On a recent Friday, I sought out one of the most revered masterpieces in Western art. Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine is a Renaissance portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, the mistress of the Duke of Milan; it rests inside a former palace, now the Czartoryski Museum, in Kraków, Poland.
Believed to have been painted around 1490, it depicts a demure young woman draped in black glass beads, cradling a snow-white ermine. She wears an inscrutable expression that da Vinci would perfect a decade later in the Mona Lisa.
