# The sitter who wrote that her portrait no longer looked like her: Cecilia Gallerani and the Lady with an Ermine > Cecilia Gallerani's own letter of 1498 says her Leonardo portrait no longer looked like her. No document from her lifetime describes the Krakow panel that carries her name. > The Study - 2026-11-09 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/study/the-portrait-cecilia-gallerani-said-no-longer-looked-like-her/ ## Key points - The only recorded sentence by Cecilia Gallerani about a portrait of herself, in her letter to Isabella d'Este of 29 April 1498, says it was made at an imperfect age and that she had since changed so much that no one would connect the picture to her. - No surviving document from her lifetime describes the Krakow panel: neither Bellincioni's sonnet, printed in 1493 after his death on 12 September 1492, nor the two letters of April 1498 mention an animal or a composition. The name on the panel is therefore an inference, which the Italian national biography states as a hypothesis and the museum states as confirmed. - The inference rests on a Greek pun on her surname, the Order of the Ermine, the sitter's apparent age and an argument made around 1900. A published dissent of 2021 would free the picture from her and push it as late as about 1508. - The documents for her life are rich and uneven: her birth in 1473, her son in 1491 and her education in letters are well attested, while her death date, her wedding year and her poems are not. ## The museum's collection page names Cecilia Gallerani as fact, and the national biography calls it a hypothesis ## What the documents say about Cecilia Gallerani herself ## April 1498: the one recorded sentence she wrote about her portrait ## How the Krakow panel got her name around 1900 ## A named sitter and an unnamed one: Lady with an Ermine beside Girl with a Pearl Earring ## What is not known about Cecilia Gallerani and her portrait Cecilia Gallerani left her own words about a portrait of herself. Within a decade of its making she wrote to Isabella that it no longer looked like her. A caption that gives her name as settled fact asks the panel to carry more than anything written about it can, and the honest label is her name with the inference attached. ## Questions **Who is the woman in Lady with an Ermine?** The National Museum in Krakow names her as Cecilia Gallerani, mistress of Ludovico Sforza. The Dizionario Biografico entry on her calls that the most credited hypothesis, usually stated with doubt, because no document from her lifetime describes the Krakow panel. **What did Cecilia Gallerani say about her portrait?** In a letter to Isabella d'Este of 29 April 1498 she said she would send it more gladly if it looked more like her, because it was painted at an imperfect age and she had since changed so much that nobody would think it was meant for her. **Does Bellincioni's sonnet mention the ermine?** No. The sonnet, printed in 1493 after Bellincioni's death on 12 September 1492, says the portrait by Leonardo makes Cecilia seem to listen and not speak. It names no animal, which is why Albert Boesten-Stengel argued in 2021 that it may describe a different composition. **When did Cecilia Gallerani die?** The date is not known. Bucci quotes a nineteenth-century genealogist who thought she lived until about 1536, and the museum gives the same year, but neither rests on a dated document that we could read. ## Sources - [1] National Museum in Krakow, collection page 'Lady with an Ermine' (Leonardo da Vinci; entry by Dorota Dec and Janusz Walek). - [2] Carlo Alberto Bucci, 'Gallerani, Cecilia', Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 51 (1998), Treccani. - [3] Julia Cartwright, Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 (London, 1903), Project Gutenberg: English translation of the letters of 26 and 29 April 1498 and an early account of Cecilia. Out of date on several facts; used for the translation and as a second source on Cesare's birth date. - [4] Albert Boesten-Stengel, 'Ein Bildnis der Claude de France? Antike und Heraldik in Leonardos Dame mit Hermelin', Folia Historiae Artium, Seria Nowa 19 (2021), pp. 31-62, with English summary; prints the 1493 text of Bellincioni's sonnet. - [5] Mauritshuis, The Hague, collection page for Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring (inv. 670): 'not a portrait, but a tronie'.