The good painter paints two principal things—man and the intention of his mind. The first is easy and the second difficult.
—LEONARDO DA VINCI
EACH DAY, A STEADY STREAM OF VISITORS SEEK OUT THE PORTRAIT of Ginevra de’ Benci, hanging in Washington, DC’s National Gallery of Art. Many, clutching brochures and art books, rush straight for her on a pilgrimage to see the only Leonardo on permanent display in America. Others notice her as they meander the museum’s airy marble halls.
Inevitably, when they catch Ginevra’s gaze, they stop. They approach the double-sided display almost on tiptoe, captured by that intent, intelligent, slightly defiant look in her eyes. They circle, taking in her image and the motto on the back. They linger. As they finally pull themselves away—perhaps to find Verrocchio’s terra-cotta statue of Giuliano de’ Medici, resplendent in his jousting breastplate, housed in an adjacent room—her viewers glance back once more, as if bidding a reluctant adieu. She is that luminous.
No, Ginevra de’ Benci is not smiling or as polished and impressive as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. She is not as dramatic as his Last Supper, or as delighting as his Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. She is the astounding but still tentative work of a young artist, displaying a few technical immaturities, as Leonardo struggled to learn how to mix and apply oil paints and to perfect the proportion and perspective of the human face. Even so, Ginevra is haunting. In her portrait are glimmers of all that comes later in his masterworks. Some art historians even speculate that this small, intense poet-teenager sparked Leonardo’s ability to recognize, respect, and then convey female promise. His commitment to portraying women as strong, thinking, capable beings was a stunning novelty and daring innovation in fifteenth-century Italy.
Da Vinci’s Tiger is fiction, my interpretation and dramatization of Ginevra de’ Benci’s life, rooted in fact, carefully researched. This is what historians know of her:
She was the granddaughter and daughter of affluent bankers with close personal and financial ties to the Medici. She was educated at Le Murate convent, which her father and grandfather generously supported, and which was run by Abbess Scolastica Rondinelli. Possessing a worldly intellect and business acumen, Scolastica improved conditions at the convent and played the politics of the city well. Her lay-students not only “learned the virtues” but also how to read Latin. Ginevra did come and go from the convent throughout her life. The black scarf she wears in her portrait looks to be a scapular, a devotional ornament like a priest’s vestment, which would mark her as a conversa, a laysister of the order.
At sixteen, Ginevra was married to Luigi Niccolini, a wool merchant twice her age and of lesser lineage, finances, and social standing. Her dowry was a rather staggering 1,400 florins. Because her father had died, her uncle Bartolomeo probably negotiated her betrothal. Given their ages, it’s plausible he and Luigi were friends. At the time of the nuptials, Luigi had not held significant office. But he was chosen to be Florence’s highest magistrate, the gonfaloniere, one month after the Pazzi assassination, when Lorenzo de’ Medici needed to consolidate support following the murder of his brother.
When Venetian ambassador Bernardo Bembo came to Florence in time for the joust of 1475, he was smitten. Taking Ginevra as his Platonic love, he commissioned poems about her, including those by Cristoforo Landino quoted in this novel. By all accounts, Bembo was charismatic, handsome, well-read, and extravagant, but perhaps of dubious ethics. Clearly he was a nimble politician, serving the watery kingdom of Venice in many posts and in many capacities despite several controversies he stirred up.
It makes sense that Bembo would choose Ginevra. Contemporaries praised her beauty, her virtue, the delicacy of her hands, her embroidery, plus her keen intellect and clever conversation. And her poems. Tragically, only one line of her poetry—about the mountain tiger—remains. But that was certainly enough to make me want to write about her! We know of the line because it is referenced in a letter from a court musician in Rome. He asks for a full copy of Ginevra’s verse to prove to Roman society the wit and sophistication of Florentine ladies. (The Petrarch-styled sonnet Ginevra is too shy to read at the Medici banquet was imagined and written for this novel by researcher and theater artist Megan Behm.)
Exactly who commissioned Ginevra’s portrait has been debated for decades. Because she is not bejeweled in the typical way of betrothal and wedding portraits of the time, it’s unlikely that it was commissioned for either of those nuptial events. Most art historians now agree that Bernardo Bembo is its most logical patron, and, given Leonardo’s career timeline, that the Venetian commissioned the portrait during his first ambassadorship to Florence (1475–1476). No one knows for sure when Ginevra’s likeness was completed.
