/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/d3/bf/d3bfdf8c-2f6e-494c-9451-01224b0301e7/pomona.jpg)
Renaissance Art Linked Beauty With Virtue and Ugliness With Vice. See How Painters From Leonardo da Vinci to Botticelli Viewed Physical Attractiveness
An exhibition in Brussels spotlights 90-plus artworks featuring golden-haired muses, greedy old men and those deemed unattractive simply because they were different
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/meilan_headshot2.png)
:focal(750x500:751x501)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/d3/bf/d3bfdf8c-2f6e-494c-9451-01224b0301e7/pomona.jpg)
Every aspect of Quinten Massys’ 16th-century portrait of a jester is exaggerated, from the man’s bulbous hooked nose to his wrinkled skin, dirty fingernails and crudely gaping mouth. The Flemish painter’s message is evident: In an era when an individual’s appearance was believed to reflect their inner character, this was a figure to be ridiculed, a grotesque caricature of gluttony and folly.
Massys’ Jester With Spoon is one of more than 90 works on view in “Beauty and Ugliness in the Renaissance,” an ongoing exhibition at the Brussels Center for Fine Arts (more commonly known as Bozar, after the Beaux Arts movement). Featuring portraits by such luminaries as Sandro Botticelli, Titian and Leonardo da Vinci, the show juxtaposes jarring renditions of conventionally unattractive subjects with lush likenesses of sitters whose flowing locks complement their rosy cheeks and smooth skin.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/07/44/0744dd52-c65f-4e01-9ad4-456451ce412d/24f17056-afe7-4d45-b925-aa6aa0a63e54.jpeg)
The exhibition’s aim, says curator Chiara Rabbi Bernard in a statement, is to offer “a new perspective on the dynamic tension between beauty and ugliness, exploring their most compelling expressions from the late 15th to the end of the 16th century—a pivotal moment in history.”
As Renaissance artists like Leonardo gained a richer understanding of human anatomy, an idealized conception of beauty took shape in European culture, with specific proportions and physical features prized above all others. Botticelli’s Allegorical Portrait of a Woman (circa 1490) exemplifies these characteristics: The painting, which may portray the artist’s main muse, Simonetta Vespucci, spotlights its subject’s “striking golden-blonde curls, dreamy gaze, delicate nose and full lips,” Lotte Poté writes in a Bozar blog post.
Vespucci died in 1476, when she was just 22 or 23, yet she continued to inspire Botticelli long after, perhaps even serving as the inspiration for the titular goddess in his Birth of Venus (circa 1485). By the time of the Allegorical Portrait’s creation, the young woman was “no longer modeling as herself,” Poté argues, “but for an idea: beauty as a timeless and untouchable concept.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/e3/95/e395b927-289f-4e43-a829-2f44605b6650/sandro-botticelli-attributed-to_allegorical-portrait-of-a-woman.jpg)
Around this same time, the idea of “ugliness” gained traction as a foil to beauty, although its nature was far more nebulous. As Bozar notes in a visitors’ guide, artists were often inspired by “disproportionate bodies, dislocations, malformations [and] hybridizations,” using such features to depict “the villainous, the wicked and the mad … with strong social and moral connotations.” Anyone who was considered marginalized or “socially inferior”—including individuals with dwarfism and court jesters—could be labeled ugly simply for being different, according to supplementary press materials.
Did you know? A jester at Tudor court
- Henry VIII employed a man named Will Somers as a court jester. Contemporaries often described him as a “natural fool,” suggesting he had a learning disability that led him to be more forthright than his peers. (Comparatively, “artificial fools” were trained performers akin to modern-day clowns.)
- According to a blog post from Historic England, a charity that cares for many of the country’s historic sites, these individuals’ “perceived lack of guile, their directness and their humor were valued as assets and woven into the fabric of court life.”
One of the portraits on display depicts Madeleine Gonzales, a young girl with a condition that caused excessive hair growth all over her body. In the painting, the 7-year-old wears a lavish gown with a neck ruff, her attire and stately posture befitting a child who was visiting Bavarian court.
But Gonzales wasn’t an honored guest: Instead, European elites treated her and her family, some of whom also had a genetic form of the condition, as curiosities to be studied and understood. Despite their entirely hair-covered faces, they were “clearly not animals, and in their hybrid nature, they challenged the distinction between humans and animals,” historian Merry Wiesner-Hanks writes in The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/7e/77/7e770379-f1bf-465a-a506-576ce3049c86/anonymous_portrait-of-madeleine-gonzales.jpg)
People perceived as sinners also came under scrutiny in Renaissance art, with their outward appearances mirroring their vices. An envious woman might be shown as a wizened witch, for example, while a tax collector deemed guilty of greed might present a face “twisted with avarice,” in the words of the New York Times’ Emily LaBarge.
The exhibition’s sections on ugliness “sometimes tread in ethically dubious waters—perhaps because of the language we now use to describe a wide variety of human bodies and faces, as well as emotional and mental states, as positive rather than negative, and the wise edict that beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” LaBarge writes in the Times review.
An underlying current in the Bozar show is the idea that beauty and ugliness are two sides of the same coin. As Leonardo once wrote, the two aesthetics “appear each more powerful when seen in contrast.” Without one, viewers can’t fully appreciate the other.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/3a/47/3a47cc46-c3ee-4493-b1a1-2c7f92480c00/lucas-cranach-the-elder_ill-matched-couple.jpg)
This dynamic is most evident in joint portraits such as The Older One Gets, the More Foolish One Becomes and Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Ill-Matched Couple. The former, by a painter known only as the Master of the Prodigal Son, presents the familiar image of an elderly man hoodwinked by a beautiful young woman who is only interested in his money. The latter flips this formula on its head, pairing an old woman who is missing most of her teeth with a handsome young man who eagerly accepts the coins that she drops into his hand.
At first glance, these paintings might seem to undermine the idea that physical attractiveness is indicative of virtue. Upon closer examination, however, they reveal the toll that lust, pride and other vices can take on a person’s appearance—and the fact that beauty alone “is not quite to be trusted,” LaBarge writes.
“Lustful old women are ugly and morally corrupt, easily fooled and parted with their money,” she argues. “Wealthy old men should be wary of young women who use their beauty to blind and manipulate.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/84/82/84827ee5-9870-44f9-8d36-014476d75584/leonardo-da-vinci_grotesk-head-of-a-woman-in-profile.jpg)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/meilan_headshot2.png)