Die schöne Ferronnière

This portrait comes out of the court of Milan in the 1490s, where Leonardo spent years working for the duke, Ludovico Sforza. The young woman looks slightly to one side, held back from us by a stone ledge along the bottom, and across it her eyes catch the viewer with a directness that feels almost like being noticed across a room. She wears a thin chain across her forehead with a small jewel resting on it, and it is that band, called a ferronnière, that gave the picture its nickname much later, borrowed by mistake from a different woman entirely. Who she actually is has never been settled. The old guess is Lucrezia Crivelli, one of Ludovico's mistresses, though scholars have also proposed his wife Beatrice d'Este and other court women, and honestly no one knows. The attribution to Leonardo has been argued over too, since the pose is stiffer than his usual work, but it hangs in the Louvre as his, a few rooms from the Mona Lisa, whose sidelong glance it clearly anticipates.