Everyone is beautiful unless you're weird like The Bearded Woman.

In our world of body acceptance, Dove commercials and Beyonce’s #beautiful Instagram campaign this painting can easily be construed as a spiteful display of a sad woman with a medical condition now known as hirsutism (check out her teary eyes). However, despite the historical persecution of bearded women with incidents of them being burned at the stake as witches and in more modern times put on display in freak shows, this painting may not have such cruel intentions.

For the few of us who don’t read Latin, the long inscription on the side of the painting exclaims, “Look, a great miracle of nature.” Admittedly the “Look” harkens to the call of a carnival barker but the rest of the inscription is written rather sympathetically. It tells the story of the sitter, a real woman named Magdalena Ventura who lost three sons and at 37 went through a second puberty causing her to grow the luscious beard we see on her at the age of 52. Seriously, that beard is gorgeous and I’m positive that her husband’s brooding expression is caused by jealousy and not concern.

Ribera seems to mention the dead children in order to humanize and feminize Magdalena. Or perhaps it is just his way of letting us know that she is in fact a she with a beard and not a man with a Cyclops boob. The huge breast that is painted too high and too centered draws immediate attention to the sex of the sitter in a way that the featured spool (woman’s work!) and snail shell (they are hermaphrodites dontcha know!) fail to do. It is also probable the baby serves the same purpose as it is extremely unlikely that a 52 year old woman with medical issues bore a suckling newborn. Unless she is a witch and she used her powers to cast fertility spells.

It should be noted that in the inscription Ribera the Great and Powerful compares himself to famed Greek portrait painter Apelles. An unsurprising act of self-promotion from a guy who was important enough to make himself the Godfather of a self-started art mafia. Too bad hashtags weren’t invented. #BetterThanApelles #Beards #TrulySexy #WokeUpLikeThis