The Marriage Portrait
Maggie O’Farrell has done it again. She has rendered up a heroine of flesh and blood, whim and heartache, from the annals of European history. O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait (2022) fictionalizes the brief life of Lucrezia de’ Medici who married the Duke of Ferrara (Modeno and Reggio as well) at age fifteen. As with O’Farrell’s last novel, Hamnet—also historical fiction—The Marriage Plot introduces readers to a vivacious young woman, bound in and restrained by her time, her class, and what everyone deems her destiny. This is novel rich in storytelling and moving prose. It is a masterpiece; one that transports readers to the regal rooms of sixteenth-century Florence and Ferrara.
O’Farrell opens her novel with epigraphs from Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Robert Browning’s “My Last Dutchess.” Boccaccio lived and wrote in fourteenth century Italy, yet the description of women’s lives that O’Farrell quotes sets the cultural context in which young Lucrezia comes of age. Browning’s poem, which first appeared in 1842 among his Dramatic Lyrics, is said to be in reference to a portrait of O’Farrell’s heroine. Browning gives the Duke of Ferrara, Lucrezia’s husband, the narrative voice; thus, Ferrara’s ominous address alludes to a violence and mystery, all while he courts a new bride’s hand. From the start, then, readers know there will be darkness, even murder, in The Marriage Portrait.
The novel opens in 1561, with Lucrezia and Alfonso, her husband, the Duke of Ferrara, sitting down to an intimate meal in a remote fortress. It is, the reader knows from the author’s note at the beginning of the novel, the final days of their marriage. Lucrezia will soon be dead. The notion that her husband means to kill her dawns on young Lucrezia; she is no fool: “The certainty that he means her to die is like a presence beside her, as if a dark-feathered bird of prey has alighted on the arm of her chair” (4). As quickly as she recognizes his treachery, the narrative jumps back to 1644, the year of Lucrezia’s birth. O’Farrell introduces her heroine lyrically, layering history and fiction together like two hues of paint on a canvas; and she does so in a notably present tense.
As Lucrezia’s story bounces between 1561—the year her cause of death will be attributed to “putrid fever”—and her the 1540s, the reader grows ever fonder of her. Lucrezia’s ferocity, her attention to detail, her artistic skill, and her role as an outsider, all make her a wildly compelling character; or so I think. It this investment in her, and the author’s note portending her coming death, that creates an urgency for the reader. Page after page, we draw nearer to the final scene, hoping against all odds that O’Farrell will provide some cunning escape, so alternate history for intelligent, young Lucrezia.
The Marriage Portrait, thus, keeps the reader engaged to the very last. It is a work of considerable craft that layers one metaphor upon another, one historical and literary reference after the last. Yes, there is a tiger (the American publication includes tiger stripes); yes, the Duke of Ferrara is as vile as Browning depicts in his famous poem. I encourage any lover of historical fiction to find their way to The Marriage Portrait. Readers are transported to sixteenth-century Italy, full of art, strict social codes, and opulent costumes. I fell in love with O’Farrell’s Hamnet immediately; and even after the emotionally-rich masterpiece of that novel, The Marriage Portrait did not disappoint. Rather, Lucrezia’s story in The Marriage Portrait is one of resilience and keen observation, as a young woman attempts to make her way—to survive—in a world of strict structure and limited opportunity for a noble woman.
Bibliography:
O’Farrell, Maggie. The Marriage Portrait. Alfred A. Knopf: 2022.
A Few Great Passages:
“She paints for a long time, standing pack from the tavolo, leaning in close. She progresses from bowl to honey to the pleats and wrinkles in the cloth. She navigates her course through the arrangement of objects, how they interact with each other, the spaces and conversations between them, shrinking herself to the size of a beetle so that she may wander through the crannies between peaches, along the interlocking hexagons of the honeycomb. She feels her way around the corresponding painting, using her brushes like feet or antennae, seeking a route through the unfamiliar terrain of the items, hacking her way through the undergrowth of the work” (201).
“If she is to survive this marriage, or perhaps to thrive within it, she must preserve this part of herself and keep it away from him, separate, sacred. She will surround it with a thorn-thicket or a high fence, like a castle in a folktale; she will station bare-toothed, long-clawed beasts at its doors. He will never know it, never see it, never reach it. He shall not penetrate it” (218-19).
