The Ugly Duchess. Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance. (London: National Gallery) 16 March ‐ 11 June 2023. Catalogue edited by Emma Capron. Distributed by Yale University Press.

Abstract

Hoe ouder hoe sotter (‘the older [one is], the [more] foolish’) is an old Dutch proverb with the kind of lesson that one finds in a variety of sixteenthcentury satires, whether verse or drama. And that is the basic visual message conveyed in a several satirical images gathered in a new focus exhibition, organized by curator Emma Capron at London’s National Gallery. Stars of the show are pendant images by Quinten Massys (also known as Metsys, active 1491– 1530): one in the Gallery collection, a grotesque Old Woman (Fig. 1), is nicknamed ‘The Ugly Duchess’ (for reasons described below); the other, an Old Man (Fig. 2), interacts with her across connected space. But another major actor in the installation drama is none other than Leonardo da Vinci, whose grotesque faces and caricatures in drawings comprise a major component of this London display. They also form the subject of a valuable accompanying essay by Martin Clayton, noted Leonardo authority and Head of Prints and Drawings, including the remarkable Leonardos, at Windsor Castle. Additional imagery of age and ugliness in the exhibition raises fundamental questions about a new, early modern turn towards independent images of figures who are neither portraits nor identifiable individuals from historical subjects of religion or myth. As Capron makes clear, this painting innovation is both secular and satirical. Her lively catalogue extends the issues of her exhibition and enriches it with an essential complement, which raises fundamental questions. The two main figures seem clearly to be pendants, painted by the same artist, Massys (although Martin Davies in his final word on the attribution, still called the London painting ‘after Massys (?)’), since they share a painted marble balustrade and common monochrome green backgrounds. Davies connected it with a Windsor drawing (Fig. 3; RCIN 912492), a copy after Leonardo from his circle (on display in the exhibition), and he follows Erwin Panofsky in associating the picture with Erasmus’s 1511 Praise of Folly satire about ‘foolish old women who still wish “to play the goat.”’ Her outlandish costume, especially her terribly oldfashioned horned wimple headdress (akin to Bruges’s Margaret van Eyck, 1439), combines with a most inappropriate décolletage that reveals her wrinkled bosom to display both her vanity and her absurdity. Of course, as recognized by Lorne Campbell in his 2015 Gallery catalogue, this picture utilizes the conventions of portraiture, showing a nearlyhalflength figure at