The old joke goes that once the New York Times reports on a trend, it’s safe to say it’s over. Consider, for example, their profile of influencer Clavcular, a representative of the Looksmaxxing fad who “believes that any step toward increasing one’s beauty is virtuous.” About a month later, the young man Arrested in Florida On battery charge, which sounds like a symbolic death knell for Looksmaxxing. What self-respecting advocate of human beauty would consider a trip to Florida?
A new exhibition at Bozar in Brussels, “Bellezza e Bruttezza,” would argue that Looksmaxxing has always been impossible, as you cannot separate beauty from its counterpart. The exhibition brings together more than 90 works from the late 15th to 16th centuries, including works by Sandro Botticelli, Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach’s The Elder, and Quentin Mitsis, drawn from more than 60 lending institutions, including the Uffizi, the Louvre, the Vatican Museums, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
This show, curated by Chiara Rabe Bernard, examines how standards of beauty and ugliness co-evolve. This thesis is embodied in the works of Da Vinci Hideous head of a woman in profile (about 1490-1500). It’s only the size of a playing card, done with a delicate touch in light brown ink, but it’s unforgettable. Da Vinci considered these drawings “extremely monstrous”, and the old woman looks like a goblin, with her nose so upturned that it is more like a snout. The folds around its mouth indicate that it could open up to devour you. These works were immediately popular, and as the catalog confirms, da Vinci was not trying to mock or caricature his subjects. He attracted them because they had power. She is compelling and attractive, which is the main quality, whether we are discussing ugliness or beauty.
Lucas Cranach the Elder painted more than 40 versions of couples with what we would today call problematic age gaps, in which an older man flirts with a younger woman as she lightens his suitcase. Three of those works appear in this show, most notably Mismatched couple (young man and old woman) (c. 1520–22), one of only three occasions on which he flipped the script. With only three teeth in her mouth, the old woman smiles at the young man and stuffs his hand with coins. In this painting, the greatest beauty can be found in her bag.
The poster image for the show is a portrait of Frans Floris de Vriendt Pomona (1565). It’s a scene from Ovid Transitionswith Pomona content with her orchard, her breasts not plentiful but fertile, her skin as plump as the fruit that surrounds her. She is in the process of rejecting the slutty Pan, whose face is not much different from that of Da Vinci’s old woman. The show seems to suggest that while beauty and ugliness are both compelling, the former can be defined by rejecting the latter.
“Bellezza e Bruttezza: The ideal, the real, and the caricature in the Renaissance“On display at Bozar in Brussels until June 14, 2026.
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