… Con sua pictura
La fa che par che ascolti e non favella.
Bernardo Bellincioni – Sonnet
The early notebooks buzz with plans and projects which are impressively diverse – diversity is already Leonardo’s trademark – but which are also part of a single plan or project: employment at the court of Ludovico Sforza. The military hardware, the urban planning, the flying-machines, the architectural designs, even the courtly word-puzzles – all these, which today survive fossilized on paper, were part of Leonardo’s bid to become the Moor’s multi-talented tecnico or expert, the ingenious ‘engineer’ in the broadest post-Brunelleschian sense of the word. How far Ludovico responded to all this we don’t know: he was doubtless impressed by the brilliance of the Florentine, but was this translated into specific patronage? Perhaps, like his fellow Florentine Benedetto Dei, Leonardo drew a small mancia – a tip, a dole, an irregular stipend – from the Sforza coffers; perhaps he was given money to develop his ideas for assault-submarines and steam-powered cannon; perhaps he was paid for redesigning the Duchess’s ‘pavilion’ in the castle gardens. It does not add up to much – a reminder of the sour proverb voiced by a Milanese courtier of the day, Tommaso Tebaldi: ‘Chi vive al corte muore al spedale’ – ‘He who lives at court dies in the poorhouse.’70 So the notebooks tell us more, at this stage, about Leonardo’s aspirations and ambitions than about what he lived off. In fact Leonardo’s first identifiable commission from Ludovico himself is not in the realm of engineering or architecture. It is a painting of the Moor’s beautiful young mistress, Cecilia Gallerani.71
Ludovico Sforza was not a model of depravity like the Duke his brother, but he enjoyed the sexual perks of despotism. He tended to regard his female subjects much as he regarded the harts and hinds of his private hunting-grounds – his for the taking – and, whatever her personal feelings in the matter, any young woman on whom his eye alighted knew this favour to be a passport to a world of comfort and privilege for herself and her family. Cecilia Gallerani was born in early 1473; her father, Fazio, was a public official who had served as ambassador to both Florence and Lucca; her mother, Margherita Busti, was the daughter of a noted doctor of law. Cecilia was a girl of a good but not spectacularly rich family, and as her father died when she was seven years old, and as she had six brothers who took precedence over her, she was only comparatively a child of luxury. She was bright and well educated, and was later a patroness of writers, among them the novelist Matteo Bandello. That she was alluringly pretty could be deduced from many poems and letters written about her, but the deduction is unnecessary because she lives – to borrow the cliché of the time – in Leonardo’s portrait of her, otherwise known as The Lady with an Ermine (Plate 12).
When she became Il Moro’s mistress is not recorded but can be fairly closely guessed. A document of June 1487 formally releases her from a childhood marriage-contract to Giovanni Stefano Visconti; the likelihood is that Ludovico’s amorous interests lie behind this. She was then just fourteen years old: young, but not unusually so. By the early summer of 1489 Cecilia was no longer living with her family, but in an unspecified property in the parish of Nuovo Monasterio; it is hard to resist interpreting this as a love-nest. In this same year her brother Sigerio killed a man during a dispute, and escaped justice through the personal intervention of Ludovico. On this circumstantial evidence it seems that Cecilia became Ludovico’s paramour in about 1487, though it is not until 1490 that we have incontrovertible evidence of the liaison in the time-honoured form of a pregnancy.
Though Cecilia’s marriage-plans had proved expendable, Ludovico’s were a weightier matter. Since 1480 he had been pledged, for sound political reasons, to the daughter of the Duke of Ferrara, Beatrice d’Este, and the time was now fast approaching for the marriage to be solemnized: a major dynastic alliance to be celebrated by a major public display of Milanese power-pageantry. On 8 November 1490 the Duke of Ferrara received a rather disconcerting dispatch from his ambassador in Milan, Jacopo Trotti, who reported that Ludovico’s intentions towards ‘la madonna Duchessa nostra’ (i.e. Beatrice) were uncertain, because he was still besotted with ‘quella sua innamorata’ (i.e. Cecilia). ‘He keeps her with him at the castle, and wherever he goes, and wants to give her everything. She is pregnant, and as beautiful as a flower, and often he brings me with him to visit her.’ Perhaps feeling he has warmed a little too much to his theme, Trotti concludes diplomatically, ‘But time, which cannot be forced, makes all things ready’ – even here he cannot resist a slightly overheated pun on Sforza and sforzare, which means also to force sexually.
The wedding of Ludovico and Beatrice went ahead as planned, and was celebrated in sumptuous style on 16 January 1491, but Cecilia continued to exert her spell, and a month after the wedding Ambassador Trotti reported that Il Moro had spoken to him ‘in his ear’, and told him ‘he wished he could go to La Rocca [his private apartments at the castle] and make love to Cecilia, and be with her in peace, and this was what his wife wanted too, because she did not want to submit to him’. Apparently Beatrice was refusing to sleep with Ludovico while he persisted in his dalliance with Cecilia. On 21 March, however, Trotti reports that Ludovico has ordered Cecilia away from the castle: ‘He no longer wants to touch her or have relations with her, now she is so big, and will not do so until she has delivered him a son.’ In April she is reported to be living in an apartment in the city provided by II Moro, perhaps again that property in Nuovo Monasterio.
