Unsettling Renaissance portrait challenges beauty standards and gender norms.

A new exhibition at London's National Gallery titled "The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance" is set to shed new light on the 1513 portrait "An Old Woman" by Flemish artist Quinten Massys. The painting, more often referred to as "The Ugly Duchess," challenges the idealized qualities seen in other female figures of that era and explores how the female body, age, and certain facial features were satirized and demonized during the Renaissance. The exhibition showcases works by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, and Jan Gossaert, featuring equally expressive older women, to reveal how older women offered a space to experiment and play that the depiction of conventional beauty and normative bodies simply couldn't allow.