The Marriage Portrait

The Marriage Portrait has been sitting unread on my shelf ever since I read the heartbreaking Hamnet. I knew this book was about a woman who tragically died very young and who may/may not have been murdered, and I wasn’t sure if I could take one more sad book.

Thankfully, when I finally picked it up last week, I found I loved the writing, and it’s not as tragic as I expected it to be.

About The Marriage Portrait

Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the palazzo: free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings, and devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding to the ruler of Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight: the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father just as quick to accept on her behalf.

Having barely left girlhood behind, Lucrezia must now enter an unfamiliar court whose customs are opaque and where her arrival is not universally welcomed. Perhaps most mystifying of all is her new husband himself, Alfonso. Is he the playful sophisticate he appeared to be before their wedding, the aesthete happiest in the company of artists and musicians, or the ruthless politician before whom even his formidable sisters seem to tremble?

As Lucrezia sits in constricting finery for a painting intended to preserve her image for centuries to come, one thing becomes worryingly clear. In the court’s eyes, she has one duty: to provide the heir who will shore up the future of the Ferranese dynasty. Until then, for all of her rank and nobility, the new duchess’s future hangs entirely in the balance.

~ Synopsis from goodreads

My Review

This book is pure class.

The book starts with Lucrezia’s childhood, focusing on one key incident: a tigress brought to the court of her father, Cosimo de’ Medici.

The animal was orange, burnished gold, fire made flesh; she was power and anger, she was vicious and exquisite.

Very soon, we identify Lucrezia as the tigress. She is a wild creature, unconventional, solitary, and confined in a gilded cage just like the animal she admires.

Even Alfonso, her husband, recognizes this and is frustrated by it.

There is something at the core of her, a type of defiance. There are times when I look at her and I can feel it – it’s like an animal that lives behind her eyes. But now see it I do not know how I missed it. It makes me fear that there will always be a part of her that will not submit or be ruled.

For someone who is a control freak like Alfonso, a wife like Lucrezia would be intolerable, and soon the tension starts to rise. Will she submit to him? Or will he get rid of her and replace her with someone more docile and fertile? I love how the writing in the book makes us doubt and gaslight ourselves. Is he actually planning to kill her, or is she mentally unwell? I loved how the writing conveyed that sense of suspense throughout the book. There are moments of tenderness between them.

It was hard to identify what was more startling – the possessive “my” or the disturbing tenderness of “dear,” or indeed the sight of her own name in his writing. No one had ever addressed her like that. She was somebody’s “dear,” somebody’s Lucrezia: the three words seemed to snake themselves around her, and she saw herself, just for a moment, encircled by a pair of arms, her body held inside an embrace.

But these moments are offset by incidents of brutality that repel both her and us.

The titular portrait is inspired by this real-life one, though the descriptions differ. In the book, this painting is commissioned by her husband Alfonso, and sounds magnificent.

Alfonso controls every detail of the painting – her pose, her clothing, her hair – all dictated by his strict instructions. But the painter infuses the portrait with a quiet defiance.

And now she sees, the look in the girl’s eye is lucid and charged. She stares out at the viewer with frankness close to defiance, her head high, her lips showing the hint of a smile.

I thought I knew how this novel would end. Throughout the read, you expect to reach its sad conclusion. But the ending took me by surprise, and that in itself makes this book totally worth it!

Overall, a solid plot, great historical detail, fantastic writing, social commentary that you can oddly relate to, and a hair-raising ending.