User Reviews

Ginevra's Story: Solving the Mysteries of Leonardo da Vinci's First Known Portrait (1999) was directed by Christopher Swann and narrated by Meryl Streep.

The portrait of Ginevra de Binci is the first of only three existing portraits by Leonardo da Vinci. (The second was of Cecilia Gallerani, called The Lady with an Ermine, and the third was Mona Lisa.)

The portrait of Ginevra de Binci is the only painting by Leonardo that exists on this hemisphere. (It's in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.)

This movie is an extraordinarily interesting documentary. In it, experts discuss what is known about Ginevra de Binci, details about the painting, information about the painting's restoration, and speculation about what the painting would have looked like before the bottom third was removed and lost.

This film has an impossibly low IMDb rating of 4.1. Why? It's a documentary about an important painting. It's thorough and fascinating. How could it be rated so low? It must be a bad miracle. I thought that it was great, and rated it 10.

This movie is a treat. There is great beauty in the three female portraits of da Vinci's, culminating in the Mona Lisa, the three portraits oddly completed 15 years apart. Why? And why, as we learn here, did the creator of the masterpieces Mona Lisa and earlier the Last Supper have so little to say in his copious diaries about painting, as if, we learn in this movie, da Vinci might simply have felt that painting was too easy for him to be worth writing about. By contrast, he has a world to tell us in his writings about physics, engineering, architecture, celestial bodies... Yet the world mostly knows da Vinci for the images of incomparable beauty he created. There really are mysteries here, some as yet unsolved, some revealed here. You'll enjoy watching this, if only to feel good about what marvelous things humans can do.

Obviously I agree with the lead reviewer that the rating is absurdly low. If you have the chance to see it you will enjoy this detective story.