Wonderland’s Other Queen?

According to Emma Capron, one of the world’s leading Renaissance art experts, and curator of The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance, which opens at the National Gallery in London on March 16, Quinten Massys’s painting An Old Woman, aka The Ugly Duchess, inspiration for Sir John Tenniel’s drawing, is actually a portrait of a male transvestite.

The exhibition will also claim that the drawing of the woman in A Grotesque Couple, attributed to Francesco Melzi, who was Leonardo da Vinci’s leading assistant, inspired Massys’s painting.

A story in The Guardian tells us more; the exhibit runs through June 11.

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