Ginevra de' Benci

Ginevra de' Benci (born ca. 1458) was an aristocrat from 15th-century Florence, admired for her intelligence by Florentine contemporaries. She is the subject of a portrait painting by Leonardo da Vinci. The oil-on-wood portrait was acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1967, for US$5 million paid to the Princely House of Liechtenstein, a record price at the time, from the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund. This portrait is currently the only painting by Leonardo in the Americas (Hand 2004). It is known that Leonardo painted a portrait of Ginevra de' Benci in 1474, possibly to commemorate her marriage that year to Luigi di Bernardo Niccolini at the age of 16. However, according to Giorgio Vasari's "Lives of the Artists"...