The Marriage Portrait

Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara (1533-1597) was the historical figure on whom Robert Browning based the murderous narrator of the poem “My Last Duchess.” In her NPR interview with Louise Kelly, O’Farrell reveals that she began researching the character with the intention of making him a balanced figure (Kelly, Louise. “‘The Marriage Portrait’ Is a Renaissance Story of Marriage, Survival, and Murder.” NPR, 27 Sept. 2022). However, when she learned that he sadistically forced his sister Elisabetta to watch while her lover was strangled, she became convinced that he was capable of murdering his wife, so she no longer hesitated to elaborate on the dark sides of his character.

Duality and Exchange is a key theme in O’Farrell’s construction of Alfonso’s character, as he juxtaposes extreme courtesy and refinement with an inhumane capacity for violence. This is evident not only in his treatment of his wife and his sister but also in subtler matters, such as his tastes. Instead of the acrobats at the Florentine court, he commissions evirati—castrated men—to sing for him. That they were subjected to a painful operation for Alfonso’s pleasure hints at his selfish aesthetic and his wielding of power for its own sake. Moreover, the eviratis’ emasculation suggests the duality present in Alfonso’s own body, which has the height and musculature of a youthful warrior but is infertile. This infertility, an open secret at the Ferrara court, builds on the historical fact that none of his three marriages produced heirs, which made him uniquely vulnerable. Alfonso wields his power over others to disguise his infertility, and his subjection of Lucrezia to a mutilating regime to present her own fertility as the problem is a distraction. Although Alfonso appears to use his physical and institutional power to control the women in his life, in the novel, they lack respect for him and frequently outmaneuver him, using every means available to them to escape his control.

Lucrezia’s mother, Eleanora (1522-1562), was a Spanish aristocrat who married Cosimo di Medici and became duchess consort of the Florentine court. O’Farrell portrays her as equally conforming to her role and visionary as she navigates the tension between Female Autonomy and Institutional Control. Her beauty and birthing of 11 children caused her to become known as “La Fecundissima of Florence,” thereby playing an important role in reinforcing the status of the Medici dynasty (206). However, she is also endowed with a restless mind that cannot abide purposelessness. The image of a palazzo where every room has been “put to use,” every “bare plaster wall has been adorned and beautified” (6), and every minute of her children’s day scheduled, gives the impression that Eleanora is eager to demonstrate her capabilities as a strategist and organizer. Her thoughts of faraway lands while conceiving her fifth child hint at her suppressed wish to govern and have influence beyond the domestic realm; however, when her autonomy manifests in Lucrezia’s independent spirit, Eleanora seeks to contain its influence. She is afraid of the consequences of unchecked female autonomy and seeks to have her daughter tamed by the influence of a powerful man.

O’Farrell’s portrayal of Lucrezia’s father, Cosimo di Medici (1519-1574), is based on the historical figure of the same name. Cosimo was a grand patron of the Florentine arts and had an outgoing, congenial temperament; however, his awareness of court danger and the potential for violence to erupt means that he wears chainmail beneath his clothes whenever he leaves the palazzo.

O’Farrell depicts Cosimo as relatively progressive in his stance on Relationships Between Men and Women; unusually for the time, he is faithful to his wife and enlists her opinion on court matters. When Lucrezia expresses her doubts about marrying Alfonso, Cosimo tries to reassure her by pointing out that Alfonso is a refined courtier like him who will treat his wife with civility and courtesy. He cannot imagine that someone so educated would be violent.

While Cosimo favors his daughter Isabella, O’Farrell shows him to be wary of Lucrezia, denying her caresses and using her as a pawn in a dynastic marriage. This shows that his progressiveness and generosity are limited when he is faced with the more traditional patriarchal concerns of ensuring the family’s position.

The eldest Medici child, Maria shares Lucrezia’s bed and had “sharp elbows and a predilection for lying in the center of the bed with all her limbs stretched out” (17). This robust, socially fluent girl’s appropriation of Lucrezia’s personal space will be reversed when Maria dies and forces her to assume her place as Alfonso’s betrothed. Lucrezia feels like an imposter in her sister’s position for a long while, knowing that she “was smaller; she was not nearly so accomplished in music and dancing; she never could think of what to say […] she wasn’t nearly so pretty; she had no skill with dress or ornament” (79). This long list, in which Lucrezia emphasizes Maria’s wifely virtues by highlighting her own perceived shortcomings, indicates Lucrezia’s sense of the wrongness of taking up her sister’s destiny. Thus, while the men who arrange the marriage think that daughters are interchangeable and can easily take each other’s place, the emotional experience of doing so reveals their distinctiveness.

Lucrezia’s older sister, Isabella shares Eleanora’s dark hair and beauty and is the favorite child of their father, Cosimo. Indeed, when Isabella marries Pietro and is permitted to stay nearby in Florence, but she is sent far away, Lucrezia reads this as evidence of her father’s bias.

