Artist: Leonardo da Vinci Completion Date: 1474 Place of Creation: Milan, Italy Style: Early Renaissance Genre: portrait Technique: oil Material: wood Dimensions: 42 X 37 cm Gallery: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. This Information is from Wikipedia. It is slightly complicated, but this is most of it word for word: Ginevra de’ Benci (born c. 1458) was an aristocrat from fifteenth-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., United States, 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. It is the only painting by Leonardo on public view in the Americas. 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. According to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (second edition, 1568), however, Ginevra was not the daughter of Amerigo de’ Benci, but his wife. The painting’s imagery and the text on the reverse of the panel support the identification of this picture. Directly behind the young lady in the portrait is a juniper tree. The reverse of the portrait is decorated with a juniper sprig encircled by a wreath of laurel and palm and is memorialized by the phrase VIRTVTEM FORMA DECORAT ("beauty adorns virtue"). The Italian word for juniper is "ginepro", which suggests that the juniper motif was used here as a symbolic pun on Ginevra’s name. This pun is not supported by any contemporary historical source, however, and the juniper stood as a symbol of sorrow, pain, and loss in the whole of the Middle Ages. Therefore, the juniper frequently was used in portrait paintings of widows. According to Maike Vogt-Luerssen the woman depicted is not Ginevra de’ Benci but Fioret