La duchessa brutta

Metsys painted this grotesque old woman in Antwerp around 1513. She is dressed in the height of a fashion already a generation out of date, in a horned headdress and a low bodice, holding out a rosebud as if she were a young bride. That is the joke, and a cruel one: it is a satire on older people who dress and flirt as though still young. Metsys shared with his contemporary Leonardo da Vinci a fascination with extreme and unusual faces, and this head sits close to Leonardo's grotesque drawings. The strangest part of its afterlife came three centuries on. When John Tenniel illustrated Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, his hideous Duchess borrows this very face, which is how the painting picked up the nickname it still carries.