Here is a novel inspired by a poem describing a painting portraying a young woman who actually lived. Art and artifice are intrinsic to it. In Maggie O’Farrell’s imagining of 16th-century Italian courtly life, manners make the man, clothes make the woman, and an image is more durable than a person.
In 1558, Lucrezia, daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, was married to Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara. A year after entering her husband’s court in 1560, aged just 16, she died. Poison was suspected. Several portraits of Lucrezia survive. Nearly 300 years after her death, Robert Browning wrote My Last Duchess, a dramatic monologue in which Duke Alfonso displays a portrait of his late wife and allows the reader to deduce that – insanely jealous – he murdered her. Now O’Farrell has shuffled historical fact, portraiture and poetic fantasy together and used them as the basis for a piece of fiction in which a simple tale, of a girl forced too young into a dynastic marriage, is overlaid and embellished with elements from fairytale and myth.
Admirers of O’Farrell’s previous historical novel, Hamnet, may be nonplussed by this one. Where Hamnet’s emotional punch (read it and weep) was powered by its psychological and social realism, The Marriage Portrait is set in a world as fabulous as that of a millefleurs tapestry and inhabited by beings as flatly emblematic as embroidered ladies and their unicorns. There is a virgin heroine whose floor-length red hair, modestly confined in a pearl-decorated net, hints at rebellious energy. There is a devilish duke, handsome and cruel. Sisters come in pairs – the good (beautiful) one and the cross, ugly one. There is an old nurse whose gruff manner masks a kindly heart. There is the pure-hearted young man who might, perhaps, offer rescue.
These stock figures are surrounded by fabulous beasts. Lucrezia’s father keeps a menagerie in the cellars of his palace. When Lucrezia is a tiny child she demonstrates her specialness by reaching through the bars of a cage and stroking a tiger, unharmed. Later, but still in the nursery, she reveals another superpower, a skill in perspectival drawing that impresses the artist Giorgio Vasari. She paints pictures of birds, dead or captive, avatars of her imprisoned self. When Duke Alfonso is being kind he gives her a white mule. When he is being frightening he talks about killing wild boar, a sow and her young. Lucrezia herself feels that there is a beast within her that could one day “crawl out into the light, blinking, bristling, unfurling its filthy fists and opening its jagged red mouth”.
These animals, like the fantastic creatures writhing through the “grotteschi” decorations of Italian Renaissance palaces, hint at the untamed impulses contained by courtly rituals and cumbersome dresses. This is a book about a picture, and it is also pictorial. There is a lot going on in it under and around the surface narrative, in the way that there are other stories being enacted in the backgrounds of Renaissance paintings of biblical scenes. Late in the story, there is a banquet in the castle in Ferrara, when Lucrezia hears for the first time the singing of two castrati. As she listens, the narrative gaze moves around the table – lighting on a spaniel lapping at a dish, a woman wearing stuffed songbirds as ornaments in her hair, a man lasciviously handling a bowl of fruit. It could be a scene painted by Paolo Veronese.
O’Farrell’s prose, as fluent as ever, is more ornate than in earlier books. She alternates passages of plain prose with others rich in musical cadences and lavishly decorated with imagery and heightened vocabulary. A river laps at its banks “with lassitudinous ochre tongues”. A dress speaks a “glossolalia all of its own”, rustling and creaking, becoming an orchestra, or the rigging of a ship. Through similes and allusions more beasts enter the story, more complex emotions. Alfonso in the act of sex becomes a “water monster … seizing her with his webbed fingers, rubbing her with his scaled skin, the hidden gills in his neck pulsing and pulsing”.
The book opens on the night before he plans to kill Lucrezia. By the end of the first paragraph we know that she knows it. Short chapters recounting the events of the following hours alternate with much longer ones giving us the backstory from her childhood onwards. The entire narrative is framed by her impending murder. When she believes Alfonso loves her we are alive to the bitter irony. When she is momentarily afraid of him we know she is right to be. Horror stains the narrative, introduced by dreams and fantasies, and by the terrible screams Lucrezia hears one night, coming from her husband’s room in a battlemented tower of Ferrara’s grim castle. This horror, though, is never quite fully felt. In a surprise ending, which suggests O’Farrell doesn’t believe in it herself, she allows us to escape it.
As a child I approached history through fiction written by early 20th-century female novelists. Favourites included Violet Needham (The Woods of Windri), Margaret Irwin (Royal Flush), and – most pertinently here, in terms of subject matter – Marjorie Bowen’s darkly gorgeous The Viper of Milan, much admired by Graham Greene. Needham wrote for children. Irwin did not, but she took a girl (Minette, youngest child of Charles I) as her protagonist. Bowen was herself only 16 when she wrote The Viper: in 1906 it was repeatedly turned down by publishers shocked that such a young female author should be drawn to matters so unladylike. The Marriage Portrait belongs on the shelf alongside these classics. Finely written and vividly imagined, it is far from being simplistic, but there is an engaging simplicity to it that makes it feel not quite like a grown-up novel. Rather, it is a very good one to be read, as publishers used to say, by “children of all ages”.
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