Her portrait was a turning point in Italian Renaissance painting, representing many firsts. In addition to being Leonardo’s first portrait and probably his first solo commission, Ginevra de’ Benci is the first Italian portrait to turn a woman from profile to a three-quarter, forward-facing pose, looking toward her viewer. It is the first “psychological” portrait designed to reveal the sitter’s “motions of the mind,” as Leonardo termed it; the first portrait to integrate the sitter into an uninterrupted natural landscape; and one of the first Florentine paintings to be done in oils rather than tempera, the egg-based paint favored by Italian artists.
The juniper, or ginepro, bush behind her was initially a vibrant, almost emerald green, providing a stunning color contrast and framing of Ginevra. But Leonardo was a novice in mixing colors with oil, and the evergreen bush has since faded to an olive-brown, clouding much of its original meticulous detail. Also, infrared study of the portrait revealed that Leonardo changed the verso’s motto to Virtutem Forma Decorat, “She adorns her virtue with beauty,” or “Beauty adorns virtue.” The original Virtus et Honor that lies beneath lends credence to the belief the portrait was commissioned by Bembo, since he used the motto himself. But it appears Bembo did not take Ginevra’s portrait with him when he returned to Venice. In fact, the location of her painted likeness was lost for centuries.
As to the other real-life people and characters in my interpretation of Ginevra’s life? Her brother Giovanni and Leonardo da Vinci were obviously friends. The artist left several of his possessions with Giovanni when he departed for Milan, including his unfinished Adoration of the Magi. Giovanni was derided as “the Six Hundred” for the exorbitant price of his Barbary horse. (Footnotes are the best! They revealed “the Six Hundred” and the facts of Uncle Bartolomeo’s armeggeria and flaming-heart float.)
Simonetta Vespucci was the Platonic idol of Giuliano de’ Medici—both of them much beloved by Florence. Art historians believe her face was Botticelli’s model for Venus in his famous Birth of Venus and Flora in his Primavera. He did indeed paint a banner of her as Pallas for the joust where she was Queen of Beauty. The artist was so enamored of La Bella Simonetta that he begged to be buried at her feet thirty-five years after her untimely death from what was probably tuberculosis. Historians also speculate Simonetta was the inspiration for Leonardo’s Madonna of the Carnation, mainly because of the Medici symbols included in the painting and the similarity of the Virgin Mary’s face and hair to the idealized females Verrocchio painted. I do not know for certain that she and Ginevra were friends, but a footnote in material about Le Murate indicates that Ginevra’s aunt was Simonetta’s mother-in-law, so surely they knew each other. They certainly shared a kinship born of being lauded throughout Florence as Platonic muses. By all accounts, Simonetta was well-read like Ginevra, kind, and a particularly graceful dancer.
The basic details about the Medici are factual: Lorenzo’s Platonic love, Lucrezia Donati; the joust’s spectacular pomp; the urban legend of Lorenzo climbing convent walls; his horsemanship; the palio; his penning bawdy Carnival songs as well as the loftiest of sonnets; his circle of friends and their philosophies and sometimes controversial opinions regarding the church; the politics of Florence; the sumptuous pageantry of feast days and the Pazzi conspiracy’s violence.
Fabric and clothing were critically important to Florentines, sometimes totaling 75 percent of their wealth.
Sancha is the only major character to be completely fictitious. But she is reflective of the era.
I have no direct information about the relationship between Leonardo da Vinci and Ginevra other than her portrait itself. Clearly there was enormous respect and insight into her soul in its making, just as Simonetta and Verrocchio describe the almost sacred romance between an artist and his subject, a poet and her muse.
After Bembo returned to Venice, Ginevra did live primarily at Le Murate. Some historians have seen that as sad. I like to believe it was a conscious, wise, and satisfying choice of self-definition on her part, in keeping with a number of other educated noblewomen and writers of Ginevra’s time who dared to protest the restrictions on women. Several of them remained cloistered so they could pursue their intellectual curiosity and dreams.
Fifteenth-century Florence, under Cosimo and his grandson Lorenzo de’ Medici, is unparalleled in its pageantry, passion, and percolating new ideas. It’s hard to imagine one city producing so many artists within a few decades—Brunelleschi, Donatello, Luca della Robbia, Ghiberti, Botticelli, the Pollaiuolo brothers, Perugino, and Michelangelo, to name the most important. And of course, Andrea del Verrocchio and his apprentice, Leonardo da Vinci. Many of these artists were nurtured and employed by the Medici. A few even lived for a time at the Medici palazzo. With such fervent patronage from its political leaders, Florence became an artistic mecca that set in motion the Renaissance, liberating the hearts and creativity of an entire continent.
