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56-2 Who Was “La Belle Ferronnière”?

Later tradition holds that “La Belle Ferronnière” was a mistress of King Francis I of France (r. 1515–1547), and that she was the cause of the king’s death. However, the first figure resembling the woman to appear in historical records did so only at the beginning of the seventeenth century, more than fifty years after the king’s death in 1547. Until the nineteenth century, she was considered to have been a real woman, but modern historians now believe that she was a fictional character whose story took shape over time after the king’s death.

The painting in the French royal collection known as La Belle Ferronnière throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not the three-quarter-view Portrait of a Woman (no. 56) by Leonardo, but rather another work titled Portrait of a Woman (no. 51) depicting a woman in profile. However, the two paintings were confused with each other around the time the royal collection was transferred to the Louvre following the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. The three-quarter-view Portrait of a Woman was erroneously referred to as La Belle Ferronnière, and the name gradually became established as its common title.

A print produced in the early nineteenth century was one factor behind the spread of the incorrect name. The print was based on a drawing of Leonardo’s work by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, who later grew to fame as a master of Neoclassical painting, and it also included a false inscription that read, “La Belle Ferronnière, Mistress of Francis I.”