Beauty and ugliness have always fascinated people, yet their meanings shift over time. Bellezza e Bruttezza explores how artists from Italy and Northern Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries depicted these extremes, from refined ideals to deliberate grotesques. A rare opportunity to see extraordinary works, some appearing in Belgium for the first and only time. The exhibition traces how the standards of beauty and ugliness evolved from the last quarter of the 15th century to the end of the 16th century—key transitional periods—by juxtaposing in a rich and compelling confrontation the ways in which these two subjects were interpreted by the greatest Italian artists and their counterparts from Northern Europe. Beauty became an increasingly important social concern at this time, as shown by the... Read more