The Marriage Portrait
Maggie O’Farrell, Headline
**** (4 stars)
There is sometimes confusion between Lucrezia Borgia (1480-1519), who married Alfonso, duke of Ferrara in 1502, and Lucrezia de Medici (1545-1561), who married Alfonso, duke of Ferrara (grandson of the other Lucrezia and Alfonso) in 1558. The first is widely believed to have been a poisoner of others; the second was (possibly) poisoned by her husband because she could not bear him a child.
Maggie O’Farrell’s latest tale is about the second Lucrezia, married at 13, dead at 16. While her research is extensive and her facts triple-checked, O’Farrell does something of a Hilary Mantel-ism on the story, bringing imagined aspects of detail and character into the narrative, and in some ways writing an alternative to the accepted (or speculated) course of this young woman’s life and death.
The tiger on the cover is a central and perhaps rather on-the-nose theme that runs throughout this novel. There is documentary evidence that Cosimo de’ Medici, grand duke of Tuscany, was probably the first person to bring, for his amusement and hubris, a tiger from India, to be kept in the basement crypt with the two lions he already had, brought out to fight each other for the entertainment of his friends. There are also papers that mention the myth that Lucrezia, as a child, snuck out of her enclosed quarters to see this mythical beast, and that it let her stroke it through the bars.
The real tiger disappears from the book early on (a good thing for those who cannot stomach descriptions of cruelty to animals) but the metaphor has been firmly established: When Lucrezia first sees the tigress, O’Farrell writes: “Lucrezia could feel the sadness, the loneliness, emanating from her, the shock at being torn from her home, the horror of the weeks and weeks at sea. She could feel the sting of the lashes the beast had received, the bitter longing for the vaporous and humid canopy of jungle and the enticing green tunnels through its undergrowth that she alone commanded, the searing pain in her heart at the bars that now enclosed her. Was there no hope? The tigress seemed to be asking her. Will I always remain here? Will I never return home?”
Apart from establishing Lucrezia as a sensitive and questioning child unusual in her time, these are the same feelings she suffers when torn from her home and sent to far-off Ferrara to be the wife of a duke in his 30s, as a substitute for her older sister Maria who had died shortly before the wedding. Lucrezia has to be strapped into the blue wedding dress commissioned for her sister, a cage within which she can hardly move or breathe.
Lucrezia is an odd girl in many ways. Children who grew up in Palazzo Pitti, the home of the de Medici family (Michelangelo’s original statue of David stood proud in their gated courtyard, where today stands a replica in a tourist square) did not disagree with their parents. Until they came of age, children were confined to the nursery floor, constantly under the watch of a nanny and schooled by tutors. They ate there, slept there, and were not permitted to wander through any part of the palace except on rare occasions when they were summoned by their father or mother, in which case they were accompanied.
Tiny, light-footed and creative-minded Lucrezia, however, finds ways to explore the castle and overhear things without being detected. Like the tigress, there were enticing tunnels that she alone commanded. This is how she hears of her father’s agreement to marry off his 13-year-old daughter to Alfonso, a fate against which she wails and protests to the point where her usually kindly father strictly insists that she behave as daughters are meant to: pets or possessions, not free-willed people.
Ferrara at first does not seem so bad. In O’Farrell’s version, Lucrezia falls in love with her husband, who at first is kind and amenable and understanding, wishing to meet her every need and accommodate her every desire. As months and months go by without Lucrezia falling pregnant, however, he becomes more absent and more violent and Lucrezia falls into a depression where, like the tigress, she wonders: “Was there no hope? Will I always remain here? Will I never return home?”
The duke takes Lucrezia to his “hunting lodge” in the mountains, far from their home in Ferrara. There is, of course, an entourage, because that’s how dukes roll, but he has contrived to exclude Lucrezia’s close maidservants. Lucrezia, who can always read the room, smells a rat and becomes convinced that her husband is planning to poison her so that she can be replaced by a woman who might be more fecund.
While Lucrezia remains cosseted in this cage of exile, Alfonso hires a famous portraitist of the day to paint her, presumably so he will have a record of her beauty and his possession of her after he offs her. Lucrezia forms a silent bond with one of the artist’s assistants, a mute and talented painter who understands only Neapolitan dialect, which Lucrezia luckily learnt from one of her nannies.
She herself is a skilled painter of miniatures, and it is probably best if we stop there because at this point the story veers away from what is accepted history to a plot of O’Farrell’s imagining, spun with delicacy and drama and worth reading to the end for.
Incidentally, the marriage portrait described in the book can be seen in the North Carolina Museum of Art, and Robert Browning’s 1842 poem, My Last Duchess, was based on it. In the poem, Alfonso is showing the portrait of the now deceased (or is she?) 16-year-old Lucrezia to the family whose daughter he wishes to marry next. Browning and O’Farrell have the same view of the callous duke, and a mutual sense of irony, but Browning’s retelling is perhaps more coherent and less flighty. Nevertheless, it’s good to have historical fiction written almost (if not quite) as beautifully as that by the late Mantel.
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