La Belle Ferronnière

La Belle Ferronnière is a portrait in oil on panel, painted by Leonardo da Vinci around 1495. It belongs to the Department of Paintings of the Louvre, where it is kept in Room 710 under the inventory numbers INV 778 and MR 317. The panel measures sixty-three centimetres in height, forty-five in width, and seven in thickness. In genre it is a portrait; in movement it is counted among the High Renaissance.

None of those facts names the woman. The painting is also known as Portrait of an Unknown Woman, and that second title is not a flourish. It records a genuine limit. What survives with certainty is the object: oil, wood, dimensions, authorship, date, and present home. What does not survive with the same firmness is the sitter’s identity.

The name by which the work is most often called arrived later. As early as the seventeenth century the portrait was titled La Belle Ferronnière, a phrase that identifies the woman as the wife or daughter of an ironmonger — a ferronnier. The same title was said to allude, discreetly, to a reputed mistress of Francis I of France, married to a certain Le Ferron. That story attaches the painting to a French royal intrigue. It does not arise from a signature, a contemporary inventory note supplied here, or any mark on the panel itself. It is a title history, and title histories can travel further than evidence.

A later suggestion names her as Lucretia Crivelli, a married lady-in-waiting to Duchess Beatrice of Milan, who became another of the Duke’s mistresses. The identification is tentative. It places the sitter inside the Milanese court world Leonardo knew, which is plausible in outline, but it remains a proposal rather than a closed case. The painting does not settle the matter for us.

Confusion has also gathered around the name itself. Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine has at times been known by the same title. That other portrait was once believed to show Cecilia Gallerani, a mistress of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. When Lady with an Ermine stood in Princess Izabela Czartoryska’s collection, the narrative and the title La Belle Ferronnière were applied to it as well. The mix-up was helped by the presence of a ferronnière — a band worn across the forehead — in that painting. One accessory, two portraits, and a shared nickname: the label slipped between works.

So the object in the Louvre has carried more than one story. It has been read as a French royal mistress by marriage to an ironmonger, as a Milanese lady-in-waiting, and, under a overlapping title, as someone else entirely in another picture. What the panel securely gives is narrower and stranger: a High Renaissance portrait by Leonardo, in oil on a thick wooden support, of a woman whose name the painting does not confirm.

Close looking, in this case, is partly an exercise in restraint. The composition is a portrait’s composition — a single figure presented for scrutiny — but the scrutiny has to include the frame of what we cannot know. The making is oil on panel at a modest, human scale. The meaning, in its own time, would have been bound up with likeness, status, and the courtly uses of a painted face. The meaning that has accrued since is bound up with the titles. Between those two sits the work itself, still present, still unnamed with certainty, still asking to be seen before it is explained.