A drawing of the head and shoulders of a hideous old woman, with a colossal mouth and upper lip. She wears a low-cut dress and an escoffion over a wimple.

The woman is an embodiment of foolish vanity, with a ridiculous contrast between her aged ugliness and her ostentatious headdress and tightly laced bodice. Leonardo's original is lost; this is a copy, probably by his pupil and heir Francesco Melzi, of one of the master's most enduring creations. A version was known to the Antwerp artist Quinten Massys, who incorporated her in several paintings, and one of the many replicas of the old woman was used by John Tenniel as the basis for the Ugly Duchess in his illustrations to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865.

Text adapted from Leonardo da Vinci: the Divine and the Grotesque