Wrinkled, furrowed, jowly and far from attractive, An Old Woman, by the Flemish artist Quinten Massys, is one of the standout paintings in London’s National Gallery. It is usually called “The Ugly Duchess”, after it became the inspiration for Sir John Tenniel’s drawing of the infamous duchess in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Now, five centuries since Massys completed his painting and 150 years after Tenniel’s interpretation, the portrait has been reassessed as neither an old woman nor a duchess, but actually as a male transvestite.
“Yes, she is most likely a he,” says Emma Capron, one of the world’s leading Renaissance art experts, and curator of The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance, which opens at the National Gallery on 16 March. “A cross-dresser as a play on gender. We know that Massys was very interested in carnivals, where men would impersonate women.”
Certainly, the face is strikingly like that of a man, as are the broad and drooping shoulders, yet the person in the portrait also has prominent breasts and feminine clothes. “The breasts, with their brazen and scandalous cleavage, are a Massys fantasy,” says Capron.
The exhibition will also claim that a drawing called A Grotesque Old Woman, attributed to Francesco Melzi, who was Leonardo da Vinci’s leading assistant, inspired Massys’s An Old Woman. The image, loaned from the Royal Collection, is itself almost certainly a copy of an original drawing, long lost, by Leonardo himself. “Massys was very much influenced by Leonardo,” says Koen Bulckens of the Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, where the Flemish artist was based for much of his career.
Massys was also drawn to the bizarre, to misfits and the extraordinary – making satirical points in some of his work, even in altar pieces. “And, yes, I agree that the face of An Old Woman does look like that of a man,” says Bulckens.
The long-held theory was that Massys’s old woman was female, and was suffering from a disease affecting her bone structure and physiognomy. Medics have argued that “she” had Paget’s disease, where the bones become inflamed and deformed. In 2008, Michael Baum, emeritus professor of surgery at University College London, along with his colleague, Christopher Cook, publicly stated that Massys’s old woman “had an advanced form of Paget’s, which enlarged her jaw bones, extended her upper lip and pushed up her nose. It also affected her hands, chin, forehead and collarbones.”
But Capron disagrees. “It’s not Paget’s, nor any of the other suggestions like dwarfism or elephantiasis. I’m really reluctant, too, to have doctors going around galleries and giving diagnoses.”
Capron actually doubts if the portrait was based on any one individual. “These grotesque images belong to a world which is upside down, as it were.”
A “twin” portrait painted around the same time – An Old Man usually held in a private American collection – will be reunited with An Old Woman for the National Gallery exhibition. The two paintings, with similar olive green backgrounds, are “coupled”, as it were, or could even have once been a diptych on adjoining panels. The former is a more conventional image of a man, probably based on one of the artist’s friends.
The “Duchess” is holding a rose bud as a token of love, and usually it is the man who gives a flower to a woman in order to woo her, but this gender switch is all part of Massys’s game. Significantly, the man has his hand raised as if he is rejecting the rosebud and any notion of romance – maybe because he has realised that the woman is a cross-dressed man.
The original frames for the paintings are lost, so no one can be certain that they were displayed in this way. The old woman is, very unusually, on the left looking right. In most Renaissance paintings the man, the more powerful person, is shown on the left, facing towards the female. “Maybe another clue that An Old Woman is a man in woman’s clothing?” ponders Capron.
The exhibition, which runs until mid June, will include other works which question attitudes to sexuality and the portrayal of women in late 15th- and early 16th-century European art. They include Bust of an Old Woman, loaned from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge; Albrecht Dürer’s fearsome Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat from the V&A; and several works by Leonardo and his followers.
“The images, sometimes grotesque, sometimes simply fanciful and satirical, are partly metaphors for the social disorder of the time,” says Capron. “And they are also artists just having fun.”
