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Lady with an Ermine
Leonardo da Vinci · Renaissance & Mannerism
- Artist
- Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
- Date
- c. 1489–1491
- Dimensions
- 54 x 39 cm
- Medium
- Oil on walnut panel
- Location
- Czartoryski Museum, Kraków, Poland
Lady with an Ermine portrays Cecilia Gallerani, a young woman at the Milan court of Duke Ludovico Sforza, holding a white ermine in her arms. It is one of only four surviving portraits of women by Leonardo.
A closer look
Cecilia turns her head as if someone has just spoken to her from the side, and the ermine turns with her, giving the portrait a sense of life and movement that was new at the time. Her slender hand, painted with careful attention to bones and tendons, strokes the animal. The ermine was a symbol of purity and also an emblem associated with Ludovico, so the picture may contain a hidden reference to the duke.
History of the painting
Around 1800 the young Polish prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski bought the painting in Italy for his mother, Princess Izabela, who displayed it in her museum at Puławy, the first museum in Poland. In 1939 the Nazis seized it, and it hung for a time in the office of Hans Frank, the German governor of occupied Poland; in 1945 Allied soldiers found it in his villa in Bavaria and returned it to Kraków.
In 2016 the Polish state bought the whole Czartoryski collection, including the Lady with an Ermine, for about 100 million euros, far below its market value. After a long renovation the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków reopened in 2019, with the painting in a room of its own.
