ANDThis is the premise of ‘The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance’, which explores the concepts of beauty, old age and misogyny in the 15th and 16th centuries as the context of one of the most emblematic works in the museum’s collection.
Over the centuries, numerous theories have surrounded the meticulous portrayal of a grotesque and masculine woman adorned with a headdress, whose low-cut dress highlights her bust while holding a rosebud.
The canvas dating from 1513 is known for having inspired John Tenniel’s emblematic illustrations in 1865 of the book ‘Alice in Wonderland’, by Lewis Carroll.
In 1920, auctioneer Christie’s sold the work claiming that it represented Margaret Maultasch, Duchess of Carinthia, described as the “ugliest woman in history”, which led the press to name the painting ‘The Ugly Duchess’.
More recently, scholars have suggested that the woman depicted suffered from Paget’s disease, which causes bone hypertrophy that often affects the skull and sometimes the jaws and facial bones.
However, by exhibiting the work together with drawings and sculptures of the time, the programmer, Emma Capron, argues that Massys (1465/6-1530) was part of a growing artistic movement during the Renaissance interested in exploring the grotesque and the comic.
For this exhibition, the ‘Ugly Duchess’ was reunited in public for the second time only with the pair, ‘An Old Man’, produced by Massys in the same year and now owned by a private North American collector.
The painting profiles an individual visibly marked by age, but in a more conventional and discreet style, who seems to reject the woman’s amorous advances.
According to Emma Capron, “according to ancient humanist comedy and satire, humor was not gratuitous, but served a didactic purpose”.
“Massys used ridicule to make a moralizing commentary on the vanity and lust of the elderly, especially of elderly women, whose supposedly unruly sexuality was the frequent butt of Renaissance jokes,” he writes in the catalogue.
The exhibition, on display in a small room in the museum, brings together for the first time the painting with reproductions of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, provided by King Charles III, of faces with exaggerated traction.
One of them is identical to the portrait of Massys, showing the influence of the Italian’s work on the Dutch painter, and reinforces the existence of an artistic movement in the Renaissance that satirized and disdained older women.
Other works lent by foreign museums and collectors include a drawing from around 1500 by the German Albrecht Dürer of a witch represented visually for the first time as an old woman, or a ceramic bust by the Italian Antonio da Faenza of an unhappy woman grimacing.
In addition to being moved by prejudices of modesty and misogyny at the time, the artists saw the portrayal of elderly women as providing an opportunity to have fun and be creative beyond the formalities required by beauty, explained Capron.
“Umberto Eco said that beauty is restricted by certain rules, while ugliness is infinite and unpredictable”, he quoted.
The free exhibition at the National Gallery opens to the public on Thursday and will remain open to the public until June 11.
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