Lady with an Ermine

The young woman turning in her chair was about sixteen when Leonardo painted her, in Milan, around 1489. Her name was Cecilia Gallerani, and she was the mistress of the man who ran the city, Ludovico Sforza, the duke Leonardo worked for. The animal she cradles is an ermine, a stoat in its white winter coat, and it is doing a lot of quiet work here. Ludovico had recently been made a knight of the Order of the Ermine, so the creature stands in for him, held close against her. There is also a pun folded in, since the Greek word for this kind of animal sounds like Cecilia's family name, Gallerani. And the ermine was thought to be so fastidious it would rather be caught by hunters than dirty its white fur, a small emblem of purity pressed into a portrait of a duke's teenage lover. What still startles people is the turn of her body and her gaze off to the side, as if she has just heard someone enter the room. That sense of a person caught mid-motion was new, and it is largely why the picture does not feel five centuries old.