As with Maria, O’Farrell sets up Isabella as the embodiment of conventional Renaissance Italian womanhood to contrast with Lucrezia’s individuality. She is preoccupied with her appearance, lamenting that the enormous ruby jewel that Alfonso gifts Lucrezia would suit her complexion better and expressing her envy by throwing herself on the bed in a dramatic manner. Isabella is also flirtatious and potentially sexually experienced prior to marriage, as she possesses knowledge – such as about men having variously sized penises—that Lucrezia does not have. Even from the distance of Ferrara, Lucrezia continues to feel shortchanged because her sister still has the support of her family and is engaging them in an addictive card game, while she is alone and at the mercy of Alfonso’s whims.

While this is Lucrezia’s lasting impression of Isabella in the novel, the historical record shows something quite different. Indeed, Isabella’s “very sudden and highly suspicious death” in 1575 during a hunting holiday with her husband inspired O’Farrell’s rendering of Alfonso’s intended murder of Lucrezia (435). The sisters are united in being seen as disposable and replaceable within a patriarchal system, and O’Farrell uses the hunting metaphor to show that they are treated like attractive animals by their husbands.

Eleanora’s Neapolitan nurse, Sofia, is an invented character. She has much in common with Juliet’s nurse in Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet (1596), being a surrogate maternal figure who is more approachable than a distant biological mother and is also a co-conspirator in her young charges’ schemes. Lucrezia’s learning Sofia’s Neapolitan dialect demonstrates her affection for the nurse and her wish to be close to her.

While Eleanora gave birth to her children, Sofia—who has lost a tooth for all the babies she nursed, including Eleanora—is in charge of the nursery and, therefore, the children’s day-to-day functioning. While she is often stern with Lucrezia, her love for her emerges in her generous ruse of delaying the news of the child bride’s menstruation as long as possible in order to postpone her marriage. The poignancy of their farewell, when Sofia stops the carriage that will finally convey Lucrezia to Ferrara, indicates the pain the former feels at the latter’s departure. That Sofia feels the pain of this separation more than any of Lucrezia’s blood relatives indicates their intimacy.

Lucrezia’s maid, Emilia, encapsulates the theme of Duality and Exchange. O’Farrell sets up this fictitious character as a sort of sister to Lucrezia, given their sharing of the same balia (Emilia’s biological mother) and distinctive fair-haired appearance. When Emilia presents herself on Lucrezia’s wedding day, Lucrezia has forgotten this girl “with a puckered scar curving from the corner of her mouth to her neck” and a “particularly gentle touch” (117). The empathy between the two women is set out from the beginning, with Emilia, the lowborn maid, looking as though she feels sorry for Lucrezia on her entry to a splendid dynastic marriage. Emilia is cunning and capable, managing to divulge secrets and to secure a ride to the Fortezza behind Alfonso’s back. However, her defining personality trait is her loyalty to Lucrezia.

In Ferrara, the girls grow as close as they were in infancy, sharing a bed and discussing the secrets of the court. Lucrezia finds that Emilia seems the more fortunate of the two, given that she has the freedom to roam about unnoticed and gather information. She tests this freedom for herself when she adopts Emilia’s dress and is able to penetrate the forbidden parts of the castello that show it’s working. Indeed, having spent her first years in the kitchen of the Florentine palazzo and finally escaping to a similar kind of anonymity as an artist in Venice, Lucrezia finds that an obscure status like Emilia’s suits her.

Nevertheless, there is a streak of fatal cruelty in Emilia’s sacrifice in Lucrezia’s place. In their early life, when a boiling pot fell, it burned and disfigured Emilia, rather than Lucrezia, who was with her. Emilia later reflected that it was better that she should be scarred rather than a noblewoman; this establishes her status as a scapegoat, the one to be sacrificed in Lucrezia’s place. This motif extends to the end of the novel, when Lucrezia takes Emilia’s clothes and escapes, but the latter is left in the bed and suffocated in Lucrezia’s place in a case of mistaken identity. O’Farrell emphasizes the darkness of the chamber and the disfigurement of the corpse, which allow the exchange of bodies to take place fully. Only the physician notices that the corpse’s fair hair does not have the memorable reddish tinge of the Duchess’s hair.  

In staging the exchange between Lucrezia and her self-sacrificing maid, O’Farrell enables her heroine to get away. However, she also reinforces the unfair class hierarchy of the time, which values noble lives above working-class ones. Lucrezia manages to use her education and artistic talents to thrive, but at the price of Emilia’s becoming another disposable woman.

