WHO IS SHE? This is the enduring question about one of the National Gallery’s most popular painting, beloved for being completely arresting every single time you look. But it’s not a goddess, queen or society beauty that has caught and kept the gaze for hundreds of years.
An Old Woman (The Ugly Duchess circa 1513) by Flemish artist, Quinten Massys shows an elderly, seemingly toothless woman with almost comically grotesque features: sunken eyes; blemished, sagging skin; huge ears; a vast prominent forehead and the general impression of a monster (helped along by the horned headdress she wears which calls to mind both devil and beast). She is dressed luxuriously but revealingly in a way that is eye-popping – even to today’s audiences – so one can only imagine how scandalised a 16th-century viewer would have been.
And now, the National Gallery is holding an – dedicated to what this painting says about satire, misogyny and marriage in art.
