Review: Eden Collinsworth’s “What the Ermine Saw”

“Almost all the key events of modern Europe were seen through the eyes of this painting, which Collinsworth vividly brings to life in her writing.”

With the end of the brutal destruction of the Second World War, American soldiers raced to a Bavarian vacation home to arrest Hans Frank, one of Adolf Hitler’s accomplices in both the Holocaust and the looting of Europe’s great artistic treasures in the secret plot to build a new museum in Linz. Frank possessed Leonardo da Vinci’s c. 1489-1491 painting Lady with an Ermine when he was arrested, and he was later sentenced to death at the Nuremberg Trials. How did this work of art end up in the hands of a Nazi butcher?

The contemporary American author Eden Collinsworth tells the story of Europe through the eyes of Cecilia Gallerani, the painting’s subject, and the ermine she holds (supposedly symbolizing the tamed sexuality of Ludovico Sforza), eternally locked in the High Renaissance. Perhaps it is not unironic that a monster like Frank had Cecilia and the ermine looking over him as he signed death warrants which made him complain about cramps in his hands from signing too many in a single day. The creation of the painting is rooted in the darker side of human nature that moderns like to wish away despite all of the historical and empirical evidence revealing the abyss inside of us.

The story of Lady with an Ermine begins at the end of the Medieval world, the Hundred Years’ War, and the Bubonic Plague. Italy was not yet unified; it remained, in the late fifteenth century, a divided land preyed upon by the political and territorial ambitions of the French Kingdom and the Habsburg emperors of the Holy Roman Empire. Despite being caught between a rock and a hard place, northern Italy became a bastion of Renaissance culture and wealth. As Collinsworth reminds us, “economic prosperity is one of the preconditions of art.” And Milan was now one of the great cities of economic prosperity that brought Leonardo into its glittering walls in service of Sforza dukes who ruled over its golden age for just under a century.