An Old Woman / The Ugly Duchess

For centuries critics called this 'the ugliest woman ever painted' — a fictional grotesque made up to mock vanity. In 2008 a London neurologist identified her facial features as textbook Paget's disease of the bone: enlarged jaw, bulging forehead, distorted nose. The disease causes excess bone growth and was not described medically until 1877. Matsys may have been painting a real person with a then-unnamed condition. Lewis Carroll borrowed her for the Duchess in Alice. Now at National Gallery, London @nationalgallery