Alfonso’s consigliere, Leonello Baldassare, was educated alongside him and is the person the duke trusts most with sensitive personal and court matters. Lucrezia’s first impression of Leonello is that he is hostile, as he has a snide attitude toward her and mutilates a servant boy for dropping a package. Lucrezia initially senses that Leonello resents her because he envies her closeness to Alfonso. However, she soon realizes that Leonello and Alfonso operate as a unit in their regime of fear and control, as Alfonso tells her that questioning Leonello’s authority is like questioning his own. Lucrezia comes to realize her marriage is doomed when she sees that Alfonso resembles Leonello more than she initially thought.

Leonello, with his “lion-colored hair” and name resonant of the same beast, evokes the lion couple in the menagerie who tore Lucrezia’s beloved tigress apart (179). This prefigures the Leonello-Alfonso duo who intend to kill Lucrezia in the same way. O’Farrell conveys the mismatch of power: two males sanctioned by the institution of patriarchy versus a female acting on her own.

A proponent of a different modality for Relationships Between Men and Women, Neapolitan cloth-painter Jacopo is set up as Lucrezia’s soulmate. He is an orphan with artistic talent who was adopted by Il Bastianino. Jacopo is the most talented of the three painters commissioned for Lucrezia’s portrait, and his friend Maurizio makes it clear that Jacopo is the one who will do the most work. The lazy Il Bastianino will merely add finishing touches. Although Jacopo speaks Neapolitan dialect, his refusal to learn Northern parlance makes everyone think that he cannot speak and is potentially deaf. This has the strategic advantage of causing others to be indiscreet around him, thereby enabling him to gather information.

Jacopo has blue-green eyes and occupies a state between manhood and boyhood, his “flesh more yielding, pale like distemper” (252). His boyish malleability makes him a more suitable match for teenaged Lucrezia than her mature husband. Moreover, they develop direct empathy for one another through their common obsession with art and their experiences of being orphaned from their families of origin and adopted into a new system headed by someone with more institutional power than their own—whether a marital home or an artistic workshop. Following Lucrezia’s saving of Jacopo’s life, the two develop a silent bond and later use their mutual knowledge of Neapolitan to conduct her rescue.

Jacopo’s presence allows O’Farrell to show Lucrezia encountering sexual desire, which she does not experience in her marriage. She notices that the feel of Jacopo’s paint-stained fingertips “causes concentric circles of heat to expand down her arm and up her neck” (381). For Lucrezia, this is desire mixed with “gentleness” (381), rather than the brutality she experiences in her marital bed; it makes her think that a new form of happiness is possible.

Il Bastianino is based on the historical figure of painter Sebastiano Filippi (1536-1602) of the Mannerist school of Ferrara. Mannerists distorted the classical anatomical style of High Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo, adding flourishes such as prominent hands or long necks. In O’Farrell’s novel, Il Bastianino is a dilettantish master painter of great renown whom Alfonso commissions to paint Lucrezia’s portrait. However, his assistant, Maurizio, reveals that he drinks a lot and does little of the work, merely adding finishing touches while the bulk is left to Jacopo. Il Bastianino, therefore, exploits the talents of others for his own reputation, following the hierarchical practice of artists in Renaissance Italy, who had workshops that included assistant painters specializing in areas such as landscape and cloth.

During his studio time with Lucrezia, Il Bastianino reveals his lascivious side, inventing excuses to readjust her clothing or touch her, giving a “secret, surreptitious squeeze” when Alfonso is not looking (330). His taking advantage of Lucrezia continues the exploitative thread of Relationships Between Men and Women and is the opposite of her dynamic with Jacopo.

Alfonso’s sister Elisabetta is pretty, “with the same dark eyes as her brother, but with a fragile face, high cheekbones and a curving red mouth” (291). Aged about 26 when Lucrezia meets her, she would be considered too old to be unmarried by the standards of the time. She coyly attests that no offer has yet tempted her, but marriage to her secret lover, Contrari, a lower-ranking guardsman, would be off-limits. Moreover, it is in Alfonso’s interests that Elisabetta remain unmarried; her production of an heir would usurp his bloodline.

Although Alfonso seeks to control Elisabetta, she understands the fullness of his scheme and does not respect him. Instead, she seeks illicit freedom with Contrari, and their hunting trips to the forest away from Alfonso’s gaze indicate her wish for a more equal, freely chosen Relationships Between Men and Women. Elisabetta’s seeking Lucrezia’s companionship may be a means of bolstering her position at court, as her mother warns her, but it is also based on genuine affection for the young bride. For her part, Lucrezia comes to admire Elisabetta and covet her informal, heartfelt relationship with a man.

However, Alfonso’s shocking gesture of strangling Contrari before Elisabetta’s eyes severs the bond between her and Lucrezia. As Elisabetta escapes to her brother Luigi’s house in Rome, she warns Lucrezia that while she can escape her brother, Lucrezia cannot.