Cultural Compass: Painting beauty and ugliness, a Verdi masterpiece and ancestral memories
Every Sunday, Belga English picks its favourite events from the cultural agenda. This week: BOZAR presents Renaissance perceptions of beauty and ugliness, Opera Ballet Vlaanderen's Nabucco explores modern day politics and explorations of knowledge are revealed through artistic ancestry.
Bellezza e Bruttezza, 20 February until 14 June, BOZAR, Brussels
“Beauty and ugliness reinforce each other,” said Leonardo da Vinci whose work features in BOZAR’s newest exhibtion Bellezza e Bruttezza. This vivid journey into Renaissance perceptions of beauty and ugliness, reveals how artists across Italy and Northern Europe explored these powerful opposites from the late 15th to the end of the 16th century.
Rather than presenting beauty and ugliness as simple contrasts, the exhibition invites visitors to see them as intertwined forces. In the Renaissance, ideals of beauty were often grounded in mathematical harmony and classical proportion while ugliness could be deliberate, provocative, or even comic, pushing viewers to reconsider what it means to see.
Works by masters such as Sandro Botticelli, Titian, Tintoretto, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo sit alongside pieces by Northern artists like Lucas Cranach the Elder and Quinten Matsys, creating a rich dialogue across styles and regions. One unforgettable example of this contrast is Matsys’s satirical portrait often called The Ugly Duchess, where exaggerated features poke gentle fun at conventional beauty while revealing deeper insights into human character.
By juxtaposing the ideal and the grotesque, Bellezza e Bruttezza not only chronicles shifting aesthetics but also invites contemporary reflection on how society defines and judges beauty itself.
Nabucco, 22 February until 15 March, Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, Antwerp
Opera Ballet Vlaanderen’s new production of Nabucco places Verdi’s early masterpiece squarely in dialogue with the present, drawing out its enduring themes of exile, power and collective resistance.
First performed in 1842, Nabucco tells the story of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar (Nabucco) and his conquest of Jerusalem. After the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, the Hebrew people are driven into captivity. Amid political oppression and personal betrayal, Nabucco descends into madness, believing himself a god, before ultimately rediscovering humility and granting the Hebrews their freedom. At its heart, the opera is a drama of tyranny and redemption, faith and resilience.
“Va, pensiero”, the celebrated “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves” became one of opera’s most iconic passages and an unofficial anthem of Italian national pride during the 19th-century struggle for unification. “The chorus is the most relatable persona in the opera. Va Pensiero is the emotional climax of the piece,” says OBV choral director Jan Schweiger. Its plea for freedom and dignity continues to resonate, making it a chorus that feels strikingly politically applicable today.
In this new staging, Opera Ballet Vlaanderen underscores the opera’s relevance to contemporary geopolitical tensions: new imperialisms, forced migration and displacement. Performers and audience alike are confronted (quite literally) with a mirror, inviting reflection on collective responsibility and the possibility of altering history’s course.
Becoming Ancestors, until 26 June, Argos, Brussels
Becoming Ancestors at Argos is a thought‑provoking exhibition that brings together Western and Indigenous artists to explore how ancestral memories shape identity, resistance and possibilities for the future. Rather than treating the past as a fixed timeline, the show invites visitors to consider memory, land and time as fluid and non‑linear.
For Indigenous artists, ancestral knowledge often emerges as a living practice of resistance, rooted in sustaining land, language and lineage in the face of ongoing colonial and environmental pressures. Western‑based artists, in contrast, interrogate loss and disconnection, unearthing suppressed folk practices, local wisdom and forgotten traditions to imagine new connections with what has been overlooked or erased.
In this shared space of questioning and connection, Becoming Ancestors challenges viewers to reflect on the legacies that shape society and to reimagine futures grounded not in inherited patterns but in conscious choice and creative re‑engagement.
Ongoing events
Antwerp
Early Gaze: Unseen Photography from the 19th Century
Danial Shah: Becoming, Belonging and Vanishing
Magritte: La ligne de vie
Brussels
Loisirs-Plezier: Brussels 1920-1940
Fire
Ghent
Fairground Wonders
Marc De Blieck: Point de voir
Monique Gies: Inside Views
Hasselt
Rococo Reboot
Michael Beutler
Sint-Martens Latem
Edith Dekyndt
(MOH)
#FlandersNewsService | Niccolò Frangipane (attribué à) Repas bachique, c 1580 © Musée municipal de Soissons
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