On 3 May she gave birth to a son. He was christened Cesare Sforza Visconti. The poet Bellincioni rushed out a trio of sonnets celebrating the birth, calling her ‘Isola’ (‘Island’, a pun on Cecilia/Sicilia), and congratulating her on being the vessel which had brought the ‘seed of the Moor to fruition’. The poet’s friendly relations with Cecilia are shown in a later letter, of February 1492, in which he tells Ludovico:
I dined yesterday morning with My Lady Cecilia, and stayed there till evening, and am her favourite, and I swear to God we had such fun with Signor Cesare, who is nice and fat, I mean fat. And because I guessed he was going to be a boy I know I will ever be in his Lordship’s [Cesare’s] good graces.72
Alas not so: the plausible rimester was dead by the end of the summer.
To Bellincioni also we owe the earliest reference to Leonardo’s portrait, in a sonnet addressed, in his usual cavalier tone, to Nature:
O Nature how envious you are
of Vinci who has painted one of your stars,
The beautiful Cecilia, whose lovely eyes
Make the sunlight seem dark shadow
Think this: the more lively and lovely she is,
The more glory you’ll get in ages to come.
Give thanks therefore to Ludovico
And to the genius and the hand of Leonardo,
Who both wish to share her with posterity.73
As far as I know, this is the earliest literary description of a Leonardo painting. It contains the rather acute observation I quote at the top of this chapter: ‘Con sua pictura / La fa che par che ascolti e non favella’ – ‘By his art he makes her look as if she’s listening, and not talking.’ This catches something of the poise of the portrait: her air of attentiveness to something beyond the picture-space. Does it also contain a personal reminiscence of Cecilia – ‘e non favella’: for once she isn’t chattering?
This is the painting’s backdrop: sex and gossip and poetry at the Sforza court. Like Leonardo’s earlier portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, it is an image of a woman created for the delectation of her lover. But up here in Milan the action is rawer: this is no Platonic crush like Bembo’s for Ginevra, and the portrait of Cecilia has an erotic frisson quite absent from the serene, lunar depiction of Ginevra. The hand caressing the furry animal is a sexual allusion; the fashion accessories – the gold frontlet, the black band, the tied veil, the necklace – suggest the restrained, captive status of the concubine. I am reminded of a passage in the Trattato della pittura, where Leonardo argues that the painter has the same kind of power as a poet to ‘inflame men with love’ – he can make them ‘fall in love with a painting’. He tells this story:
It once happened that I made a picture representing a divine subject, and it was bought by a man who fell in love with her. He wished to remove the emblems of divinity in order to be able to kiss the picture without scruples. But finally conscience overcame his sighs and desires, and he was obliged to remove the painting from his house.74
This cannot be the portrait of Cecilia, of course, but the idea of a painting as a kind of love-object, an erotic inducement, is suggestive of it.
The ermine cradled in the girl’s arms brings a train of symbolic and folkloric associations into the painting. The ermine, Mustela erminea, is the northern variety of stoat whose winter-fur is white (though in the painting the creature’s coat is discoloured by varnish, and appears yellowy-brown). The animal was associated with purity and cleanliness, as in Leonardo’s own ‘bestiary’ compiled in the early 1490s: ‘The ermine, because of its temperance… will rather let itself be taken by hunters than take refuge in a muddy den, in order not to stain its purity.’75 This claim is not original to Leonardo – it is among the many items in his bestiary drawn from his well-thumbed copy of the Fiore di virtù. The ermine also appears as a symbol of purity in Vittore Carpaccio’s portrait of a knight (c. 1510), where a cartouche above the animal reads, ‘Malo mori quam foedari’ – ‘Better to die than to be besmirched.’ This association of purity adds a partly ironic refinement to the portrait: the symbolic in contrapposto with the erotic. Another connection of the ermine is a learned linguistic pun. The Greek word for a weasel or stoat is galé, which puns on Cecilia’s family name of Gallerani: this is parallel to the juniper or ginepro in Ginevra’s portrait. This is the sort of stuff Leonardo liked – or knew that his customers liked – though it seems unlikely that he would have known this rather obscure bit of Greek vocabulary; perhaps he had a bit of help from Ludovico’s secretary, the Hellenic scholar Bartolomeo Calco.
