Ludovico, to whom Leonardo was now court-painter, had married Beatrice
d'Este, in 1491, when she was only fifteen years of age. The young
Duchess, who at one time owned as many as eighty-four splendid gowns,
refused to wear a certain dress of woven gold, which her husband had
given her, if Cecilia Gallerani, the Sappho of her day, continued to
wear a very similar one, which presumably had been given to her by
Ludovico. Having discarded Cecilia, who, as her tastes did not lie in
the direction of the Convent, was married in 1491 to Count Ludovico
Bergamini, the Duke in 1496 became enamoured of Lucrezia Crivelli, a
lady-in-waiting to the Duchess Beatrice.
Leonardo, as court painter, perhaps painted a portrait, now lost, of
Lucrezia, whose features are more likely to be preserved to us in the
portrait by Ambrogio da Predis, now in the Collection of the Earl of
Roden, than in the quite unauthenticated portrait (Plate VII.), now in
the Louvre (No. 1600).
On January 2, 1497, Beatrice spent three hours in prayer in the church
of St. Maria delle Grazie, and the same night gave birth to a
stillborn child. In a few hours she passed away, and from that moment
Ludovico was a changed man. He went daily to see her tomb, and was
quite overcome with grief.
In April 1498, Isabella d'Este, Beatrice's elder, more beautiful, and
more graceful sister, "at the sound of whose name all the muses rise
and do reverence" wrote to Cecilia Gallerani, or Bergamini, asking her
to lend her the portrait which Leonardo had painted of her some
fifteen years earlier, as she wished to compare it with a picture by
Giovanni Bellini. Cecilia graciously lent the picture--now presumably
lost--adding her regret that it no longer resembled her.