La Belle Ferronière — Leonardo da Vinci
Because Da Vinci painted beyond La Gioconda.
Some artists are irremediably linked to a painting, maybe two, and sometimes even three. They are communicating vessels, a flash in mind in the form of an image evoked every time we hear their names.
It happens to El Bosco and his The Garden of Earthly Delights. Something similar happens with Girl with a Pearl Earring and its author, Johannes Vermeer. These two cases illustrate how intimately linked author and work are in the collective imagination, that popular wisdom that makes us know a little of everything and that, when it comes to painting, creates these particular associations.
It also happens to Leonardo da Vinci is perhaps the clearest example of the phenomenon we are talking about. Two works come to mind when someone hears his name: La Gioconda and The Last Supper. They are two paintings that the entertainment world has used for countless products (from movies to novels of all kinds), increasing the preponderance of these two works when relating them to their artist even more.
However, Da Vinci is more than those two paintings. For example, the one we have below, known as Le Belle Ferronière, undoubtedly passes as one of his best works despite not enjoying the same fame as the other two.
