Leonardo painted a portrait of Ginevra de'…

Leonardo painted a portrait of Ginevra de' Benci, an aristocrat admired for her intelligence by Florentine contemporaries, in 1474-78, possibly to commemorate her marriage that year to Luigi di Bernardo Niccolini at the age of sixteen, according to three written sources that

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 VIRTUTEM 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.

Fittingly, juniper is also a Renaissance symbol for chastity. (The oil-on-wood portrait will be 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.)