the jawline, every single detail of her face and neck. When he thought he had gotten the pose right and captured the right details, he transferred the drawing from paper to panel with the spolvero technique he had used for the Annunciation, as revealed by recent infrared photographs.

But he was not pleased with the result.

Infrared photography reveals that Ginevra’s head and gaze were once oriented slightly more to the side. Her curls were closer to her cheeks and forehead, and her face was slightly narrower.

Leonardo retouched Ginevra’s face over the imprimitura. He moved the part line of her hair a tad toward the center. The whole face now looked a bit more frontal. He pushed the curls slightly to the side. The face looked wider. Because of these minute adjustments, her gaze was no longer aimed downward, although it did not address the viewer directly, either. She looked off into the distance, as though she were thinking about something.

In the background, he sketched a hilly landscape with water, not dissimilar to the one he had created for the Annunciation—but soon he realized that the landscape did not suit Ginevra’s portrait. Such a backdrop would not allow enough natural light to wash over her face and create minute shadows on the moonlike color of her skin, on her eyebrows, lips, chin, cheeks, and neck. The landscape was too distant from Ginevra’s head. It was also too light to serve as a backdrop for her face. It did not create the contrast that was required to render her pale flesh tones and the subtleties of her face.

What would be an appropriate backdrop?

A bush.

A bush placed midway between her and the landscape.

A bush with spiky foliage that would let natural light from the landscape percolate delicately through small openings between the needles.

A juniper bush, to be exact. It would be a pun on her name, since the word “juniper” (ginepro in Italian) shares the same root as her given name, Ginevra.

Leonardo sketched a juniper bush around Ginevra’s head and neck and all the way down to her shoulders. He sketched it rapidly, with rough and imprecise brushstrokes, and the result was a dark, unrefined, almost unsightly mass of brown color that modern infrared photography has made visible beneath the pigments. Those wide brushstrokes are quite uncharacteristic of Leonardo, but we have to understand that he meant them only as a guide for shaping the bush, not as a final, visible layer.

It is a good thing that he did not paint the bush fully. He had miscalculated its size. It was too large. It blocked too much natural light.

And so Leonardo resized the juniper bush.

He covered the area between Ginevra’s neck and left shoulder with a base pigment, and painted on top of this base a more expansive view of land and water. The bush shrank, and the landscape expanded. If we look carefully at the area between Ginevra’s face and the landscape, we can detect a darker patch (made visible by aging) that is now covered with blue but that originally displayed the base color for the larger bush.

Once he settled on a bush of the right size, Leonardo painted individual needles with a copper resin pigment, creating delicate shades of bright green. The green has darkened considerably since Leonardo’s time, but it was bright and intense when Leonardo applied it. To show clearly how natural light passed through the needles, he added a few branches at the top of the bush, against the sky. He painted these branches directly against the blue sky, and because their contours were a little too stark in the bright sunlight he smeared them with his fingers, adding texture to the paint.

Everything looked much better. Sunlight reflected off water and land and scattered through the atmosphere, filtering through the juniper’s foliage to Ginevra’s face, which was bathed in soft light. Her head cast a dark but subtle shadow over her neck—a marvel in its own right, as were the edgeless shadows on her face. Skin was for Leonardo “a bit transparent.” Pleased, he applied the final layers of varnish.

But the painting was not yet finished. He turned finally to the eyes. The eye was “the window to the soul” and “the primary means by which the common sense [sensus communis] of the brain may most fully and magnificently contemplate the infinite works of nature.” Thin lines of brown and gray paint delicately portray eye sockets and tear ducts.

The portrait was finished.

But convention, as we have seen, dictated that the reverse of a woman’s portrait include references to the sitter’s chastity. Could he invent a sophisticated image and motto, an emblem, to celebrate a woman who was devout, pious, and virtuous, but who was also a poet?

Yes, he could.

Porphyry, a purple marble from Egypt, was the material reserved for emperors to single them out among their subjects. Only emperors were buried in porphyry sarcophagi. For the same reason, Verrocchio used porphyry for Medici tombs, to single them out among Florentines. But porphyry was also a common material in artists’ workshops: as the hardest marble, it was the preferred material for the pestle on which artists ground pigments. Leonardo, who spent long hours grinding colors on a porphyry slab as part of his apprenticeship, and who possibly helped out with polishing porphyry for the Medici tombs, knew the texture of porphyry well. He painted a porphyry trompe l’oeil as the background of Ginevra’s reverse to single her out among women of her time, just as emperors were unique among their subjects and the Medici among Florentines.

