ABSTRACT
The gaze of Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549) has long been elusive, even on a pictorial level. In the putative portrait of her that is attributed to Jean Clouet, which hangs in the Walker Gallery of the National Museums of Liverpool, the young noblewoman’s face and ornately clad body are angled slightly away from the viewer or artist, upon whom her eyes and one belonging to the green parrot she holds are fi xed in contrapposto on the vertical axis of the painting.1 Because of her Spanish-style costume, betrothal ring, and small image of Cupid on the hat, scholars speculate that the threequarter-view painting, tentatively dated at around 1527, celebrates her engagement to Henri de Navarre.2 Despite the outward orientation and seeming directness of her gaze, which is unusual in extant images of Marguerite, her half-smile is enigmatic in the style of La Gioconda (Mona Lisa), causing collectors of the early nineteenth century to attribute the work to Leonardo.3 Moreover, the body language of the noblewoman and her bird, whose torsos are turned inward toward one another, points to an earlier, private gaze between Marguerite and the parrot that the artist and viewers have interrupted. Exactly what the conventional, public pose camoufl ages is uncertain: depending on the bird’s symbolism, it may have been an intimate exchange between the lady and her “amant vert” or “green lover,” echoing Jean Lemaire de Belges’ verses for an earlier Marguerite;4 or an allusion, grounded in the bird’s capacity for speech, to the female subject’s eloquence or even the Word of God.5
