Quinten Massys
NG 5769 
An Old Woman (‘The Ugly Duchess’)

Lorne Campbell, 2014

Extracted from:
Lorne Campbell, The Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings with French Paintings before 1600 (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2014).

Oil on oak panel, 64.2 × 45.5 cm,

excluding the addition on the left

Provenance

The painting may have been in France in the seventeenth century since a copy seems to have been made for Louis XIV’s cousin Anne‐Marie‐Louise (1627–1693), Duchess of Montpensier, ‘La Grande Mademoiselle’.¹ NG 5769 probably belonged to Baron Pieter‐Nicolaas Van Hoorn van Vlooswyck (1742–1809), who came from Amsterdam and whose collection was sold in Paris in November and December 1809. Lot 668, sold on 22 November 1809, was described as ‘Quintin Mathsys. Maultasch, Duchess of Carinthia & of Tyrol, Queen of the Romans, life‐size, seen at half‐length, dressed in the costume of her time. On panel. 30 × 20 pouces’ (approximately 97 × 65 cm; these measurements may have included the frame).² It was bought by the dealer Maurice. Three months later, in March 1810, the same dealer Maurice, in partnership with Henry Seymour, bought six pictures at the sale in Paris of Jean‐Baptiste‐Pierre Lebrun’s collection.³ Henry Seymour (1776–1849), of Knoyle House, Wiltshire, certainly owned NG 5769, which was inherited by his son Henry Danby Seymour (1820–1877), who, before 1854, showed it to Waagen.⁴ It passed to Henry Danby Seymour’s brother Alfred Seymour (1824–1888) and then to his daughter Jane Margaret Seymour (1873–1943); it was among the pictures she sold at Christie’s on 23 January 1920. Lot 92, it was bought for £880 by the dealer Williams, from whom it was acquired before September 1920 by the painter and dealer Hugh Blaker (1873–1936).⁵ On 20 September 1920 he offered to lend it to the National Gallery;⁶ in 1921 he noted that it ‘Rejoices in the title of the “ugliest portrait in the world”. But what a masterpiece. I simply love her.’⁷ Although he then thought that ‘There should be big money in it’,⁸ by February 1922 he had decided to keep the painting and offered it again on loan to the National Gallery.⁹ Inherited by his sister Jenny Louisa Roberta Blaker (1869–1947),¹⁰ who in 1938 also offered it on loan to the Gallery,¹¹ it finally entered the Collection in 1947 as her bequest.

Exhibitions

The Daily Telegraph Exhibition of Antiques and Works of Art, Olympia, London 1928 (X 31); The Lewis Carroll Centenary in London 1932, Messrs J. & E. Bumpus Ltd (350 Oxford Street), London 1932 (650, The Blaker Exhibit); Le siècle de Bruegel, Musées Royaux des Beaux‐Arts de Belgique, Brussels 1963, (166); NG 1975 (25); NG 2008–9 (70).

Related Painting

A painting of an old man, in a private collection in New York (fig. 5), was identified before 1954 by Reis Santos¹² and subsequently by Silver¹³ as the pair to NG 5769. It is on a panel of two boards, vertical in grain and set vertically. It has been thinned and cradled and veneers of wood have been applied to all four edges. The support measures 64.4 × 45.8 cm, the join being at approximately 30 cm from the left edge. The background, which is damaged, is green, now darkened to a brownish green. The hat is dark crimson velvet; the coat is dark blue velvet trimmed with brown fur; the undergarment and sleeves are blackish; the rings are golden; the eye is blue. The parapet is similar to the parapet in NG 5769. It was on the Paris market at the time of its discovery.¹⁴ It was temporarily reunited with NG 5769 at the exhibition Renaissance Faces at the National Gallery in 2008–9 (nos 70, 71).

