Before the Mona Lisa: The Secret Beneath Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci (c. 1474)
In February 1967, a portrait smaller than a dinner plate crossed the Atlantic sealed inside a modified American Tourister suitcase, booked into a first-class seat under a false name, and met on the tarmac by federal agents. It was Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra de' Benci — and the $5 million the National Gallery of Art paid to bring it home was, at the time, the largest sum ever spent on a single work of art. Three decades before he painted the Mona Lisa, a 22-year-old Leonardo had already produced his first masterpiece of psychological ambiguity, and hidden a second, secret message on the back of the panel.
Artist: Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
Date: c. 1474–1478
Medium: Oil on panel, painted on both sides
Collection: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Notable fact: The only painting by Leonardo on public view in the Americas
Florence, 1474: A Portrait for an Engagement
Ginevra de' Benci was sixteen and already known across Florence as a poet and a formidable conversationalist when her family, wealthy bankers with close ties to the Medici, arranged her marriage to Luigi Niccolini, a widower twice her age. Only a single line of her own verse survives, copied down by an admirer: "I ask your forgiveness, I am a mountain tiger" — a flash of defiance that the painting itself seems to argue with. Leonardo, barely into his twenties and still working out of Verrocchio's workshop, was given the commission, likely to mark the engagement. It was among his very first paintings in oil, a medium still new to Florence, and he used it to attempt things Italian portraiture had not really tried before.
The Three-Quarter Turn That Broke the Rules
Florentine women were painted in strict profile, safely decorative and giving nothing away. Leonardo turned Ginevra's body and face toward the viewer instead, a three-quarter pose borrowed from Flemish painting and almost unheard of for a woman's portrait in Italy at the time. He also put her outdoors, in front of a juniper bush and a hazy, blue-green river landscape, when convention called for women to be shown indoors, glimpsed through a window at most. The atmospheric distance in that background — mountains dissolving into mist — is the same effect Leonardo would spend the rest of his life perfecting, and it reappears, more famously, behind the Mona Lisa some thirty years later.
The Message Beneath the Message
Flip the panel over — as visitors to the National Gallery can, since it is hinged for display — and Leonardo's illusionism continues: a trompe-l'oeil wreath of laurel and palm, wrapped around a sprig of juniper, painted to look carved in porphyry stone. It is a pun in Italian: ginepro, juniper, for Ginevra. A scroll across the wreath reads VIRTVTEM FORMA DECORAT — "beauty adorns virtue." But infrared reflectography has found an even earlier inscription underneath, painted out and replaced: VIRTVS ET HONOR, "virtue and honor" — the personal motto of Bernardo Bembo, a Venetian ambassador to Florence and one of Ginevra's most devoted admirers. The likeliest reading is that the reverse was quietly repainted once, rededicating a panel about her engagement into something closer to a private emblem of Bembo's own attachment to her — a hidden message hiding an even more hidden one.
The Missing Hands
The portrait ends abruptly at the base of Ginevra's collarbone, and it was not meant to. At some point — probably through damage rather than deliberate trimming — roughly a third of the original panel was cut away. A red-chalk study by Leonardo of a woman's clasped hands, closely related in style, has led scholars to believe the missing section once showed Ginevra's hands folded at her waist, quite possibly holding a small flower. It would have been the first time Leonardo attempted the hands that later became one of his signatures — including, again, in the Mona Lisa — and we will likely never know how he first solved the problem.
A $5 Million Suitcase
The painting stayed in the Liechtenstein princely collection for over 250 years, hanging largely unremarked until the family, facing postwar financial pressure, agreed to sell. In February 1967, Prince Franz Josef II sold it to the National Gallery of Art for $5 million, a record price for any work of art at the time. Getting it out of Europe was treated like a covert operation: the gallery's conservator, Mario Modestini, had a suitcase fitted with foam padding and a humidity gauge, booked a first-class seat on a commercial flight under his wife's name, and carried the panel out as ordinary luggage. FBI agents met the flight in New York, and a private plane completed the trip to Washington. Nearly a thousand visitors filed past the painting in its first hour on view — and it has been the only Leonardo on permanent public display anywhere in the Americas ever since.
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