Artist Lindsey Mendick on the National Gallery show The Ugly Duchess: “I’m not sure how funny this satire is”

In this episode of Art After Dark, multimedia artist Lindsey Mendick visits a show of Renaissance satirical works at the National Gallery.

The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance consists of thirteen artworks, ranging from ceramics to paintings and includes one of the best-known faces in the National Gallery: Quinten Massys’s 16th-century depiction of an elderly woman, a painting known as The Ugly Duchess.

The exhibition showcases artworks that look at how women, old age and facial difference were satirised and demonised in the Renaissance, shaping attitudes that still exist today.

At the heart of the exhibition will be the exceptional reunion ofAn Old Woman with her male pendant, An Old Man(about 1513), on rare loan from a private collection in New York. The two works have only been shown together once in their history, in the Renaissance Faces exhibition held 15 years ago, also at the National Gallery.

Their joint display will allow visitors to make sense of the woman’s flamboyant costume and gesture: she has put on this expensive, scandalously revealing, and by then old-fashioned outfit in the hope of seduction. She offers the man a rosebud as a token of love, but his raised hand seems to indicate rebuke. Viewers are invited to laugh at her vanity, lust and self-delusion. It remains oneo of the gallery’s most popular artworks – Lindsey wonders, how much have we really changed since the paintings were made?

The Ugly Duchess is at the National Gallery until June 11