A replica of the head, painted on paper mounted on panel and subsequently transferred to canvas, measures 48 × 37 cm and is in the Musée Jacquemart‐André in Paris (fig. 4); the background is whitish and bears the inscription QVINTINVS/ METSYS. PINGE/BAT ANNO 1513.¹⁵

Related Drawings and Print

• New York Public Library, Spencer Collection, one of 104 Leonardesque drawings bound into a copy of a 1669 edition of Rabelais, II:22 (fig. 6). A smaller version of the Windsor drawing listed below, it was presumably copied after the same lost original.¹⁶
• Windsor Castle, Royal Library, 12492 (fig. 7), from the album of Leonardo drawings, thought to be a ‘replacement copy’ by Melzi after a lost drawing by Leonardo: red chalk on paper, 17.2 × 14.3 cm.¹⁷
• An engraving by Hans Liefrinck (about 1518–1573) of two pairs of grotesque heads reproduces one of the above or a third, related drawing. It is on the right side of the lower pair, 15.7 × 21.0 cm, inscribed ‘liefrinck’ and ‘Sordida deformis sic est coniuncta marito/ Foemina, quo quaerat quisque sibi similem’.¹⁸

Copies and Versions

• An etching by Wenceslaus Hollar (fig. 3), plate measurement 6.7 × 12.3 cm, P.1603, inscribed ‘Rex et Regina de Tunis/ Leonardo da Vinci inu. WHollar fecit’. This is a free reversed copy of NG 5769 and its pair.¹⁹
• A painted copy at the Château of Eu, Musée Louis‐Philippe, canvas, stretcher 79.5 × 60.5 cm (fig. 1). Said to have come from the collection of Louis XIV’s cousin Anne‐Marie‐Louise of Orléans (1627–1693), Duchess of Montpensier, ‘La Grande Mademoiselle’; an inscription in French on the reverse of the lining canvas identifies the sitter as Margaret ‘Maultasch’, Countess of Tyrol.²⁰

  This copy was itself copied:

  • An engraving, in reverse, dated 1787, by Gilles‐Antoine Demarteau the younger after a drawing of 1777 by ‘G[irolamo?] Paris’.²¹
  • A woodcut, a free copy in reverse and extended to a full‐length, on an anti‐papal broadsheet dated 1797, with an inscription identifying the lady as ‘La princesse Porcia’ sister of Pope Pius VI (Giovan‐Angelo Braschi).²²
  • A painting by Louis‐Edouard Rioult (1790–1855), made in 1839 for the Versailles museum, canvas, 21 × 18 cm.²³
  • An engraving by Conquy, taken from the painting by Rioult for the Galeries historiques de Versailles, series X, section V, pp. 76–7.²⁴
  • Another painted copy, with an inscription identifying the woman as Margaret of Austria (1480–1530), Governess of the Low Countries, was lent in 1972 from a private collection in Béziers to the Musée de l’Ain, Bourg‐en‐Bresse (fig. 2).²⁵

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

• Another painted copy (panel, 63.5 × 45 cm) is in a private collection in Vienna and came from the collection of the Princes of Schönburg‐Hartenstein at the castle of Rothen‐Lhota in Bohemia. On the brooch on the woman’s hat are an image of Venus and the letters C and B.²⁶
• Tenniel’s Duchess, in Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, London 1865, Chapters VI, ‘Pig and Pepper’, and IX, ‘The Mock Turtle’s Story’, is taken directly or indirectly from NG 5769 (figs 8, 9). The illustrations are wood‐engravings, 7.3 × 8.9 cm, by the Brothers Dalziel. It has not been possible to discover whether Tenniel had seen NG 5769 or whether he worked from one of the copies, or from one of the Leonardesque drawings, or from John Chamberlaine’s engraving of the Windsor drawing.²⁷

Technical Notes

An addition on the left, 3.5 cm wide, is of beech;²⁸ a second addition, removed from the lower edge in 1947–8, was probably made at the same time. It was laid against the grain of the original and was causing damage. The first addition, on which there was no ground, was painted black, presumably when the green background was overpainted in black (fig. 10). The black overpaint, itself over several other layers of repaint and a cream‐coloured ground, was removed in 1947–8. Since the copy at Eu includes the additions and has a black background, it seems to have been made after the picture had been enlarged and overpainted. The copy at Eu is thought to have been painted for ‘La Grande Mademoiselle’, who died in 1693; the additions and black overpaint of NG 5769 would therefore have predated 1693. The reverse of the panel has been thinned and cradled. The top horizontal member of the cradle bears the remains of an inscription in English (see below), where a long ‘s’ is used for the first ‘s’ of ‘Duchess’. This may indicate that the cradle was in place shortly after the picture arrived in England: possibly in about 1810. After it was bequeathed to the Gallery, it was cleaned in 1947–8 by Messrs Drown.²⁹ They removed the addition at the lower edge and the black and other overpaint from the green background.

