LEONARDO and VERROCCHIO's GINEVRA

LEONARDO AND VERROCCHIO's GINEVRA

This portrait of Ginevra de' Benci in the National Gallery in Washington was painted by Leonardo da Vinci probably in 1474, the year in which Ginevra was married to Luigi Niccolini, 32, a Florentine merchant who was a widower. According to Alessandro Cecchi, Leonardo was a friend of Ginevra's brother, Giovanni, and Giovanni may have recommended him as the artist to do the portrait. (See the excellent catalogue essay in Leonardo Master Craftsman, Yale University Press, 2003.)

Ginevra is identified as Ginevra in the painting by a plant on the front and back of the portrait, the GINEPRO plant, the plant of the Juniper Tree, whose name resembles hers.

On the front of the portrait the Juniper plant encircles her head:

On the back side of the portrait the juniper plant is encircled, embraced itself by two other plants: a palm leaf and a laurel branch:

(The red seal in the upper right corner of this view is a 1773 stamp of a royal collection in Lichtenstein and should be ignored for our purposes.) Original to the Leonardo portrait is the scroll with a Latin inscription that entwines all three plant forms. It reads:  VIRTUTEM FORMA DECORAT and means literally FORM DECORATES VIRTUE, or as some scholars would interpret it, BEAUTY DECORATES VIRTUE. The letters of FORMA are the ones that are closest to and the ones that are winding around the juniper branch, enjoining the viewer to associate the woman GINEVRA with BEAUTIFUL and BELOVED FORM. The palm frond and the laurel both protect and enshrine the juniper plant, as if revering it.

Several oddities stand out about this portrait:
1) It is a 3/4 view portrait in a period when profile portraits were the norm. In fact, it may be the VERY FIRST 3/4 view Italian Renaissance female portrait, 1474 being much before Mona Lisa's in 1503.
2)The portrait, as well as the back painting of the plants and Latin inscription, have both been cut down from a longer size that might have included the hands and arms of the woman and the ends of the sprigs of the plants (more on this point later.)
3) The woman in question, Ginevra de' Benci, daughter of a wealthy Florentine banking family, is so very sad in this portrait. Other female portraits from this period are serious but not sad. She seems doubly sad if you think of this as a wedding portrait.

4) The last curious thing about this portrait is that the plants surrounding the juniper sprig on the back of the painting are not the plants associated with her husband but rather are plants that symbolize honor and virtue (Laurel and Palm) and are the plants of the Venetian Ambassador to Florence during this period, a man named Bernardo Bembo, the father of the poet Pietro Bembo. Bernardo
Bembo's motto of HONOR and VIRTUE, was found underneath the painting on the back of Ginevra's image, in an x-ray examination, which rather suggests that Leonardo's portrait was not commissioned for her husband but rather for this admirer, Bernardo Bembo. That Lorenzo the Magnificent is thought to have teased Bernardo Bembo for his Platonic love for Ginevra adds to the frisson of this work. Bernardo (1433-1519) would have been 41 in 1474, considerably older than Ginevra and a married man with his own children.
5) Given what we know about Bernardo Bembo, the background scene in the painting of Ginevra takes on new meaning. Bernardo Bembo was ambassador for Venice in several places, and in 1473 he had been in Bruges, where he had his own portrait painted by a Flemish artist named Hans Memling.
His portrait still exists in the National Museum of Art in Antwerp:

As he was an avid coin collector, he holds an ancient Roman coin of Nero in this portrait. Two laurel leaves appear on the ledge in front of him and a palm tree in the landscape behind him. These two plants are his insignia. The landscape includes two swans, a white horse and rider, and castles up on hills. In Leonardo's portrait of Ginevra we find a very similar landscape with a river and trees and hills behind the sitter to the right from the viewer's viewpoint. No swans or white horse, but

the reflection of trees in the water in both paintings as well as the placement of the landscape suggest that Leonardo knew about the earlier painting, maybe even had looked at it in a desire to fashion a companion painting for Bembo's own portrait.
How unusual is that? To have a commissioner of a woman's portrait ask to have the work resemble his own portrait, if he is not the person marrying the lady? From the scant knowledge we have of Bembo's affection for Ginevra, he was smitten with deep love for this intelligent girl of 17 and wrote her letters and poems. Is it not possible he wanted to have a portrait of her to place next to his own to contemplate his pure, undefiled feelings for her? If he paid for the work, how unusual is it that he might have commissioned it for her wedding to someone else? and then kept it for himself?
No wonder she is sad; she is taken as an object of young beauty, but she is not given a chance to express her own desires for either man. She is merely a pawn in the mercantile games played in the 15th-century where women were considered bounties to be used to cement alliances and to ensure a contract between families. She knows her real affections must not be shown or known.

