Eden Collinsworth - What the Ermine Saw: The Extraordinary Journey of Leonardo Da Vincis Most Mysterious Portrait

Some 530 years ago, a young Italian womannot much older than a girl, reallysat for her portrait.

It was a customary practice in Europe to commission a noblewomans portrait in anticipation of marriagemarriage being a transactional event with political or monetary value. The setting was a sprawling, opulent, Milanese castello, but the young womans simply styled dress revealed that she was neither noble nor soon to be married. Instead of being depicted as something akin to an object, she would be well and truly the portraits significant subject.

In a time when her sex was expected to harbor unexpressed opinions, the young woman diverted herself during the long stretches of sitting for her portrait by enlisting a circle of learned men with whom to enjoy intellectual conversation. Often they would do this in Latina devilishly complicated language whose alphabet is derived from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets and features a nominative, a vocative, an accusative, a genitive, a dative, and an ablative. Some days, the young woman would recite poetry to the men or orate long passages by memory; on other days, they would debate philosophical issues in respectfully low voices so as not to disturb the concentration of the painter, whose focus was forensically trained on the purpose at hand.

The painter was not just an artist. Indeed, he eluded any number of categorizations, but if there were a central knot of his being, it was curiosity. His fascination with science often informed the methods of how he worked; by studying the anatomy of the human eye, he had gained an understanding of the relationship between light and the size of the pupil, noting that the pupil of the eye changes to as many different sizes as there are different degrees of brightness and that in the evening and when the weather is dull, what softness and delicacy you may perceive in the faces of men and women. To benefit from this discovery, he would sometimes paint during overcast days or the early evenings when his enlarged pupils would have a sharper focus.

He was in his early thirties and strikingly handsome: tall, lean, with auburn curls flowing past his shoulders and a neatly trimmed beard. He had a perfectly straight, Grecian nose and deep-set, soulful eyes. There was a brio in his style of clothes, which were convention flouting in the best possible way. While most of his male contemporaries wore long garments, he dressed in rakishly short tunics.

As for his character, it was hard to read. He wasnt thought to be broody as much as self-absorbed. There was a meditative nature about him, and his facial expression often rested in the unsettling border between open and not, making a reading of his thoughts difficult. He appeared most content when left on his own with his notebooks; on the other hand, he could offer himself to conversation with disarming ease and infectious charm. The combination of these two traits enabled him to portray the interior life of the subjects he painted while revealing very little of his own.

The painters way of working required time, and his refusal to be rushed with a commissioned work often frustrated his patron, but so admired was heso unrivaled were his talentsthat he was granted as much time as was required. That said, the young woman and her retinue thought it odd that as they passed his easel while filing out of his studio after each of the sittings, they could see that no brushstrokes had been made on the wood panel where there was meant to be an emerging image. Unbeknownst to them, the painter had already conceived the portrait. In order to capture the fluidity of the young womans grace before painting her, he had investigated the mechanics of how her head and shoulders would move as she turned. To illustrate his understanding, he drew eighteen rapid compositional sketches of a models head in a revolving sequence.