Ginevra de' Benci

This is the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci anywhere in the Americas, and it hangs in Washington because a European royal family finally agreed to part with it in 1967. Leonardo made it around 1476, in Florence, when he was still in his early 20s and largely unknown. The sitter is Ginevra de' Benci, a young Florentine woman from a wealthy banking family, and Leonardo has given her a pale unsmiling face against a spray of dark spiky leaves. Those leaves are the clue to who she is. They are juniper, and the Italian word for juniper, ginepro, echoes her name. Turn the panel over and there is a Latin motto painted on the back, beauty adorns virtue, wrapped around a sprig of the same plant. Look at the bottom edge and something is missing. Her hands. At some point the panel was cut down, and roughly a third was trimmed away, including the folded hands that would have rested in her lap. A red-chalk drawing of hands by Leonardo is often thought to record what that lost strip once held.