Review: 'The Marriage Portrait'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Marriage Portrait
By Maggie O'Farrell
Literary Fiction
Knopf

She had
A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Browning's "My Last Duchess" was the first poem I studied in college that caught my attention and imagination. The story it tells of a young woman who seemed kind and interested in the world, who was not appreciated by a world-weary aristocrat, who died and who was not mourned, whose portrait was a curio among many for her widower, floored me.

How could anyone be that callous? How could anyone not appreciate kindness and beauty? How could "a nine-hundred-years-old name" be worth more than those qualities? Is the male ego that fragile? Is is an aristocracy thing?

These questions came back to mind while reading Maggie O'Farrell's latest historical novel. The Marriage Portrait imagines the life of Lucrezia di Cosimo de' Medici d'Este. The middle daughter of Cosimo and Eleanora de' Medici was married to Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, at the age of 13. This happened after her elder sister, also promised to Alfonso, died before the wedding could take place. Lucrezia died at the age of 16.

She is believed to be the subject of Browning's poem about a dead young wife's marriage portrait. The actual painting of her that inspired Browning, which was on display near his Italian home, although it was apparently painted some time after the marriage, makes one wonder what she was thinking. O'Farrell has some ideas.

In the novel, Lucrezia is unlike her sedate siblings. She is not only the opposite of sedate, she also is curious and desires to know things, to see things, to understand things. As a child, she crept down to the family's courtyard during the night when a tiger her father had commissioned to be part of his private zoo arrived. Mesmerized by the fierce, caged beast, she later gets to visit the caged animals with her older brothers and sisters. As the odd one out, Lucrezia is skilled at fading into the background, and does so to go to the tiger's cage. To stroke its magnificent fur. She is discovered doing so and is dragged away. Later, the tiger is killed when the doors to its cage and those of the two lions already in the zoo are opened. 

That part of the story is factual. But like deeds surrounding her eventual husband, whether her father had something to do with what took place is worthy of speculation. 

To anchor Lucrezia's fictional character to the real portrait, and subsequent fame through Browning's poem, O'Farrell's protagonist is a talented painter. Brushstrokes, use of color, the fascination of creating underpaintings no one but the artist will see are all fascinating and satisfying to the Lucrezia of the novel. The way that O'Farrell describes how these aspects of creating art giving meaning to her character's inner life show another interpretation to the complaints of the widower in the poem, who is peeved at not being on some mythical pedestal. Instead, the novel's Lucrezia is lost inside her art.

The truth is, though, that she is still caught in the microcosm of her painting: that is the only place she wishes to be. All other sights, all ther worlds, will be dissatisfying to her until she finishes it, until the painting is complete and will release her back to where she belongs. Here, in this salon, waiting for her husband to appear, an embroidery hoop in her hands.

Added into the mix are Alfonso's troubles with his Protestant mother, who has angered the Pope, and his desperation for a child. (The real Alfonso married twice more after Lucrezia's death but had no children.) If Lucrezia feels a bond with a different man, that could well be the last straw for an aristocrat accustomed to getting his way.

It is easy to see that a would-be empire builder, in an age when Henry VIII would be doing the same, only in public, would think murdering a wife could solve some of his problems and perhaps soothe his ego.

How much any of this is true is not the purpose of the story. It is the wondering about what drives people, what inspires or motivates them, what controls them, that makes The Marriage Portrait a fascinating look at how people with so many advantages can fail at life on such a grand scale.