Most of the picture is well preserved. There is some damage, however, to the background, including erosion and abrasion and some areas of more extensive paint loss. It has been retouched and some of the ‘cracks’ are in fact lines incised into overpaint. The background now appears a rather light opaque green, but traces of a dark green glaze are visible in places, suggesting that a glaze was probably originally present across most of it. There are broad cracks in places, suggesting problems with the drying of the paint, which might explain its relative fragility.

The original part of the panel, which measures 64.2 × 45.5 cm, consists of two boards of oak, vertical in grain. The join, between 13.3 and 13.0 cm from the right edge, is secured with two dowels, exposed when the panel was thinned. It has been established that the oak is from the Baltic region, that the 227 growth rings of the first board were formed between 1235 and 1461, that the 96 rings of the second board were formed between 1395 and 1490, and that the first board is from the same tree as the first board of the Crucifixion, NG 715, also attributed to Quinten Massys.³⁰ The reverse has been cradled and on the cradle are inscriptions: 8 on the vertical member second from the left; on the top horizontal member, 8 (again), Top and Duchess of [Car]inthia/Quintun Mastys. Rebates at the top and bottom edges of the panel have been filled with veneers of wood: the veneer at the top has been removed, but has left traces of glue; the lower veneer remains. The possible significance of the rebates and veneers has not been explained.

The panel is painted up to all four edges, though the final paint layers do not quite reach the right or bottom edges; no traces of barbes have been found. The picture may have been cut down, or, more likely, was not painted in its original frame.

The ground is chalk (confirmed by EDX analysis); it is covered by a very thin light grey priming. Infrared reflectograms reveal a good deal of underdrawing, executed with brushes in a liquid medium (fig. 15). It is entirely linear, without any hatching. The underdrawing of the face is carefully done; whereas the underdrawing for the headdress, clothes and parapet is free and bolder: the line for the fluted edge of the veil over her right shoulder, for example, has been very rapidly indicated by a continuous wavy line. In the underdrawing for the face, the artist may well have followed carefully a preliminary drawing, whereas the rest of the underdrawing, though it may be accurately based on a preliminary drawing, is very much more sketchy. There are several changes. In the face, both eyes, which have underdrawing in their present positions, are painted above and slightly to the right of their first underdrawn positions. Her painted chin and neck are smaller than their underdrawn counterparts, which extend further to the right, and her right ear was drawn smaller. In the rest of the underdrawing, her right shoulder is lower but was redrawn in its present, painted place; her right breast seems to have been moved slightly; and both hands are differently posed. Because the underdrawing here cannot be made completely visible, the original poses of the hands cannot be fully understood. The parapet is underdrawn higher, and the left side of the horned bonnet and veil is also higher in the underdrawing.

The blue dress and deep purple underdress both have a greyish‐pink modelled underpaint consisting of lead white, red lake and black in varying proportions. In the blue dress the upper paint layers are based on azurite, mixed with some lead white in the highlights and mid‐tones, or with a little red lake in the shadows. The underpaint gives the drapery a subtle greyish‐blue hue. In the purple underdress, the uppermost layer contains only red lake. It seems that the artist, preferring not to use a conventional mixture of red lake and a blue pigment, has relied on the optical effect of the underpaint (a darker pinkish grey than in the blue dress) showing through the translucent upper layer to give the purple colour (fig. 11). Scumbles of white or pink have been painted wet‐in‐wet into the red glaze to give the highlights and convey the texture of the fabric. The opaque green paint in the background contains a mixture of a green mineral copper pigment composed mainly of copper sulphate with a small amount of malachite, mixed with lead white and lead‐tin yellow; this seems originally to have been covered, at least in shadowed areas, by a further verdigris glaze, of which only traces remain.

In the only sample taken for medium analysis, which was from the white veil, the medium was identified as walnut oil.