These meanings play over the ermine, but the creature has a more particular significance. It is an emblematic allusion to Ludovico himself, who in 1488 was invested with the title of the Ermine (‘L’Ermellino’) by Ferrante di Aragona, King of Naples (grandfather of Isabella of Aragon, who was soon to marry young Duke Gian Galeazzo). A sonnet of Bellincioni’s styles Ludovico ‘l’italico morel, bianco ermellino’ (the Italian moor, the white ermine).76 The animal cradled in Cecilia’s arms is thus an emblem of the man to whom she is bound, socially and sexually, and indeed one notes its vigilant eye, and powerfully muscular foreleg, and the claws splayed out against the girl’s red sleeve. As so often, Leonardo renders the emblematic so powerfully that it doubles back into the actual, and one has a sense of the ermine as predator, as it is in nature, and as Ludovico was. It is very likely Leonardo drew the creature from life – ermines were imported to Milan by furriers; there is a letter from a traveller in Moscow promising to send Ludovico’s brother ‘beautiful sables, ermines, bears, and white hares, alive or dead’.77 Stoats and their relatives (weasels, martens, ferrets, etc.) make decorative pets, so the portrait as a whole is not fantastical: it achieves its resonances within an image of almost photographic realism, beautifully lit against a black backdrop.
Though discarded, Cecilia remained in the Moor’s affections, and as the mother of one of his natural sons she was favoured. She was awarded lands at Saranno, north of Milan, and in 1492 she was married off to a Cremonese, Count Lodovico Bergamini. She created a little salon at the Palazzo Carmagnola in Milan; among those who paid court there was the author Matteo Bandello, who dedicated two of his novelle to her, and praised her wit and learning, and her Latin verses.
The portrait remained in her possession, and on 26 April 1498 the avid collectionneuse Isabella d’Este wrote to her with a typically peremptory request (though the tone is not unfriendly considering that Isabella was Beatrice’s sister):
We happened today to be looking at certain beautiful portraits done by Zoanne Bellino [i.e. Giovanni Bellini]; and we began to discuss the works of Leonardo, and wished we could see some of them to compare with the paintings we have here. Recalling that L. V. did your portrait from the life, would you be so good as to send it to me, by this present bearer whom we send for this purpose. As well as serving the purpose of comparison, it will give us the pleasure of seeing your face. As soon as we have studied it we will return it to you.
On 29 April Cecilia replied that she was sending the portrait,
though I would send it more willingly if it looked more like me. Your Ladyship should not think this is due to any failings on the part of the maestro, whom I truly believe to be without equal. It is solely because the portrait was done when I was at an imperfect age, and my face has since changed completely, so that if you put the portrait and me side by side, no one would think it was me represented there.78
This was by no means the last of the picture’s peregrinations. After Cecilia’s death, in 1536, it remained in Milan. In the eighteenth century, according to Carlo Amoretti, librarian of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, ‘it was still to be seen in Milan, in the collection of the Marquises of Bonasana’. He also implied that there were other paintings based on it: a St Cecilia holding a zither, and another in which ‘this renowned lady is painted as she was in the first portrait, done by Leonardo himself in the flower of her youth, but instead of the zither she seems to hold in her hand a fold of her gown’.79 Then, in about 1800, the portrait was bought by the Polish prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, and given to his mother, Isabella. She hung it in her picture gallery, called the Gothic House, in the family estate at Pulawy, near Cracow. It was at this time that the erroneous inscription was added to the top left-hand corner:
LA BELE FERONIERE
LEONARD D’AWINCI
A note by Isabella Czartoryski explains that the picture ‘is supposed to be the portrait of the mistress of François I, King of France. She was called La Belle Ferronnière as she was believed to be the wife of an ironmonger.’ (The idea that Leonardo painted this semi-legendary Frenchwoman has proved tenacious, and the same title is now given – equally erroneously – to another of his Milanese portraits.)
In 1842 the Czartoryski family were living in exile in Paris, and had the painting with them; it was in Paris for three decades, in their apartments at the Hôtel Lambert, but the French art establishment seems to have known nothing of it. Arsène Houssaye’s exhaustive catalogue of 1869 lists the painting as lost. After the Franco-Prussian War the family returned to Poland, and in 1876 the Lady with an Ermine was exhibited in public for the first time, in the Czartoryski Museum at Cracow. By the early twentieth century it had been accepted and celebrated as an authentic Leonardo, and identified as the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani documented by Bellincioni and others.
It had a last adventure during the Second World War. Just before the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 it was hidden at Sieniawa, with other treasures of the Czartoryski collection – a Rembrandt landscape, a Raphael portrait – but the hiding-place was discovered. The Lady was briefly exhibited at the Kaiser Friedrich Musum in Berlin, and was reserved for Hitler’s private museum (the ‘Führerauftrag’) at Linz, but instead it wound up in the private collection of the Nazi governor of Poland, Hans Frank, at whose villa in Bavaria it was discovered in 1945 by the Polish-American Committee. Thus the fortunes of love and war are etched on this small painted panel of walnut-wood which issued from the studio of Leonardo da Vinci in c. 1489.