What the Ermine Saw The Extraordinary Journey of Leonardo da Vinci's Most Mysterious Portrait

In the tradition of The Lady in Gold and The Hare with the Amber Eyes, the remarkable story behind one of history’s most enigmatic portraits.

Five hundred and thirty years ago, a young woman sat before a Grecian-nosed artist known as Leonardo da Vinci. Her name was Cecilia Gallerani, and she was the young mistress of Ludovico Sforza, duke of Milan. Sforza was a brutal and clever man who was mindful that Leonardo’s genius would not only capture Cecilia’s beguiling beauty but also reflect the grandeur of his title. But when the portrait was finished, Leonardo’s brush strokes had conveyed something deeper by revealing the essence of Cecilia’s soul. Even today, The Woman with an Ermine manages to astonish.
 
Despite the work's importance in its own time, no records of it have been found for the two hundred and fifty years that followed Gallerani’s death. Eden Collinsworth illuminates the eventual history of this unique masterpiece, as it journeyed from one owner to the next–from the portrait’s next recorded owner, a Polish noblewoman, who counted Benjamin Franklin as an admirer, to its exile  in Paris during the Polish Soviet War, to its return to WWII-era Poland where—in advance of Germany’s invasion—it remained hidden behind a bricked-up wall by a housekeeper who defied Hitler’s edict that it be confiscated as one of the Reich’s treasures.
 
What the Ermine Saw is a fact-based story that cheats fiction and a reminder that  genius, power, and beauty always have a price.
 

EDEN COLLINSWORTH is a former media executive and business consultant. The author of three previous books, her most recent, Behaving Badly: The New Morality in Politics, Sex, and Business, was published in 2017. She lives in London.