The Girl Who Faced the Wrong Way
A young Florentine woman stares past the viewer with a gaze that refuses to charm — and in that refusal, Leonardo da Vinci left America its only public painting.
She looks at nothing in particular. That is the first strange thing about her. Painted sometime between 1474 and 1478 in Florence, Ginevra de' Benci gazes forward with an expression that seems almost bored by the person looking at her — no smile, no softness, just a level, indifferent stare that has unsettled and fascinated viewers for over five centuries.
Ginevra was a real young woman, born around 1458 into a prominent Florentine family, and the portrait is widely believed to commemorate her marriage — or more likely her engagement — to Luigi di Bernardo Niccolini when she was sixteen. Renaissance portraits of women were typically commissioned for one of two occasions: betrothal or marriage. Wedding portraits usually came in pairs, with the woman positioned on the right side of the panel, facing left toward her husband's matching image. Ginevra faces right instead, which art historians take as a clue that this was painted to mark her engagement rather than her wedding day.
Behind her, filling most of the background, is a dense screen of juniper — not simply decorative. In Renaissance Italy the juniper bush symbolized female virtue, and its Italian name, ginepro, doubles as a pun on Ginevra's own name. The plant is not just scenery; it is a signature, a visual echo of the woman it surrounds.
Turn the panel over, and the symbolism deepens. The reverse bears a painted sprig of juniper encircled by a wreath of laurel and palm, beneath the Latin motto Virtvtem Forma Decorat — 'Beauty adorns virtue.' The laurel and palm belonged to the personal emblem of Bernardo Bembo, a Venetian ambassador to Florence whose relationship with Ginevra, by all accounts platonic, is documented in poems the two exchanged. Infrared examination later revealed Bembo's own motto, 'Virtue and Honor,' hidden beneath the surface, suggesting he had some hand in commissioning the work.
Ginevra's beauty made her something of a celebrity in her own time, well beyond Leonardo's brush. Members of the Medici literary circle — Cristoforo Landino and Alessandro Braccesi — wrote ten poems about her, and Lorenzo de' Medici himself composed two sonnets in her honor. Giorgio Vasari later claimed she also appeared in Domenico Ghirlandaio's fresco of the Visitation of Mary and Elizabeth in Santa Maria Novella, though this claim is now considered mistaken — most scholars believe Vasari confused her with Giovanna Tornabuoni, whom Ghirlandaio actually painted.
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