Description
La Belle Ferronnière – the portrait that carries the wrong name
La Belle Ferronnière is one of the most direct portraits of the Renaissance: a young woman turns towards the viewer and looks him straight in the eye. Leonardo da Vinci painted her between 1490 and 1496 at the Milanese court. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings that gaze into your home, painted in oil on canvas with full attention to the light on skin and fabric.
A name born of a mistake
The painting is named neither after the painter nor after the patron, but after a misunderstanding. The title took hold in the seventeenth century, when the sitter was wrongly taken for the wife or daughter of an ironmonger – in French a ferronnier. The name most likely conflated two stories: a reputed mistress of King Francis I of France, and the jewel the woman wears. The Louvre today lists the work cautiously as “Portrait of a woman, wrongly called La Belle Ferronnière”. The irony is complete: the title describes the object on her forehead, not the person beneath it.
Who the woman is
The sitter has never been securely identified. She is most often recognised as Lucrezia Crivelli, lady-in-waiting and mistress of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan; some more recent scholarship sees instead Beatrice d’Este, Ludovico’s wife. Whoever she was, Leonardo painted her with rare psychological sharpness: the body is turned aside while the head turns towards us, so that the gaze strikes the viewer suddenly, almost as an interruption. A low parapet in the foreground separates her space from ours – a device Leonardo would later develop in the Mona Lisa. The original is painted in oil on a wooden panel, measures 63 × 45 cm, and is held in the Louvre in Paris.
The ferronnière – the band that gave the name
The slender band with its jewel, worn tight across the forehead, is called in French a ferronnière. In the fifteenth century it marked high rank, and in the nineteenth century it enjoyed a revival as fashion precisely because of this painting. Leonardo painted it so that it cuts very slightly into the skin, creating a sense of physical presence – a small proof of how closely he observed the body.
A hand-painted reproduction for your home
Every reproduction of La Belle Ferronnière is entirely hand-painted in oil on canvas. It is not a print, but a real painting created for you by an experienced artist, so every copy is unique. It is available in eight sizes, stretched on a wooden frame on request and in a frame from our 3D range. Because of the dark ground and the strong gaze, the painting works best on a quiet, single-colour wall. Among our canvas wall art you will also find Leonardo’s other female portraits: Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, Ginevra de’ Benci and Mona Lisa.
- Subject: La Belle Ferronnière, Leonardo da Vinci, 1490–1496
- Technique: hand-painted oil painting on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 8 dimensions, stretched on a wooden frame on request
- Fact: the Louvre officially lists the painting as “wrongly called” – the name comes from a seventeenth-century mix-up
