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One Fine Show: “Bellezza e Bruttezza” at Bozar in Brussels

From da Vinci's grotesques to Cranach's mismatched couples, some of the Renaissance's most compelling works posit that beauty only means something in the presence of its opposite.

The old joke stipulates that once the New York Times has reported on a trend, it’s safe to say that it’s over. Consider, for example, their profile of the influencer Clavicular, a representative of the Looksmaxxing fad who “believes any step toward increasing his beauty to be virtuous.” About a month later, the young man was arrested in Florida on a battery charge, which feels like a symbolic death knell for Looksmaxxing. What self-respecting advocate of human beauty would even consider a trip to Florida?

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A new exhibition at Bozar in Brussels, “Bellezza e Bruttezza,” would argue that Looksmaxxing was always impossible, as you can’t separate beauty from its counterpart. The exhibition brings together over 90 works from the late 15th through the 16th Centuries, including works by Sandro Botticelli, Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach The Elder and Quinten Metsys drawn from more than 60 lenders, including the Uffizi, the Louvre, the Vatican Museums and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Curated by Chiara Rabbi Bernard, the show examines how standards of beauty and ugliness evolved together. This thesis is embodied in the da Vinci work Grotesque Head of a Woman in Profile (ca. 1490-1500). It’s only about the size of a playing card, done with a delicate touch in light sepia ink, but it’s unforgettable. Da Vinci deemed these drawings “visi monstruosi,” and the old woman does look like a goblin, her nose so upturned that it’s more of a snout. The folds around her maw imply that it could open to gobble you up. These works were immediately popular and, as the catalogue emphasizes, da Vinci was not trying to mock or caricature his subjects. He drew them because they have power. They are compelling and magnetic, which is the main quality, whether we’re discussing ugliness or beauty.

Lucas Cranach the Elder painted more than 40 versions of couples with what we might call today problematic age gaps, wherein an older man courts a younger woman as she lightens his purse. Three of those works appear in this show, the most notable of which is Ill-Matched Couple (Young Man and Old Woman) (c. 1520-1522), one of only three occasions on which he flipped the script. With only three teeth left in her mouth, the titular old woman grins at the young man and stuffs his hand with coins. In this painting, the greatest beauty can be found in her purse.

The poster image for the show is Frans Floris de Vriendt’s Pomona (1565). It’s a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with Pomona content in the bounty of her orchard, her breasts not abundant but fecund, her skin as plump as the fruit that surrounds her. She’s in the process of rejecting the lascivious Pan, whose face is not so different from da Vinci’s old woman. The show seems to propose that while beauty and ugliness are both compelling, the former may be defined by the rejection of the latter.

“Bellezza e Bruttezza: The Ideal, the Real and the Caricature in the Renaissance” is on view at Bozar in Brussels through June 14, 2026.

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