Lady with an Ermine face swap

Where this one comes from

Leonardo painted Cecilia Gallerani around 1489, when she was about sixteen and the mistress of Ludovico Sforza, who ran Milan. The animal is a pun twice over: the Greek for ermine is galé, near enough to her name, and the white stoat was also Ludovico's own badge. It is among the first European portraits to catch a sitter mid-turn, as though something had just been said off to the right.

What is in the picture

Her head turns one way and her body the other, as though something has just been said off to the right. The animal is awake and turning with her, and the hand on its back is painted knuckle by knuckle and tendon by tendon. Top left, in a much later hand, somebody has labelled the picture LA BELE FERONIERE — a different painting altogether, by the same man.

When people use it

It is the look you give when somebody says your name and you already know what they are about to ask. It fits the head that turns the instant the fridge opens, the reply to 'quick question', and the calendar invite for a thing that could have been a message.

How your face lands in it

The face is turned about thirty degrees off the body and lit softly from the left, so a photo taken at a slight angle sits more naturally here than a straight-on one. Her hair is pulled flat under a thin band with a long plait down one side, which covers most of the hairline but not all of it — this is a portrait built on a very smooth silhouette, and volume around the ears will show.

Lady with an Ermine (Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani) — Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1489-1491. The artist died in 1519, so the painting is in the public domain worldwide, and a faithful photograph of a flat public-domain painting carries no new copyright of its own. Source

Also in: Paintings · Renaissance