Over the years, Verrocchio’s talents and accomplishments have been overshadowed by his most gifted student. But in the 1470s, Verrocchio was one of the most acclaimed and sought-after artists in the city, remarkable in his output and diversity, a goldsmith, engineer, sculptor, and painter. His influence on Leonardo was vast. Many scholars now speculate that several innovations once credited solely to Leonardo, such as the subtle blending of light and shade called sfumato, might actually have been Verrocchio’s idea first, or a joint discovery between them. Verrocchio’s sketch of a horse that included precise measurements of the steed’s limbs in relation to one another may slightly predate Leonardo’s famous Vitruvian Man—acclaimed for the figure’s perfect proportions. Clearly Leonardo emulated the charming and lovingly animated female faces Verrocchio drew.
The men must have been close friends. The younger artist stayed with his master long beyond his apprenticeship. One leap of imagination I take is the competition between Verrocchio and Leonardo regarding Ginevra, but this invention is inspired by fact. Verrocchio did create a sculpture, Lady with Primroses, about the time Leonardo painted Ginevra’s portrait. Just as Leonardo’s portrait was groundbreaking, so too was this sculpture. It was the first Italian portrait sculpture to extend below the shoulders and to convey movement, the figure appearing to have just gathered up flowers in the way Verrocchio carved and turned her shoulders. The good-natured teasing between the two men in Chapter Fifteen is culled from Leonardo’s notes about the superiority of painting over sculpture and poetry.
The face, dress, and hairstyles of the two art pieces are strikingly similar, and the figure in the statue cradles blossoms that may have been referenced in one of the poems written about Ginevra. Primroses were also part of Bembo’s family crest. Strengthening the hypothesis that Ginevra was the model for both works is the fact that Leonardo’s painted Ginevra appears to have originally held blossoms in a pose similar to Verrocchio’s statue. At some point, the bottom third of Ginevra’s portrait was cut off, probably because of damage. A study of hands with a sprig of flowers sketched by Leonardo is the basis for the assumption that the missing portion of the painting showed Ginevra holding a blossom.
Much of Leonardo’s dialogue comes from his own writings, and my depiction of his appearance and personality are taken from contemporary descriptions of him. In April 1476, Leonardo was indeed arrested, accused by a letter dropped into a tamburi—the box Florentines used to charge neighbors of breaking the city’s prejudicial “morality” laws. The term homosexual was not yet coined, so I use the words of Leonardo’s Florence—sodomy and Florenzer.
The city was known for its celebration of Plato’s ideals, including the Greek teacher’s lauding of love between men. Neoplatonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino interpreted that affection and mentoring to be chaste, like Platonic love. The legal issue for Florence during Leonardo’s time arose when men were believed to have physically acted on that love. Any intimacy that was not procreative—designed by nature to result in babies—was deemed taboo in the fifteenth century.
Leonardo’s arrest seemed to deeply affect him. He left Verrocchio’s studio and home. His exact whereabouts in Florence after that remain cloudy. He became zealously protective of his ideas. Historians also speculate that the arrest may have dampened Lorenzo de’ Medici’s interest in Leonardo. The Magnifico did not lavish the same kind of patronage on Leonardo that he did on other artists. In 1482, Leonardo sought a new home and fresh start, moving to Milan, initially as court musician and engineer.
You will find images of all artwork mentioned in this novel in a visual companion on my webpage, www.lmelliott.com. If you travel to Florence, you can walk streets little changed since Ginevra’s time and find her childhood palazzo. It still stands as a private home on what is now named via dei Benci, between the Ponte alle Grazie bridge and Santa Croce. Be sure to visit the Bargello museum to enjoy Verrocchio’s Lady with Primroses statue. See if you agree that it is Ginevra.
Also in the Bargello stands Verrocchio’s David, a beautiful, youthful depiction of the biblical hero. It is said a teenaged Leonardo was the model for the bronze statue. Its graceful figure and sweet-smiling face will give you an idea of the adult man Ginevra would have known.
Fewer than twenty paintings exist that Leonardo created either alone or with another artist like Verrocchio. We almost lost Ginevra de’ Benci. She resurfaced in the possession of the royal family of Liechtenstein about three hundred years after Leonardo painted her. During World War II, the aristocrats protected her from Hitler’s treasure hunters by hiding the portrait in a wine cellar in the family castle. In 1967, after much secret negotiation, the National Gallery of Art purchased Ginevra’s portrait for five million dollars, the largest sum ever paid for a work of art at that time.
I hope you view Ginevra in person. Look into her eyes and interpret for yourself the “motions” Leonardo saw in that eloquent mind of hers. Some think her melancholy, imposing even. I found an exquisite self-possession, strength of character, and inquisitive nature implied in that composure and steady gaze, in the skeletal details of her life, and in that one incredibly bold line of verse. But see what you find and imagine about her—that’s precisely what Leonardo wanted and Ginevra graciously and bravely granted us.