The plant in Leonardo da Vinci’s Ginevra de’ Benci is the juniper, a visual pun on the sitter’s name.
In Italian, juniper is ginepro, a word close enough to Ginevra to identify the woman symbolically. Leonardo placed the dark, spiky evergreen directly behind her head, making it one of the portrait’s most conspicuous details. The plant also carried associations with female virtue and chastity in Renaissance culture.
The portrait was probably painted around 1474–1478, when Ginevra was a young Florentine woman connected with an elite banking family. Its three-quarter pose was innovative for an Italian female portrait, since sitters were more commonly shown in profile. The hazy landscape and subtle facial shading further display Leonardo’s early mastery of oil painting.
A common mix-up is to choose laurel because it also appears in the work’s symbolism. Laurel represents intellectual achievement, while palm represents moral virtue. The juniper, however, is the plant that identifies Ginevra by name.