Several apparent idiosyncrasies of painting technique are worth mentioning. The paint is worked in many places wet‐in‐wet (fig. 12) and has been dragged or feathered. Some forms are clearly demarcated with lines of shadow or reflected light, whereas other forms are ill‐defined; for example, the pupils of the eyes, which have serrated contours and irregular shapes (fig. 13). (This may help to suggest that the woman has poor eyesight.) In many places, energetic feathering softens transitions of tone, which become less violent or sudden (fig. 14). This technique seems to have been peculiarly Quinten’s. [page 455][page 456]Some of the hair near her right ear (fig. 16) and some of the embroidery on her right cuff are boldly rendered in sgraffito. The mottled areas of her flesh are rendered by spotting the basic pink of her flesh with red and white dots, dashes and blotches. Many of the white areas are impasted (fig. 17). Sometimes, as in the nose, the underlayer is impasted and the upper layers have been worn away from the impasted crests of the underlayer.

Strangely, the decoration on the two horns of the headdress is rendered by different methods. On the horn on our right, the black stripes on the petals of the red, white and blue flowers have been made by removing the red, white or blue paint with a dry brush to reveal the black underlayer (fig. 18); on the left horn, however, the black paint on the petals has been applied on top of the wet red, white or blue paint, into which a brush carrying black paint has been pushed (fig. 19). This may indicate that the two horns were painted by different artists, perhaps Quinten and an assistant; or that the same artist, possibly Quinten himself, discovered another way of executing the patterns which he preferred to the first. Perhaps all the flowers of one colour were painted at the same time [page 457]and the painter started to decorate those on our right. When he got to the flowers on our left, however, they were too dry for his sgraffito technique to work well and he evolved the alternative method.

The exhilarating skill of the brushwork may be admired in a magnified detail of a filigree area from the brooch, where at least five shades of brown, orange, pink and yellow are found and where paint containing mainly lead‐tin yellow is fairly heavily impasted (fig. 20).

Description

In front of a flattish green background and behind a parapet of brownish and bluish marble appears an elderly woman with a very short nose and an exceedingly long upper lip. She seems to have lost all her teeth. She is evidently suffering from an advanced stage of Paget’s disease (see below). Her hair and eyes are brown and the hair has been shaved at the top of her forehead. Her skin is pimply and is disfigured by a wart on her right cheek, from which hairs are sprouting (fig. 21). Most of the broken veins in her face are red but some at the point of her nose are blue. Her collarbones, affected by her disease, point downwards; her large breasts are forced upwards by her tightly laced dress. She wears three large golden rings and holds across her cleavage the bud of a red rose (fig. 27).

Her heart‐shaped bonnet is ornamented with a grid of black straps patterned with green stripes. The points at which the straps cross are decorated with daisy‐like flowers with white centres and blue petals. The petals of some are missing because they were never painted. In the interstices of the grid are stylised roses. In the top horizontal row, the roses are alternately red with white centres and blue leaves, and white with blue centres and red leaves; in the second row, the roses are blue with red centres and leaves, and red with white centres and blue leaves. These patterns recur regularly, so that red roses mark both diagonals of the grid. The corded edges, where the bonnet meets the forehead, are blue (fig. 22). Though hair is exposed at the temples, most is concealed in the ‘horns’ of the bonnet. Over the bonnet is a long but fairly narrow white veil. The cloth has been ingeniously woven, on weighted warp threads, so that fluted strips are formed along both selvedges.³¹ It is held in place by a large oval brooch, apparently made of gold, elaborately worked and incorporating four roses with petals of white enamel. The brooch is set with four large pearls and a table‐cut diamond (fig. 23). Beneath the woman’s dress the fluted edge of her chemise(?) is visible. The dress itself is blue but the sleeve is black and is decorated at the cuff with gold embroidery. The lacing of the dress is green and passes between rings of grey metal; the undergarment seen through the laces is deep purple (fig. 12).

Attribution and Date

NG 5769 seems always to have been attributed to Quinten Massys from the time of its appearance at the Paris sale of 1809 until 1955,³² when Martin Davies considered that ‘the execution appears too pedestrian to be by Massys, and suggests a later date’. He classified it as a copy after a lost original by Quinten, painted between, approximately, 1510 and 1520.³³ His opinion has not been unanimously accepted. Silver saw both NG 5769 and the companion painting of the Old Man (fig. 5) as originals.³⁴

Given the number of alterations between the underdrawing and the painting, there can be no doubt that the picture is an original. The relationship between the painting and the two Leonardesque drawings listed above will be discussed later but it may be helpful to state now that there is no proof that NG 5769 depends on an original by Leonardo and that it is very probably a study of a woman suffering from Paget’s disease and wearing some form of archaising fancy dress. It should be stressed that the quality of the execution is superlative. The technique of painting, with the unusually extensive use of feathering to soften the tonal transitions in the flesh, is close to that of Massys.

