The painting's title, applied as early as the seventeenth century, identifying the sitter as the wife or daughter of an ironmonger (a ferronnier), was said to be discreetly alluding to a reputed mistress of Francis I of France, married to a certain Le Ferron.

Although the model of the painting La Belle Ferronnière is still shrouded in mystery, the landmark exhibition "Leonardo Da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan" (National Gallery, London, 9 Nov. 2011 – 5 Feb. 2012) listed the portrait as possibly depicting Beatrice d'Este, wife of Ludovico Sforza.

[citation needed] Karl Morgenstern (1813) and other critics noted some similarities with the drawing number 209 preserved in the Uffizi, executed in lapis and watercolor but retouched a little hard everywhere by a hand of the sixteenth century, which was identified by Father Sebastiano Resta (XVII century) as a portrait of Beatrice d'Este and attributed to Leonardo da Vinci .

[6] A later version of the painting, on canvas,[7] had been offered to the Kansas City Art Institute as the original, but was identified as a copy, on the basis of a photograph, by Sir Joseph Duveen, who permitted his remarks to be published in the New York World in 1920; the owner, Mrs Andrée Lardoux Hahn, sued for defamation of property in a notorious court case,[8] which involved many of the major connoisseurs of the day,[9] inspecting the two paintings side by side at the Louvre; the case was eventually heard in New York before a jury selected for not knowing anything of Leonardo or Morellian connoisseurship, and settled for $60,000 plus court expenses, which were considerable.

[10][11] The owner's account, Harry Hahn's The Rape of La Belle (1946) is a classic of populist conspiracy theory applied to the art world.