Lucrezia can see that they are nearing Santa Maria Novella; there isn’t much time. These are the last moments of her girlhood – with every passing second, her time with her family is ebbing away. Very soon, she will be married. The feasting, the dancing and the gaming have already taken place – the celebrations have been going on for days – and by the end of the day, she will be gone.
Maggie O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait (Tinder Press, 2022), p. 128
The Marriage Portrait follows the life of Lucrezia de’ Medici (later d’Este) prior to and during her short marriage to Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. Lucrezia, daughter of Cosimo d’Medici, Duke of Florence, is fifteen years old when she is married off to twenty-six year old Alfonso because the match is politically expedient for their fathers. (That Alfonso was previously engaged to Lucrezia’s sister Maria and that Lucrezia is not yet menstruating when the match is arranged is of no consequence to anybody but Lucrezia herself and Sofia, the family’s nurse.) The story begins with Lucrezia sitting opposite Alfonso in his hunting lodge and realising ‘with a peculiar clarity, as if some coloured glass has been put in front of her eyes, or perhaps removed from them, that he intends to kill her.’ From here, the timeline of the narrative shifts back and forth between Lucrezia’s childhood, its abrupt end as she prepares to become Duchess of Ferrara, and her experience of pseudo-womanhood once married, marked by the responsibility that hangs over her of producing a male child to ensure that the dukedom remains in her husband’s bloodline.
Rather than being the fast-paced thriller I’d primed myself for, The Marriage Portrait was more of an exploration of the emotions of a child-bride and former black sheep of her family who is convinced that her husband is out to kill her. As such, the reader spends a lot of time in Lucrezia’s mind, experiencing the narrative almost entirely through her thoughts. When I realised that this was the route O’Farrell was taking, I thought that it had the potential to be quite interesting but it really didn’t work for me. Given Alfonso’s possessive nature, which limits Lucrezia’s existence to one of painting in her room, walking in the gardens of his houses and fretting with her handmaid over how exactly he intends to kill her, there was very little by way of plot in the novel, which in itself is not a bad thing. However, despite the novel focusing largely on Lucrezia’s internal life as she transitions from being her father’s property to her husband’s and as she begins to understand Alfonso’s true character, I hesitate to ascribe the term ‘character-driven’ to The Marriage Portrait because I found Lucrezia an uncompelling and eventually static protagonist. I therefore felt there was little vitality on the character front as well as on the plot front.
My least favourite thing about the novel was how liberal O’Farrell was with the extravagance of her descriptions, which ended up making the novel a laborious read. Lucrezia is a gifted painter and this aptitude for the visual arts is discovered by her antiquities tutor who, after finding Lucrezia’s drawing of a scene of Iphigenia and Agamemnon at Aulis left in the children’s classroom after a lesson, doubts that anything with as much attention to perspective as the drawing could have been done by a child Lucrezia’s age. Thus, as well as functioning in the way imagery and metaphor and simile usually do, O’Farrell’s use of these devices in The Marriage Portrait also works to illustrate life through the eyes of someone extremely sensitive to colour, shadows, light, angles etc.
When used for that reason, I thought O’Farrell’s ornate prose was apt and worked really well. There are passages, for example, where O’Farrell describes in great detail Lucrezia’s surroundings as she is transported from her childhood home in Tuscany to Alfonso’s delizia (his country house) and his castello (his ancestral home) in an entirely different province of Italy. These I absolutely loved because Lucrezia, as a girl who has travelled very little and is therefore enthralled by the sights around her, is frantically trying to commit all of these foreign details to memory so she can recreate them in paintings later. Others, such as the one in which a tiger’s movements are described as ‘Liquid… like honey dropping from a spoon’ and its stripes not as stripes but as ‘a bold, dark lace, to adorn, to conceal’, a lace that both ‘defined’ the tiger and ‘saved’ it, I couldn’t make sense of or justify their being there, thought-provoking and beautiful as they were. There were many descriptions which I thought were very interesting poetically but which I felt were misplaced in the contexts she’d chosen for them, the descriptions of the tiger’s movements and stripes being two. Over time, I felt the opulence of her descriptions detracted from the novel instead of adding value to it and found that the frequency which which these moments of literary sumptuousness appeared slowed the novel down almost to the point of stasis, making me lose the initial investment I had in both characters and story.
