La Belle Ferronni\u00e8re 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 in French a ferronnier<\/em>. 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 \u201cPortrait of a woman, wrongly called La Belle Ferronni\u00e8re\u201d. The irony is complete: the title describes the object on her forehead, not the person beneath it.<\/p>\n 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\u2019Este, Ludovico\u2019s 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 \u2013 a device Leonardo would later develop in the Mona Lisa. The original is painted in oil on a wooden panel, measures 63 \u00d7 45 cm, and is held in the Louvre in Paris.<\/p>\n The slender band with its jewel, worn tight across the forehead, is called in French a ferronni\u00e8re<\/em>. 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 \u2013 a small proof of how closely he observed the body.<\/p>\n Every reproduction of La Belle Ferronni\u00e8re 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.<\/p>\n La Belle Ferronni\u00e8re \u2013 the portrait that carries the wrong name La Belle Ferronni\u00e8re 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":127964,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[9810],"product_tag":[9831,9870,9862,9863],"class_list":["post-127970","product","type-product","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","product_cat-leonardo-da-vinci","product_tag-da-vinci-en","product_tag-painter","product_tag-reproduction-en","product_tag-reproductions","pa_dimenzija-120-x-170-cm","pa_dimenzija-150-x-220-cm","pa_dimenzija-40-x-60-cm","pa_dimenzija-53-x-77-cm","pa_dimenzija-60-x-90-cm","pa_dimenzija-70-x-100-cm","pa_dimenzija-80-x-120-cm","pa_dimenzija-90-x-130-cm","pa_oblika-vertical","pa_okvir-without-frame","pa_podokvir-without","pa_podokvir-yes","first","onbackorder","purchasable","product-type-variable","has-default-attributes"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWho the woman is<\/h3>\n
The ferronni\u00e8re \u2013 the band that gave the name<\/h3>\n
A hand-painted reproduction for your home<\/h3>\n
\n