The companion picture of the Old Man is in most ways closely similar. The version of his head in the Musée Jacquemart‐André (fig. 4) bears the inscription QVINTINVS METSYS. PINGEBAT ANNO 1513;³⁵ this supports the attribution of both the Old Man and the Old Woman to Quinten and suggests that they too may have been painted in about 1513. The Jacquemart‐André version, which is on a paper support, could be a worked‐up sketch for the Old Man. It could have been inscribed and dated when, perhaps unexpectedly, a purchaser took an interest in it.

A further reason for attributing NG 5769 to Quinten is the fact that the first board of the panel is from the same tree as the first board of Quinten’s Crucifixion, NG 715, which may also have been painted in about 1510–15.

The Identity of the Old Woman

According to the inscription on Hollar’s engraving, she and her companion are the ‘King and Queen of Tunis’. Tietze‐Conrat, imagining that the old woman was a dwarf, claimed, but did not prove, that court dwarfs were often given such names.³⁶

The theory that NG 5769 and the copy at Eu were likenesses of Margaret ‘Maultasch’, Countess of Tyrol, had slightly more to recommend it but is equally misconceived. Maultasch, ‘pocket mouth’, was interpreted as a description of some of the deformities of the old woman. Silver considered that the companion portrait of an old man was a caricature of Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464), that he was presented as a personification of Avarice and that the old woman personified Lust.³⁷

Margaret Maultasch (1318–1369) was the younger of two daughters of Henry VI (c. 1270–1335), Duke of Carinthia and Count of Tyrol, by his second wife Adelheid of Brunswick‐Lüneburg‐Grubenhagen.³⁸ Their elder daughter Adelheid (1317–1375) was feeble and unfit to rule. On Henry’s death [page 459]in 1335, Margaret therefore inherited Tyrol but the Habsburgs annexed Carinthia. Margaret married first in 1330 John Henry of Luxemburg, a younger brother of the Emperor Charles IV. John Henry, it was claimed, was impotent; this marriage was annulled in 1342 and Margaret married Louis of Bavaria, Elector of Brandenburg, a younger son of the Emperor Louis IV. Her husband and their only child ‘Meinhard’ having predeceased her, Margaret resigned Tyrol in 1363 to Rudolf IV of Habsburg, Duke of Austria, and retired to Vienna. The only contemporary portrait of Margaret is on the seal that she affixed to the grant of 1363. There she is represented in an entirely conventional way.³⁹

One contemporary described Margaret as ‘exceedingly beautiful’,⁴⁰ another as driven ‘half‐crazed’ by her impotent husband;⁴¹ a third called her Maultasch, a dialect word for the vagina and, by extension, a whore.⁴² Margaret’s enemies may have tried to vilify her because of her scandalous and irregular divorce from her first husband; after her death, some made her out to have been a devilish virago. The use of the word Maultasch was taken to indicate that she was hideously deformed and the legend of the vicious Ugly Duchess was created. Probably during the seventeenth century and in France, someone acquainted with the legend identified NG 5769, a picture of an ugly woman wearing ‘medieval’ clothing, as a portrait of Margaret.

The clothes worn by the old woman and her male companion seem to be fanciful adaptations of Burgundian fashions of the early fifteenth century. Her bonnet and brooch and her frilled chemise are rather like those worn by Margaret of Bavaria (1363–1423), wife of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, in a portrait from a series of dukes and duchesses of Burgundy now at Lille (fig. 25). It is a sixteenth‐century copy but is based, perhaps freely, on a lost original of the early fifteenth century.⁴³ The subject of the companion painting of the Old Man is very like, in features and in dress, a portrait of Philip the Bold (1342–1404), Duke of Burgundy, father‐in‐law of Margaret of Bavaria; the original portrait of Philip, probably painted towards 1400, is lost but there are copies at Versailles (fig. 26),⁴⁴ Cincinnati and elsewhere and the image was used in a miniature in the Grandes Heures of John, Duke of Berry.⁴⁵ Massys has lowered the fur collar, altered the shape of the hat, exposed the ear and removed the jewellery.

