The sentence is as follows (excuse my French): UN embarrassment of wealth…
This means that there are far too many things to marvel at, to praise, to admire, to covet. Many large public galleries suffer (suffer?) from this problem. Take the National Gallery in London, for example. Do you start in the Vermeer, Raphael’s great Crucifixion de Mond, or – perhaps best of all – the Rembrandt Room, in order to experience an exquisite measure of pain beholding brilliant evocations of human decay, all brown studies?
Or are you perhaps going after an ill-defined pixie called Beauty? Often.
We go to Raphaël for idealized beauty. But what if a painting was the opposite of beautiful, and utterly arresting for that very reason?
Welcome to the world of 16th century painting known as “The Ugly Duchess”. Today it is the centerpiece of an entire exhibition. The painting inhabits a small gallery space at the National Gallery, and the exhibition, The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance, is modest in size – about 15 works in all. But as you look back at this painting and reflect on how it emerged and what it means, it begins to expand – and continues to expand, in interest and importance.
A curious fact is that even when first met, he probably seems vaguely familiar. Why should this be? Because in the middle of the 19th century, a great worker Punch Cartoonist John Tenniel was invited by the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a member of Christ’s College, Oxford, to illustrate one of his books entitled Alice in Wonderland, which he would go on to publish with great and lasting acclaim under the name by which the world now knows him. These Tenniel woodcuts embodied the very idea of Alice in Wonderland Since.
Now there was a bad job in this book (actually there are several) called The Duchess, and it looks a lot like the painting in the National Gallery – especially in the headgear, which looks like a pair of horns. The horns often mean the devil himself, and there may be more than a hint of malevolence here. When you look at Tenniel’s woodcut, you see it’s a pretty close robbery of “The Ugly Duchess” itself.
The painting was made by an Antwerp man called Quinten Massys, and its probable date is 1513. Is it a portrait of a living person or not? He is tricked into believing that this might well be the case, if particularly he was painted. His hand rests on a marble ledge. The costumes are luxurious.
The answer is no. It is a piece of satire, inspired and partly copied from an image of Leonardo. Leonardo’s original is lost. Fortunately, his associate Francesco Melzi made a copy, and this copy was found bound in the pages of a 16th century edition of the works of another great and ruthless satirist called François Rabelais. This copy is in this exhibition, open to the page.
Leonardo made many of these grotesques; one can see an entire panel of seven profiles (again these are not the originals, but copies), all tiny little things, all created on a single sheet, on the left wall of the gallery, looking out from an eye toward the ugly Duchess herself.
They make us creatures of the present moment uncomfortable, for they show in a blinding way that these noble Renaissance masters were well trained in the art of misogyny; to make fun of the old and the poor; to spit on a witch; to burn the witch and spare the wizard. How vulgar they seem, consumed by helpless savagery and pathetic lusts. It’s all really very nasty.
And the Ugly Duchess is an integral part of this despicable story of mockery and defamation. She is dressed in ridiculously old-fashioned clothes. The painter crawls over every inch of her flesh, every cavity, every sag and sag, every hollow and wrinkle of her absurdly pneumatic breasts. What a laughable monster she is! What a perfectly calibrated study of the lack of love!
Or look at this “Bust of an Old Woman” (c. 1490-1510) in Italian majolica, another object of mockery, with her sickly low head…. Or spare a second or two in front of Dürer’s print titled “Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat” of c. 1500. How irrepressible and sexually indomitable she is. Such a woman upsets the moral order itself—it is surely for this reason that Dürer’s monogram is written upside down. Only the brutal purification of death is enough for a capricious and dangerous creature like this.
What we didn’t know before is that the Ugly Duchess herself is part of a pair of paintings, identical in size and format, which are again side by side, so we can compare and contrast. The companion is a man, also elderly. But he was spared the rod. If he is not handsome, he ages with a certain sobriety, without being inflicted with contempt and mockery.
O lucky old man!
The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance continues at the National Gallery (Trafalgar Square, London, England) until June 11. The exhibition was curated by Emma Capron.
