The Marriage Portrait – Review

The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O'Farrell

Before the end of the first page, Lucrezia di Cosimo de' Medici is certain that she is going to die. She is only sixteen, young and naive, but she has never been more sure of anything in her life. This is where the readers are dropped into the story. No pre-amble, no set-up, no narrative pleasantries to ease us in - before we have any sort of context by which to orientate ourselves, O'Farrell plunges us into the plot. How on earth did this situation come about? we ask ourselves. Why would Alfonso want to murder his wife? And how is Lucrezia so sure that he's going to do it? It's a brilliant opening, and not just because it startles us: it lends a tragic chill to the rest of the novel. We know how Lucrezia's story is going to end, and as O'Farrell leads us through her birth, her childhood, her courtship, her marriage, our knowledge of her demise weighs like a stone.

Lucrezia, we discover, is a fantastically spirited young woman. Headstrong, vivacious and shrewd, she spends her childhood in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence refusing to be pinned down. She's the odd one out of her siblings, small and restless and curious; she outperforms her brothers in all their academic pursuits, and spends most of her leisure time in the servants' quarters painting wild scenes from her imagination. She's untameable, the bane of her mother's perfect brood, and we fall in love with her. So it's heartbreaking when we learn that, at the age of fifteen, she is to be married off to Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, with the sole purpose of producing an heir.

In this echelon of society in the Italian Renaissance, bloodline was everything. Your family was your dynasty, and your grip on political power depended on the existence of a successor. Women were for producing babies - nothing else. Lucrezia, feisty, characterful, and still very young indeed, finds herself a political pawn in this sickening game: Alfonso's duchy is crumbling before his eyes, and as she is bound into marriage with him, Lucrezia has one job. Conceive a son. O'Farrell weaves her story with such feeling; this cold political arrangement was the unjust reality for so many women, and as the childless days go by and we begin to see flashes of ruthlessness in Alfonso's character, we want to weep for the poor trapped Lucrezia. 

One thing I absolutely loved about O'Farrell's prose was the way this sense of entrapment permeated every page. She used tenses with great effect: sometimes sections were written in present progressive (Lucrezia is sitting at the table; her husband is pouring her drink, saying...). This gave the unnerving sense that events are continually happening around her; Lucrezia sits, disempowered and dissociated in a suspended present, whilst Alfonso is moving, orchestrating, directing. 

Then there was the imagery. The whole book was suffused with metaphors of entrapment. Lucrezia's father keeps a wild tiger caged in his underground menagerie; fierce and beautiful with fur like liquid bronze, she snarls from behind her bars - but she will consent to being stroked by Lucrezia, a kindred spirit. All Lucrezia's clothing is symbolic too: her wedding dress has to be tightly laced, her hair knotted and plaited and pinned, and there's a collar of rubies heavy at her throat - her clothing contains her, dwarfs her. I think my favourite image of all was Alfonso's kiss: '[he] presses his lips to hers - a brief, emphatic pressure. It reminds her of her father, bringing his seal down on top of a document, marking it as his.' These metaphors weren't subtle (in fact the parallels were strikingly overt) but by deliberately drawing our attention to all these layers of entrapment, O'Farrell constructs a rich and vivid setting in which the female experience is utterly stifling.

The final thing I loved was the marriage portrait after which the book is named. Lucrezia is painting pictures all the time, and her artworks are vibrant, arresting, alive. The act of painting is liberating, and she imbues every subject with colour and motion, bringing the inanimate to life. But when Alfonso has Lucrezia painted, she has to pose like a statue for hours on end, so that her whole being can be flattened into a likeness. Art can animate the non-human, but it forces Lucrezia into a kind of living death. The counterargument of course is that the painting immortalises her - the novel's epigraph is from the Robert Browning poem said to be inspired by Lucrezia herself: That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive... Lucrezia lives on, in paint and now in literature - but she'll be remembered as a woman entrapped.

All in all, this was a beautiful, masterful, sinister, heartbreaking read, exquisitely written and full of feeling. I highly recommend it.