“IN 1560, 15-year-old Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici left Florence to begin her married life with her husband Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. Less than a year later, she would be dead.” Although the official cause of her death was given as putrid fever, it was rumoured that she had been murdered by her husband, and this is the historical note on which Maggie O’Farrell bases her novel, The Marriage Portrait, expanding what little is known of Lucrezia’s life with entirely convincing literary licence — convincing because the characters, especially Lucrezia herself, are so persuasively drawn.
Conceived in the map room of her father’s Florence palazzo, Lucrezia is a baby “who will not rest or sleep or be comforted unless . . . in constant motion”, and all her life is drawn towards exploration and movement. Fearing that this baby’s unbiddable nature will influence its older siblings, her mother, Eleanora, removes Lucrezia to the care of a wet-nurse in the palace kitchens who already has a two-year-old daughter; these relationships and, above all, that with the Neapolitan nursery nurse Sofia, are of lasting significance in Lucrezia’s life.
Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess” is thought to have been inspired by the Duke of Ferrara, who became Lucrezia’s husband: “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive. . .”
While the portrait which is the subject of Browning’s poem is apparently fictional, the novel is itself highly visual and textured like a painting; and the theme of painting underpins the whole book. Some of the evocative chapter titles reflect this: “Man asleep, Ruler at rest”; “Sisters of Alfonso II, seen from a distance”.
Fruit, nature, clothing — all are brilliantly conjured so as to seem tangible: the stuffed head of the cinghiale, “eyes closed to the indignity” of having its mouth stuffed with a yellow quince; the “bristly, squat bodies” of wild boars, “heavy as travelling boxes”.
Part of the story involves her husband’s commissioning of a portrait of Lucrezia, who is herself a talented artist, creating her own nibs and pigments, tiny tavola on which to paint with brushes made with fur snipped (guiltily) from the palace cats.
But the story is aural as well as visual: “The gown speaks a glossolalia all of its own. . . It is a symphony, an orchestra of fabrics.” The writing is multi-layered, overlaying actions and senses and worlds — farmers and pot-boys going about their business, the cook dozing in the afternoon heat with her feet on a barrel; reading it is like being immersed in a painting by (the more or less contemporary) Bruegel the Elder.
We feel for ourselves the “mile after mile of jolting up and down in the saddle, . . . back aching . . . legs rubbed raw by wet stockings”, and have a real sense of what it might have been like to be a child-woman in 16th-century Florence, married off to someone you hardly knew, and to be the political bargaining chip, the powerless pawn at the centre of the drama.
© Sophie DavidsonThe Northern Irish author Maggie O’Farrell, a multi-award winning novelist
Early in the story, Lucrezia’s father acquires a tiger, an impossibly exotic animal that “didn’t so much pace as pour herself. . . she carried on her body the barred marks of a prison, as if . . . captivity had been her destiny all along.” The author brilliantly conveys the empathy between Lucrezia and the tiger; both are creatures of instinct and passion, who share an essentially untamed quality, despite the physical constraints of their existence.
Alfonso both senses and fears this — “that there will always be a part of her that will not submit or be ruled” — and Lucrezia draws on this capacity for disembodiment, not least when sitting for her portrait: “She keeps still as best she can, unhitching herself from what is happening in the room . . . leaving just her skin and bone behind. . . The rest of her withdraws, escapes, slips away.”
Despite her political impotence, after the structured life of the nursery and the schoolroom, marriage brings unexpected freedom, as it dawns on Lucrezia that the days are hers in which to do as she wishes. Later, she discovers a different sort of freedom by disguising herself as a servant in a household whose owners see servants only as part of the furniture: “She has access suddenly to the private, hidden life of the castello, the wrong side of its embroidery, with all the knots and weave and secrets on display.”
Sadness and malevolence are powerfully personified, so that we share the growing sense of dread which begins “to cover her, like moss on a stone”; and yet the narrative, which has carried us back and forth between “Fortezza, near Bondeno, 1561”, “Palazzo, Florence, 1544”, and “Delizia, Voghiera, 1560”, overshadowed by the spectre of her death, does not pre-empt the end of the story.
The text draws the reader so deeply into the world of 16th-century Italy that I experienced the present world more intensely for days after reading it, drawn into the artist’s trick of seeing, and simultaneously seeing themselves, from a different perspective.
Once the portrait is completed, “Lucrezia is unnecessary; she can go now.” Her place is filled by a self who, “when she is dead and buried, will outlive her . . . will always be smiling from the wall, one hand poised to begin a painting.”
Caroline Chartres is a contributing editor to the Church Times.
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell is published by Tinder Press at £9.99 (Church Times Bookshop £8.99); 978-1-4722-23880-3.
Listen to Caroline Chartres in conversation with Sarah Meyrick in this week’s Church Times podcast. This is a monthly series produced in association with the Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature. Listen here.
THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT — SOME QUESTIONS
- How is Lucrezia’s experience typical of the period, and in what ways is it unusual?
- What does the story reveal of the different parts played by, and relationships between, men and women at the time, and where power really lies?
- How does the author make the book feel like a painting brought to life?
- What part does light play in the book, especially in conjuring up the very different physical backdrops for the story: the palazzo in Florence/the Delizia/the Fortress, and perhaps, above all, the Church?
- Does the author succeed in making Alfonso simultaneously sympathetic and ruthless?
- How did the ending affect your enjoyment of the story?
IN OUR next Book Club on 6 September, we will print extra information about our next book, The Archaeology of Loss by Sarah Tarlow. It is published by Picador at £10.99(£9.89); 978-1-5290-9955-3.
THE BOOK
The archaeologist Sarah Tarlow, in her candid memoir The Archaeology of Loss, excavates her memory to piece together the events and experiences leading up to her husband’s suicide, and traces the complicated grief which followed. Using her archaeological insights, the author makes parallels between what she has encountered through her professional work, tracing the rituals of death and commemoration, with the reality of her own personal situation. Nothing prepared her for the grim reality of caring for someone whose personality had been so affected by illness, and for her own struggles facing up to the actuality of loss.
THE AUTHOR
Sarah Tarlow is Professor of Historical Archaeology at the University of Leicester. She is best known for her work on the archaeology of death and burial in post-medieval Britain and Ireland, and has written or edited ten academic books about archaeology and history. Her most recent project is “Ethical Entanglements”, a study which examines the caring of human remains in museums and in research. The Archaeology of Loss is her first memoir.