The plunging neckline of the old woman’s dress may be compared with those of the temptresses in the Temptation of Saint Anthony (Prado) by Massys and Patinir, painted around 1520 (fig. 24).⁴⁶ The front lacing of the dress, however, is found in portraits of the 1470s, for example that of Margaret of York (1446–1503), Duchess of Burgundy (Louvre), datable around 1475.⁴⁷ The lacing there is less tight and flattens the breasts instead of forcing them upwards.

The old woman and her companion, wearing old‐fashioned and therefore rather ridiculous clothes, are being satirised. They look at each other; he raises his right hand in greeting; she offers a rosebud. There are four roses in the jewel on her bonnet and scores of roses, as well as daisies, in the decoration on the horns of her bonnet. The roses recall the Roman de la Rose and all the sexual connotations of the rose; her exposed breasts are only slightly less shocking than the breasts of the elderly temptress in the Prado Temptation of Saint Anthony (fig. 24). There, as in NG 5769, the horns of the headdress are devilish. Generations of clerics had fulminated against horned headdresses.⁴⁸ In the Praise of Folly, written in 1509 and first published in 1511, Erasmus described ‘the old women who can scarcely carry their weight of years and look like corpses that seem to have risen from the dead. They still go around saying “Life is good”, still on heat … longing for a mate … and hiring some young Phaon by paying out large sums of money.’⁴⁹ Erasmus continued: ‘They’re forever … exposing their sagging withered breasts and trying to rouse failing desire with their quavery, whining voices’;⁵⁰ but this old woman’s breasts are scarcely withered and her toothless mouth is firmly shut.

The old woman is suffering from an advanced form of Paget’s disease, osteitis deformans, called after Sir James Paget (1814–1899). It causes increased and irregular formations of bone, the skull may increase in size, other bones may bow. Here, the maxillary bones are abnormally enlarged, so that the upper lip is extended and bulges, the nose is pushed upwards and the nostrils become unusually arched. The chin and collarbones, too, are abnormally enlarged; the collarbones have[page 460]bent. The ears project and the forehead is overdeveloped; the bones of the hands and the eye‐sockets are also affected by the disease. The painting seems, therefore, to be a truthful portrait of a woman suffering from a disease of the bones.⁵¹ It is of course possible that she profited from the unfortunate change in her appearance by exhibiting herself as a freak. That may be why she is wearing ludicrously old‐fashioned clothes.

Several seventeenth‐century sources indicate that Quinten Massys took an interest in representing elderly people as well as monstrosities. Denis de Villers, a canon of Tournai Cathedral, received as a gift in 1616 ‘a face of a laughing old man, in oil on paper mounted on panel; extremely well done by master Quinten’.⁵² In 1655, the Marqués de Leganés owned, with several other paintings by Massys, ‘An old lady in half length, tearing her hair’ and ‘a painting half a vara square of two old men, one holding a rosary in his left hand and the other with “armed” hands’, both by Quinten.⁵³ Alexander van Fornenbergh in his biography of Quinten, published in 1658, recorded that he had painted ‘absurd, monstrous faces of men and women, of which two belonged to Burgomaster Smidts at Aalst. Also there are at Brussels beggars done from life who appear to be reading attentively with prayer beads in their hands.’⁵⁴ In 1659, the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm owned ‘A small portrait in oil on panel of an old woman with exposed breasts, in a red dress with a veil on her head … an original by Quintino Masseysz …’⁵⁵ The artist Joshua Reynolds owned a picture described as ‘Quintus Matzius. A woman’s head, a humourous character’ (lot 89 of the first day of his sale, Christie’s, 11 March 1795);⁵⁶ while Richard Hart Davis (1766–1842), MP, owned a painting attributed to ‘Quintin Matsis’ and sold in 1814 as ‘An Old Lady, with a Letter in her Hand and Rings on her Finger. – Her Head Dress and Drapery of singular costume, forcibly painted; and a strong proof of his energy of pencilling and colour.’⁵⁷

