The Ugly Duchess

An aged woman got up in the horned headdress of two generations earlier presents herself in a low-cut gown, a rosebud of courtship in her hand, her features grotesquely swollen and coarsened. Matsys means it as satire - on vanity, on age aping youth - in the tradition of the grotesque heads Leonardo drew, which had traveled north. Modern doctors have even read a bone disease into the distortions. Painted in booming Antwerp, it may once have faced a companion portrait of an equally absurd old suitor, and centuries later it gave the illustrator Tenniel his Duchess for Alice in Wonderland.