I also think the novel was longer than it needed to be because of O’Farrell’s tendency to tell the reader what she had just shown them, which, after a while, began to read as though she didn’t have full faith in her ability to communicate ideas to the reader indirectly. For example, when Alfonso enters Lucrezia’s room for the second time since their arrival at the delizia, Lucrezia’s fear that he has finally come to consummate their marriage is implied by O’Farrell’s telling us that as Alfonso moves towards Lucrezia, ‘the thought that Lucrezia had been holding at bay in her head opens it startling petals in her head’, making the following lines superfluous to me:
He means to take her, here and now. He means to perform upon her the act she has been dreading, with all her being, ever since that visit by Vitelli when she painted the starling. He has been waiting for her to wake. He means it to happen now.
I appreciate that these sentences, with the varied lengths in particular, are meant to more viscerally depict the dread that an uncomfortable and uninformed (and therefore disempowered) young bride would probably be experiencing in such a situation but Lucrezia’s anxiety is equally clear from the ‘arid and parched’ throat she has when she attempts to swallow down her nerves, two adjectives from a line immediately following the above. The use of all three methods to convey the same feeling thus felt excessive to me. I believe this kind of repetition can be really effective as a literary device, but didn’t find it working for me this time. There were many of these ‘show, tell, then show again’ moments in the book where beautiful similes and metaphors were not left to simply be, but explained for us (when Alfonso’s less friendly sister Nunciata interrupts Lucrezia’s fun with his other sister Elisabetta by making a cutting comment, her voice is ‘like water tossed onto a fire: the joy, the spark goes out of them all’) and the frequency of these explanations prevented The Marriage Portrait from being as exciting and engaging a story as I thought it had the potential to be.
(I also think that the novel’s non-linear structure contributed to making the story slower than enjoyable and I think that had the novel been narrated chronologically, beginning with the circumstances of Lucrezia’s conception, followed by her early years, her wedding, her stints at the delizia and the castello, and finally Alfonso’s last minute decision to move the couple to his hunting lodge — all the while their difficulties conceiving being noted — O’Farrell would have created more suspense and potentially rectified what I thought was a pacing issue.)
While I found the novel overly-long and the descriptions gratuitous at times, I do think that throughout the novel O’Farrell brilliantly conveyed the various feelings that a person would have were they a young girl wanting to live as young girls typically do but instead forced to marry a man nearly twice their age and increasingly single-mindedly concerned with impregnating them. I loved the simile she used to describe Lucrezia’s feeling of objectification in the castello as everybody waits for her to become pregnant. As she speaks to Alfonso’s sisters, who have their own equally urgent reasons for being so invested in her conceiving a child and clumsily dance around the matter in their first conversation with her, she feels that they, and all the other courtiers:
are like anatomists who peel back the hides of animals to peer inside, who undo the muscle from skin and vein and bone, assessing and concluding and noting. They, all of them, pulse with the craving, the need to see a child growing within her, to know that an heir is secured for them.
This feeling will have been exacerbated by the frustration of multiple failures to conceive, which in itself will have been compounded by Lucrezia’s illiteracy about her own body and I think the simile, with its description of the successive ‘undoing’ of an animal, illustrates this wonderfully.
In general, I loved the parallels between Lucrezia and wild animals to convey her lack of agency. O’Farrell introduced this motif from the outset, beginning with the tiger forcibly removed from its home and placed in Lucrezia’s father’s menagerie to be entertainment for his courtiers in her childhood, and continued it in our second picture of hers and Alfonso’s married life with the venison (suggestedly poisoned) that Alfonso near force-feeds her at his hunting lodge, a sight that makes her stomach heave for the way it ‘stands in puddles of red, which could either be wine or blood’. Another moment of wild animal imagery I loved was the picture of the cinghiale (boar) on the dinner table at one of Alfonso’s feasts, with ‘its mouth forced open with a yellow quince, its eyes closed to the indignity.’ I thought this one was particularly well done because the cinghiale, voiceless not just because it is dead but also because it’s mouth has been stoppered with a fruit, is clearly the centrepiece of the feast being held in Lucrezia’s honour upon her and Alfonso’s arrival in his hometown. Given the glimpses of Alfonso’s abusive tendencies that O’Farrell provides in her depictions of the couple’s married life in the delizia, that even the capacity to make noise has been removed from the boar — more than unnecessarily as it is already dead —highlights Lucrezia’s own status as mere ornament and reproductive mule in her marriage and within the court.