It is commendable that Leonardo is sensitive enough to her situation to reveal something of the real under the ideal. Ginevra's brother, Giovanni, is one year older than she, four years younger than Leonardo in 1474. Was he a close and protective brother who wanted the best for his sister? Did Giovanni disapprove of her future husband? Perhaps the brother liked the homage Bembo paid to his sister and couldn't stand Niccolini. This portrait captures a romantic view of a young girl on the cusp of womanhood, set in a landscape slightly reminiscent of the Arno valley and its environs. She is not put in a domestic setting but given a life pulsing outside in the countryside with all the freedom that implies. Even so, she is hemmed in by the plant around her head and by familial duty. She wears a black scarf as if in mourning for herself. (See Garrard, Ars et historiae, 2006 for an interpretation of the scarf as a garment for lay persons in a convent.)

Cristoforo Landino wrote poetry to Ginevra as did Lorenzo the Magnificent, too, and they both acknowledge the relationship she had with Bembo, who seems to have adored her as a medieval knight would his Lady. The plant symbols entwined are another measure of the chivalric nature of this painting and speak of the natural affinities that Ginevra and Bernardo shared in correspondence and in conversation. She does not appear in the portrait to have beautiful features of the sort we can see in other portraits of the period, but the radiance of her interior life may have warranted all the male attention.

There is one other plant that was probably in the original painting of Ginevra: a primrose bouquet or a forget-me-not bouquet held in her hands, both of which are now missing. Other scholars have tried to reconstruct how the portrait might have looked when it was not cut down. Here is a version
created for the National Gallery in Washington.D.C. by Susan Dorothea White:

 For this version she used an actual drawing of hands that appears in Leonardo's sketches in the Royal Collection in Windsor:

as well as adding the finishing stems to the plants on the reverse image. Since the right hand in the drawing holds the stems of several flowers, the addition of the small bouquet seems reasonable.

Appropriate, then, to look at what I think to be another portrait of Ginevra de Benci, this time in marble, carried out by Leonardo's teacher, Andrea del Verrocchio, probably in 1475, of a woman holding a bouquet of flowers:

This portrait of the same lady is now in the Bargello, where she is not identified, just given the title, Lady with Bouquet (in Italian - Dama Col Mazzolino.)
If you compare the two heads, the identification of the sitter is clear as Ginevra. Her hairstyle is the same, with tight curls bunched up around the ears and a split straight part in the center of the top of her head. No portrait of any other woman from this time has the same hairstyle.

At the back of her head the hair is bundled into a wrapped bun in both cases. Her eyes are heavily lidded both in the upper and lower lids, the nose slopes into a large protrusion at the nostril end, and her mouth is small in relation to her chin and nose, with a deep furrow between her mouth and nose in both portraits.



































Even the bulging p

pupils are apparent in both. The lady in both portraits also wears a see-through voile undergarment tied with a button. To be sure, the shape of the face differs; Leonardo's Ginevra is more oval and Verrocchio's is squarer, but the other features that are common to both seem to link them as the same person.

Verrocchio's lady has graceful hands

and those hands hold a bouquet of flowers that look like
either primroses, a sign of Ginevra's young age, 17,








or forget-me-nots:

Was this marble portrait also commissioned by Bembo? If these are forget-me-nots in her hand, is it not reasonable to suppose that one year after her marriage, he wants a reminder that she still has affection for him and always will? Forget-me-nots are called "Nontiscordardime" in Italian, which is roughly, "Do not forget about me."

        If we can try technology to combine the portraits, the result would look something like this view below. The hand gesture of the Verrocchio sculpture appears much more self-protective then here:

The documents that exist are the poems to her, the notes in Leonardo's notebooks that connect him to Giovanni, and the catasto (tax) records that say the Benci family owned two large palazzi in the street in Florence now known as Via dei Benci, at number 16. We also know that when Leonardo left for France in 1517, he left his unfinished painting, now in the Uffizi, of the Adoration of the Magi, with this Benci family. We presume much since we have none of the documents yet that link Bembo to the money paid for either painting or sculpture. But the similarity of the portrait of Bembo to that of Ginevra, not to mention the hidden x-ray image of Bembo's insignia on the back of her portrait, both tell us these two people had a deep connection. The symbolism of plants speaks still through both portraits words that were private and intended for intimate consumption.

 

Her beauty certainly adorns her virtue, but in both portraits of Ginevra we feel the cost of that virtue.

Verrocchio's lady is not as sad as Leonardo's, but her flowers give her away.