The painting was recorded in the sale in 1826 of Gaetano Callani's collection to the Galleria Nazionale di Parma, the museum in which it is currently housed, but proof of its existence may date back to 1531, when it may have been owned by Isabella d'Este.

[13] It portrays the unfinished outline of a young woman whose face gently gazes downward while her loosely drawn, dishevelled hair waves in the air behind her.

[7] The woman's eyes are half-closed and completely ignore the outside world and viewer, while her mouth is slightly shaped into an ambiguous smile, evocative of the Mona Lisa.

[15] The attribution is not so widely accepted as other debated Leonardo paintings, such as his Ginevra de' Benci, Portrait of a Musician, Lady with an Ermine, and Saint John the Baptist and is ignored by some art historians, with many refraining from even commenting on it.

In 1896 Corrado Ricci, director of the Galleria Nazionale, claimed that it had been forged by its former owner, Gaetano Callani,[1][10] which caused it to be re-attributed as "by the school of Leonardo".

[10] In 1924 this claim was challenged by the art historian Adolfo Venturi, who asserted that it was by Leonardo, and who revealed evidence that sought to link the work with the House of Gonzaga.

[1][11] Most scholars have since accepted the work to be an autographic Leonardo,[19] but modern critics such as the art historian Jacques Franck continue to question its authenticity.

[4][20] Franck, basing his doubts on the irregular proportions and strangely shaped skull of the subject, has proposed the painting to be by Leonardo's pupil Giovanni Boltraffio.

[7] Bambach cites a note by the Florentine official Agostino Vespucci that mentions Leonardo, and describes the appeal and beauty of the unfinished bust of Venus by the famous ancient Greek painter Apelles.

She was one of the leading women of the Italian Renaissance, a major cultural and political figure, who had asked Leonardo for a painting of the Madonna for her private studio in 1501.

[26] This is evidenced by a 1531 letter from the secretary of the Mantuan Gonzaga family, Ippolito Calandra, who suggests that a painting (with very similar features as La Scapigliata) be hung in the bedroom of Federico II and Margaret Paleologa.

It is possible that the painting was stolen from the Gonzaga collection in July 1630 when, under the pay of Ferdinand II, an imperial army of 36,000 Landsknecht mercenaries sacked Mantua.

"[14]It is uncertain what access Leonardo would have had to Pliny the Elder's Natural History, but in 2016 Bambach speculates that La Scapigliata may have been inspired by an anecdote from it.