The Ugly Duchess gets another chance to shine

It is difficult for us to understand ‘the joke’ in our modern times, and if you have to explain it at all, the joke is killed by the explanation

Getty Images

A gallery staff member poses with a painting titled 'An Old Woman ('The Ugly Duchess')' (1513) by Quinten Massys.

The Ugly Duchess gets another chance to shine

Bryn Haworth

last update on 04 Apr 2023

As a child, I was taught never to mock the afflicted. It’s a good question where or when that rule began, because the afflicted were fair game in medieval times.

An Old Woman, aka The Ugly Duchess, is graphic evidence that the bounds of acceptable mockery have narrowed, or at the very least shifted to one side, since the 15th century. She is so far from any ideal of feminine beauty that some have conjectured that she was afflicted with a disease.

Others have wondered, at a time when gender is a troubled concept like never before, whether she’s a ‘she’ at all. Ignore her bust for a second and focus on the countenance. Or else look at the shoulders, or her heavy lack of female grace.

Getty Images — Gallery staff members look at paintings titled (L-R) 'An Old Woman ('The Ugly Duchess')' (1513) and 'An Old Man', about 1513, oil on panel by Quinten Massys

In the carnival period, a man would dress in similar garb as the Sausage Woman. He’d be courted by Morris dancers, who pretended to find him enticing. Clearly, the idea is not just a symptom of our gender-bending times.

A joke in poor taste

But, on balance, the evidence suggests that the duchess is neither diseased nor transgender. She is, beyond dispute, a joke in poor taste.

The difficulty one finds understanding her, and the difficulty confronted by the curators who have attempted to explain her, is the same as in explaining any joke. If you have to explain it at all, the joke is never likely to raise a laugh. Instead, it’s killed by the explanation.

The difficulty one finds understanding The Ugly Duchess, and the difficulty confronted by the curators who have attempted to explain her, is the same as in explaining any joke. If you have to explain it at all, the joke is never likely to raise a laugh. Instead, it's killed by the explanation.

The cuckold joke

In the medieval period a good example of a gag that we no longer really get is the cuckold joke.

All through the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, for instance, there are old men whose young, sexually active wives manage to do the dirty on them.

In the Canterbury Tales, the flamboyant Wife of Bath, one of the pilgrims on the way to Canterbury, has been through a fair few husbands. Now, fulfilling the role of mutton dressed as lamb, she flirts with the other pilgrims and boasts of her sexual omnipotence, but she tells a tale (when she finally gets round to it) of a young knight forced to marry an old crone.

The 'duchess' in this case surprises the knight by turning into a beautiful young maiden in their marriage bed. The desperation that sits behind this wish-fulfilling tale rebounds on the Wife and proves she is not as omnipotent as she used to be.

The Zeuxis test

Just as the cuckold joke is never likely to receive a 'lol', so the old story from ancient times of the artist Zeuxis tests one's credulity. He is said to have died laughing at a portrait he'd just completed of an old woman.

Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things. (Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-portrait as Zeuxis Laughing, 1663) pic.twitter.com/NTxRMKztI8
— The School of Life (@TheSchoolOfLife) February 24, 2023

Rembrandt painted a self-portrait in the guise of Zeuxis. He survived whatever picture it was that tickled his funny bone, but it must have been touch and go for Quinten Massys, the man who gave us An Old Woman in around 1513.

While none of the visitors to this exhibition are about to die laughing, the picture has not lost all of its capacity to amuse.

Tenniel's picture of the duchess in Alice in Wonderland – the source of her elevation to the aristocracy – is certain proof that she continued to amuse the Victorians, and Tenniel's illustrations are still funny – at least, they make me laugh.

But most of the explanations for the picture, and for its accompanying portrait of an old man, gave me the sensation of disappearing down Lewis Carroll's rabbit hole.

Was the duchess trying to woo the old man with a rose bud? If so, what was the meaning of his gesture in response? Is it useful to know that her bizarre head gear was outmoded at the time she was painted, or is that just another joke we can never resurrect?

Different times, different sensibilities

Perhaps there is just too much buried under the delicacy of my modern sensibility. If I could travel back in time to another sensibility altogether, I would no doubt be rolling about laughing. At the same time, I might also get my kicks pelting a thief in the stocks, watching a bear torn to pieces by dogs or attending a public execution.

Perhaps there is just too much buried under the delicacy of my modern sensibility. If I could travel back in time to another sensibility altogether, I would no doubt be rolling about laughing.

None of this is to criticise the efforts the curators have made to excavate the joke. In their wonderful explorations down the rabbit hole, the book that accompanies the exhibition traces the origins of the duchess back to an artist we tend to revere for his depiction of mysterious beauty: Leonardo da Vinci.

Another set of drawings that Leonardo produced for the amusement of the Sforza court were caricatures of funny looking people he dubbed 'visi mostruosi' which is commonly called 'grotesques' pic.twitter.com/RssnuC6I5Y
— The Doc (@drhasifishak) February 18, 2020

Leonardo of the grotesques

The celebrated Italian also produced an abundance of grotesque images, known to art historians as his visi mostruosi, often in the form of doodles and sketches.

It is from one such a drawing, surviving only as a copy by his assistant, that the duchess ultimately derives. This image of monstrous deformity made its way to Antwerp and was finished in all the exquisite attention to detail we see today, from the trellis of flowers on her horny headdress to the hairs of the mole on her sunken cheek.

'It is a sobering thought that until the 19th century the Leonardo of the grotesques… was better known than the Leonardo of the Mona Lisa' (Martin Clayton).

I would say more than sobering. It's actually mind-boggling to think that Leonardo was once celebrated for these deliberately unpleasant images, and that this ugly woman's simpering smile was as much his creation as the one belonging to the Mona Lisa.

Here, though, there is a conspicuous lack of mystery. The reason the duchess simpers, barely raising the corners of her mouth, is probably to conceal her dental record. She has danced her last tango – there is never any danger of that rose bud ending up between her teeth.

'The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance' is showing at the National Gallery in London until 11 June 2023.

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