A laurel wreath had been the symbol of poetry since antiquity. Ancient poets were crowned with laurel, and so were Dante and Petrarch, the great modern poets who wrote in Italian. Leonardo painted a laurel branch over the porphyry trompe l’oeil to signal that Ginevra was a poet.

A palm was the plant Christ held in his hand when he entered Jerusalem the Sunday before his Crucifixion. It had long been a revered Christian symbol. Leonardo painted a palm branch next to the laurel wreath to show that Ginevra was pious. He positioned the two branches so that they formed a perfect circle: one half stood for piety, the other half for poetry.

A thin juniper sprig painted between the symbols of piety and poetry made clear these qualities referred to Ginevra, the yin and yang of her personality.

A beautiful ribbon that almost resembled a roll of paper, a banderol, was entwined among the branches with a motto: “Virtue and Honor” (Virtus et Honor). Together with the plant symbols, the motto pointed to the fact that, contrary to expectations of the time, Ginevra’s honor and virtue resided precisely in her piety and in her poetry, that a respectable woman like her could be pious and artistic, and that these aspects of her persona were not at odds.

It is odd that this emblem was associated with another poet: Bernardo Bembo, who had arrived in Florence as the Venetian ambassador shortly after Ginevra’s marriage, and who sought out Ginevra as his platonic beloved.

Prominent members of the Platonic Academy wrote ten different poems about this love. Landino sang of “the chaste love of Bembo” for Ginevra and praised her for her unsurpassed “chastity, beauty, kindness, moderation, and pure morals.” It has been suggested that Bembo, who was peerless at self-promotion, commissioned the poems himself.

The emblem on the reverse of Ginevra’s portrait, which was associated with him, has led some to believe that Bembo commissioned this painting. Indeed, Bembo used the emblem to mark books from his private library, and he had it displayed on Dante’s funerary chapel in Ravenna, whose restoration Bembo had financed.

But whose emblem was it? Ginevra’s? Or Bembo’s?

According to Renaissance conventions, the reverse of portraits referred to the sitter, not to the patron. It extolled her qualities, not the patron’s. The emblem was Ginevra’s. It referred to her accomplishments and desires, and it referred to the sophisticated Florentine cultural milieu of which she was a part.


Whether Ginevra was pleased to be Bembo’s platonic love we do not know. We do not even know how she settled into her role as Luigi’s wife. She did not have children. In 1490, when she was thirty-three years old, an unidentifiable admirer who was a viola player and who signed himself as “G+H,” suggested in a letter that she chose not to have “descendants”: “Your Magnificence,” he wrote to her, “from excessive haughtiness [you] refuse to present us mortals with descendants—well, you keep it and let it be yours [have it your way].”

What we know is that in 1480 her health was poor and she was “in the hands of doctors.” We also know, from a sonnet he dedicated to her in the late 1470s, that Lorenzo de’ Medici hinted that she “fled the city which is aflame with every vice” and that she “should never turn [her] gaze back to it.” He did not specify where she fled. Nor did he say why she fled. He borrowed Saint Paul’s words to remind her that “people imagine vain things” but that she should “let them talk, sit and listen to Jesus.”

Ginevra may have chosen to move to one of the Benci properties in the countryside. Lorenzo addressed her as a devout spirit, a stray lamb rescued by the divine Shepherd who “finds you and takes you gladly in his arms.” He praised her new circumstances, her “newly devoted ardor” in which “no suspicion, disdain, envy, or anger” have a place. “Follow where the voice of the Shepherd softly calls […] and draws you,” he wrote.

Later in life, Ginevra lived at Le Murate as a tertiary, or commessa, which means that she remained a gentildonna, a secular woman, and did not take the full vows but did choose to “join the college” and follow the nuns’ routine of prayer, labor, and reading. Like her father, she chose to be buried in the nuns’ church, “in a tomb set aside specifically for tertiaries so that at their death they can partake more fully of their religiosity,” as a chronicle for Le Murate specified.

At some point, the motto Leonardo had chosen for her portrait’s reverse—Virtus et Honor—was replaced with another inscription: Virtutem Forma Decorat, or “Form Adorns Virtue,” which on its face seems even more attuned to the rhetoric of a platonic beloved. But the new motto was as much about Leonardo as it was about Ginevra. The painter was the one who was able to make visible Ginevra’s virtues thanks to his skills as an artist at depicting her beauty, which was, in turn, a manifestation of her soul.

She was no bride, no platonic beloved, no idealized beauty. Just herself, lost in her own thoughts at a fundamental juncture of her life, when her inclination toward poetry and her pious disposition clashed with the expectations society and her family placed on her.

That’s the inner portrait of Ginevra that Leonardo delivered with his new way of painting.