Massys and Leonardo

It may have been Quinten’s interest in the grotesque that attracted him to Leonardo’s work. It has not been established how he made contact with Leonardo but, in his altarpiece of the Entombment (Antwerp) of 1508–11, he made use of Leonardo’s drawing of A Man tricked by Gypsies (Windsor 12495 recto).⁵⁸ He must have owned a copy of this drawing, from which he took the heads of two of Saint John’s tormentors in the right wing; and he retained it to use again in his Wedding Party (known from several versions, the best being in São Paulo).⁵⁹ Four heads from Leonardo’s drawing are here combined with a central group of an old woman embraced by a young man, taken from a lost drawing by Leonardo known from a copy attributed to Joris Hoefnagel and an etching by Hollar.⁶⁰ The old man in Quinten’s Ill‐Matched Lovers (Washington)⁶¹ and a man in the background of his Adoration of the Kings (New York)⁶² are free reversed copies of the head on the left of Leonardo’s Man tricked by Gypsies. Quinten had probably seen a version of Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (Louvre);⁶³ he may have had some knowledge of a Leonardesque Virgin of the Cherries⁶⁴ and a Leonardesque Christ Child kissing Saint John the Baptist.⁶⁵ The head of Terminus on the reverse of Quinten’s medal of Erasmus is claimed to follow another lost Leonardo drawing, known from a ‘replacement copy’ attributed to Melzi (Windsor 12494);⁶⁶ but this is not proved. Otherwise Quinten’s knowledge of and interest in Leonardo’s work was relatively limited. Preferring sharply defined contours and strong patterns with brilliant colours, Quinten could not have been sympathetic to Leonardo’s experiments with sfumato, light and shade, and colour.

Quinten’s ‘grotesque’ heads are rather different from Leonardo’s. The men stoking the fire under the cauldron in the right wing of Quinten’s Antwerp triptych and even Christ’s tormentors in his paintings of the Ecce Homo in the Prado, Coïmbra and Venice or in his Coïmbra Flagellation are ugly and their facial expressions exaggerated, but, unlike many of Leonardo’s grotesque heads, they are neither caricatures nor completely unnatural, hybrid inventions.⁶⁷ Even when Quinten copied Leonardo, he tended to diminish the elements of caricature; he never ventured into representing the impossibly malformed. If the old woman in NG 5769 is suffering from Paget’s disease, then the picture is another of Quinten’s studies in ugliness and is not radically different from the companion painting of the Old Man.

The relationship between NG 5769 and the two Leonardesque drawings, both of which seem to follow the same lost original, must be carefully re‐examined. Superficially similar to NG 5769, the drawings show a differently proportioned and less plausible face and thorax. The drawn woman’s eyes are much larger, her chin is longer and her forehead, shoulders and breasts are very much smaller. The point of her nose differs in shape, less easy to explain in terms of the overdevelopment of the maxillary bones. The shapes of her ears and the horns of her headdress are simplified in the drawings, where she seems to have acquired a second veil trailing across her forehead. The brooch is not securely positioned in her headgear; the veil no longer has frilled edges, nor indeed any logical structure as a rectangular strip of fabric. Her left eye is not contained within her skull but projects awkwardly from its socket. The drawings present an altogether less convincing representation of the unfortunate deformed woman.

It is therefore difficult to accept the theory that Quinten has followed in his painting a lost drawing by Leonardo. It seems more likely that Quinten and Leonardo, sharing an interest in ugly or grotesque heads, exchanged sketches and that Quinten sent to Leonardo a version of NG 5769 which was copied by Leonardo himself or by his pupils. They altered the proportions of the figure, simplified the shapes, misunderstood the structures of the outlandish and archaic Burgundian clothes and failed to comprehend the ways in which disease had transformed the bones of the face and shoulders. Any resemblance between the Windsor and New York drawings and other grotesque heads by Leonardo himself may be dismissed as coincidental: those women may be wearing horned headdresses but their noses and upper lips are not malformed in the same ways as those of the woman in NG 5769.⁶⁸

For help in preparing this entry, I am grateful to Michael Baum, Martin Clayton, Christopher Cook, Alban Duparc, Reinold Gayre, the late Richard Godfrey, Suzanne Higgott, Elizabeth Kujawski, Michael W. Kwakkelstein, Nicolas Milovanovic, Paula Nuttall, Cécile Scailliérez, Alistair Smith and Gerald Stiebel.

Notes

Infrared reflectography was carried out using a Hamamatsu vidicon. For details see p. 18, note 22.