You know the feeling: you meet someone out of context, know you know them, but you can’t quite place who they are or where they’re from. I daresay it happens to on-screen celebrities quite a bit, and I wonder if their colleagues on the radio feel jealousy or relief. Cue excruciating conversation starters, none better than the apocryphal story of Sir Thomas Beecham and the familiar woman whom he just couldn’t place. “How’s your husband; still in the same job?” “Well, thank you; yes, he’s still King.”
The same sense of uncertain awkwardness (at least for me) surrounded Quinten Massys’s An Old Woman, which is the subject of the National Gallery’s latest mini-show. With her crazy headdress, crinkled skin and saggy breasts, I knew I’d seen her somewhere before. The penny dropped rather too slowly, given that the title of the show is The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance. Massys’s mutton dressed as lamb was the inspiration for John Tenniel’s Duchess in his illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland stories.
I can’t be the only person in a similar situation, because the curatorial commentary starts from just that point, with a reproduction of Cook, Duchess, Cheshire Cat, Baby, and Alice from the 1865 edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But it moves on to focus on the star of the show with almost indecent haste: “away from the world of fairytale to focus on the painting’s Renaissance context”. Our aged heroine has come from elsewhere in the National Gallery; her companion piece, An Old Man, has returned from the Museé Jacquemart-André in Paris.
They were last reunited in 2008; the National Gallery was the matchmaker then as well. Are they meant to be friends, spouses, or even late-found lovers? This time they come together to form the focus of a single-room presentation about Massys’s parody of the high-end double portraits of contemporary couples. Were they commissioned as a joke? It seems unlikely that he would have risked painting the Duchess in the hope of finding a buyer, with its “fanciful explorations of the expressive and subversive potential of distorting the human face”.
An Elderly Couple by Jan Gossaert kicks off the short journey: the sort of serious painting that followed strict conventions of modesty in expression and dress. Eyes down, cleavage covered, hair tidily veiled. Massys threw off all of these for his Duchess and looked to more mischievous works like those of his Italian contemporary Leonardo da Vinci. The latter’s Satire on Aged Lovers is here, on loan from the Royal Collection, but more significantly so also are reproductions of his lost Grotesque Old Woman.
When you look at them side by side it’s pretty obvious how Massys drew on (for which read copied) Leonardo’s old woman for his own: they’re together for the first time here, which is a spectacular convergence. The old woman – was she actually a duchess, or just put in finery for the purpose of the painting? – makes so much more sense in the context not only of the Leonardo sketches but also of that of her beau. He’s a fine fellow, to be sure, but apart from the quality of Massys’s brushstrokes his ordinariness heightens the extraordinary effect of his belle.
The rest of the exhibition – there are only about a dozen pieces in all – carries on themes of beauty and ugliness (or unconventional beauty) and the tradition of the wizened old hag in European folklore. As the curators note, “old women afforded Renaissance artists opportunities for invention and play that depictions of normative beauty did not allow. Their unruly bodies were metaphors for social disorder, and there is an undeniable joy in beholding The Ugly Duchess trample beauty standards, social conventions, and gender expectations.”
This may well be over-egging the pudding a little, but the basic point stands. They conclude that “the image’s enduring power perhaps lies in this irreverence”, which is spot on. For a fuller assessment of the Ugly Duchess’s influence down the years, however, visitors will need to turn to the catalogue, which is one of the most satisfying that I have seen for some time. In his introduction the Director of the National Gallery, Gabriele Finaldi, also begins with Alice in Wonderland, which puts me in good company, I suppose. He talks of the Ugly Duchess as “a cultural icon”, and the pages that follow bear it out. It soon becomes clear that Tenniel was far from the first to co-opt Massys’s portrait for his own purposes, and that the image of the old woman with rather too much flesh on show was far from unusual in the medieval period. At Ludlow she even grins out from underneath a misericord in St Laurence’s Church. It was a trope that invariably functioned as a butt of cruel (and usually masculine) humour – there are modern cries of misogyny here and there.
Most striking of all, she appeared in 1787 in a French anti-clerical broadsheet – a year before the Revolution – which claimed to excommunicate Pius VI and provide a portrait “after nature, of the Princess Portia, his sister”, who was going to raise an army and return her brother to the Papal States from which he had been taken as a prisoner of the French. This fictional sibling was to be Judith to Napoleon’s Holofernes, and she appears partly in ancient Roman armour but bedecked with ecclesiastical ornaments and the motto “La Religion, ou la Mort”.
Religion, then, or death? The full-page image is worth the price of the catalogue alone, and the mis-gendering of mort is a very witty pun. In context, death (which is masculine) is intended, but feminising it to la mort gives it hints of l’amour, love. And who would not prefer death to embracing an Ugly Duchess, or by extension in this instance the Church that she is meant to represent?
I dare say that there are all sorts of theological arguments to be made, but, simply put, the first part of the question is what Massys poses with An Old Woman, and one that this glorious little exhibition tries to answer.
Who could possibly love an old crone like this, well past her prime and then some? Well, if her various afterlives are anything to go by, then the answer is very many people indeed.
<em>The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance is at the National Gallery, London, until June 11</em>
