“I am going to commission a new one immediately,” Alfonso exclaims. “An allegorical scene or a religious one. Or, now I look at her here, I am thinking perhaps just a three quarter profile, exactly as she is. A marriage portrait. What do you think?”
I haven’t read a lot of Maggie O’Farrell, but I very much enjoyed both her memoir (I Am, I Am, I Am) and her last historical novel (Hamnet; on the death of Shakespeare’s son, which won multiple literary prizes), so I expected to like The Marriage Portrait very much as well. And it was just okay. More historical fiction than literary fiction, this is an imagining of the life and marriage of Lucrezia de’ Medici, and while the plot is an interesting enough take on the time and place (Florence and Ferrara in the mid-sixteenth century), I made little emotional connection with the characters (and honestly found more psychological insight into the Duke of Ferrara in Robert Browning’s inspirational poem “My Last Duchess” and the corresponding analysis to be found on it at The Poetry Foundation website). I don’t regret picking this up — I learned a lot (and especially off the page) — but this wasn’t an entirely successful novel for me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
How will he do it? Part of her would like to ask him this. The knife in a dark corridor? His hands about her throat? A tumble from a horse made to look like an accident? She has no doubt that all of these would fall within his repertoire. It had better be done well, would be her advice to him, because her father is not someone who will take a lenient view of his daughter’s murder. She sets down her cup; she lifts her chin; she turns her eyes on to her husband, Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, and wonders what will happen next.
As the novel opens, Lucrezia, at sixteen, has been married for a year to the mercurial Duke of Ferrara. Having been spirited away from the palace to a dank hunting lodge in the woods for a “rest”, Lucrezia becomes convinced that her husband has isolated her in order to kill her. Sections alternate between long stretches that detail Lucrezia’s backstory and shorter bits that describe the events that transpire at the lodge, and a centerpiece in each timeline is the creation and unveiling of a marriage portrait of his wife that the Duke commissions from his Court painter, Il Bastianino (I don’t believe this portrait exists; it is not the one used as the cover art.) And why would the Duke want to murder his young bride? Could it be because she has failed to provide him with a desperately needed heir within the first year of marriage?
Lucrezia stands there, in her travelling dress, in her fifteen year-old skin. She feels as though these people desire to see right through her; they are like anatomists who peel back the hides of animals to peer inside, who unclothe muscle from skin and vein from 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. They see her as the portal, the means to their family’s survival. Lucrezia wants to fasten her cloak about herself, to hide her hands up her sleeves, to tie her cap to her head, to pull a veil over her face. You shall not look at me, she wants to say, you shall not see into me. I will not be yours. How dare you assess me and find me lacking? I am not La Fecundissima and never will be.
O’Farrell implies that the Duke was interested in marrying a Medici daughter because their mother had had so many children that she had been nicknamed “La Fecundissima”, and as he in his years of youthful indiscretions had failed to father even a bastard child, Alfonso had thought he was getting himself a brood mare from proven lines (the Duke had originally been engaged to an older Medici sister but turned his attention to a then twelve-year-old Lucrezia upon Maria’s sudden death). The plot provides plenty of space for colour (the customs, the clothing, the politics), and there is satisfying tension in discovering whether or not Lucrezia’s husband is actually trying to kill her, but I didn’t really like the details of the plot (not the encounter with the tiger, not Lucrezia’s constant daydreaming and dissociating, not the reason for Jacopo’s muteness), but worst of all I didn’t like the actual ending. Not touching or exciting or lyrical, the plot hitting some fairly expected beats: this was just okay.
