ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests a way of looking at Leonardo Da Vinci's art that reveals it as indeed abnormal, but in social rather than psychological terms. It begins with the earliest preserved portrait by Leonardo's hand, the Ginevra de' Benci in the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., probably painted in the late 1470s, which puts forth a fundamentally new female image. In the category of female portraits, Leonardo's progressive exploration of human personality was soon subverted by the very circumstances that first sustained it—namely, the flourishing of portraiture within court circles, the rise and increasingly ambiguous status of intellectual courtesans, and the full-blown emergence of the generic beauty portrait. Leonardo entered a discourse to which he made a conscious and original contribution, by affirming to a remarkable extent that the relationship between nature and the female passed beyond the metaphoric, and by presenting evidence in his anatomical studies that directly refuted dominant views about women's deficiencies.