While the use of hunted animal imagery to represent disempowered girls and women is not a novel thing in fiction, O’Farrell’s offering of animals in The Marriage Portrait was so rich, and all of them quite distinct both in their natures and in the contexts in which they appeared, that exploring the possibilities of meaning for each animal for a given moment in Lucrezia’s life was something I really enjoyed. Another thing I loved was how the end of Lucrezia and Alfonso’s relationship (which we are led to believe is synonymous with the end of Lucrezia’s life) is represented visually in the book by the paragraphs becoming shorter, which quickened the pace and mirrored the sense of urgency Lucrezia herself would have been feeling.
The parts of the novel I enjoyed the most were the opening chapters (around the first 100 pages) which detailed the circumstances of Lucrezia’s conception, her early childhood spent in the basement kitchen with the household servants and maids after having been exiled there for being a ‘difficult’ child, and the later discovery of her aptitude for drawing and painting. In a passage written from Lucrezia’s mother’s perspective, O’Farrell tells us that Lucrezia came out a ‘feral’ child because her mother Eleanora, unpleasantly nicknamed ‘La Fecundissima’ for her childbearing capabilities, was daydreaming about uncharted territories and wildernesses when Lucrezia was conceived, and as all 16th century noblewomen know, ‘the character of the child is determined by the mother’s thoughts at the moment of conception’. These were the most engrossing parts of the novel for me because the omniscience of the narrator in these chapters, as opposed to the third person limited perspective that the narrative shifted to once Lucrezia was married, made the chapters much more dynamic. After this point, the monotony of Lucrezia’s internal monologue in conjunction with O’Farrell’s florid prose style made the story less engaging for me.
As heavy-handed as I found O’Farrell’s prose for much of the novel, when it worked, it worked amazingly. For the historical fiction fan for whom feeling completely immersed in a foreign context takes priority over other elements of a book, The Marriage Portrait will be a hit. It’s definitely a treat for the senses — it just wasn’t entirely my cup of tea. 3.5/5
A Moment For The Dress…*
*some of my favourite lines from the book
[What Lucrezia sees when she enters Santa Maria Novella church]:
p. 131
A long stretch of red-tiled floor sweeps away from her, with pale repeating arches on either side. Light enters at an oblique angle from invisible lofty windows, high above their heads, warming the apex of the arches, alchemising the white plaster to lozenges of gold. Candles gutter and flare, piercing the dusk, each at the centre of their own glowing corona. The lines of the roof, the lines of the aisle lead the eye irrevocably all the way to an altar surrounded by painted saints with golden halos, and windows of many-coloured glasses.
The forest, at night, seems to come right up to the walls of the villa and press itself close, encircling the inhabitants in its green, quickening world; it wreathes into their dreams the snap of branches, the creep of lichen, frail light-seeking shoots, with web-veined foliage. Its sharp, loamy air penetrates their slumbering lungs.
p. 166
Bed: once a place for sleep, or for staying awake to listen to the breathing of her siblings, to the nocturnal noises of the palazzo. And now another person may pull back the covers and enter it, and do – this.
p. 193
The indigo and azurite he must have mixed, here, in this very room, under commission by one of Alfonso’s ancestors, have faded and softened with time; it is almost as if the colours have retreated into the wall, to hide themselves, to wait out the centuries. Lucrezia imagines them springing back, all at once, in collusion, to their original vibrancy, with some magic signal, with the utterance of some secret shibboleth. Hercules’ eyes will once again be sky-blue, his loincloth startling red, instead of faded pink, the mountains beneath his feet the green of new growth.
p. 249
[Elisabetta] is, Lucrezia thinks, like a shattered window pane, her whole being splintered into crazed fractures.
p. 361.
