One of my favorite Da Vinci paintings is The Lady with an Ermine. It’s housed in a museum in Kraków, but it’s been widely published and researched for years. Painted around 1490, it depicts Cecilia Gallerani—a young woman of intelligence and beauty, though not of noble birth. She was the mistress of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, and Leonardo was the court painter at the time.

Sforza, interestingly, had a nickname: the White Ermine. So Leonardo, ever the clever court player, painted Cecilia cradling just that—a white ermine. It was more than a symbolic flourish; it was a bold, layered connection, likely understood by anyone familiar with the court’s dynamics.

I’ve reworked this image several times—sometimes with AI filters, sometimes by retouching the cracks and color shifts, and occasionally with hand-drawn overlays. Most museum scans are decent, but recently I was stunned to find the largest, highest-resolution version I’ve ever seen—on Wikipedia of all places. So large, only one app on my iPad could even open it. Naturally, I resolved to clean it. Painstakingly. Every scratch, every scar, every stray fleck of digital dust—gone.

The painting carries its own backstory. It was one of the many works looted by the Nazis and hidden in a salt mine. It was marked for destruction, but the local miners, at great risk, sealed the entrance to protect it. The painting survived. The Lady with an Ermine even makes an appearance in the film The Monuments Men, one of the pieces the Allied team recovers.

But back to me—hours in, zoomed to the highest magnification, delicately brushing out each pale speck against the dark background. And I start to laugh.

The tiny white dots I’m erasing—they look like stars in a night sky.

Stars? Constellations?

Is it possible? Did Leonardo embed a cosmic pattern? Was this some celestial code hidden in the background? Was I erasing a secret?

The answer, of course, is yes—he was absolutely that devious.

And no— They were probably just dust.

Probably.