The Marriage Portrait

“Her husband is sitting down, not in his customary place at the opposite end but next to her, close enough that she could rest her head on his shoulder, should she wish; he is unfolding his napkin and straightening a knife and moving the candle towards them both when it comes to her with particular clarity, as if some colored glass has been put in front of her eyes, or perhaps removed from them, that he intends to kill her.”

O’Farrell juxtaposes the intimacy of Alfonso’s being so close that Lucrezia could rest her head on his shoulder with the violent imagery of a knife and her realization that he intends to approach her so that he can kill her. The imagery of light, both with reference to the candle and to the colored glass, reflects Lucrezia’s internal sense of revelation: Something obscure finally makes sense.

“Eleanora is a woman all too aware of her rarity and worth: she possesses not only a body able to produce a string of heirs, but also a beautiful face, with a forehead like carved ivory, eyes wide-set and deep brown, a mouth that looks well in both a smile and a pout. On top of all this she has a quick and mercurial mind.”

This description of Eleanora encapsulates an ideal of Renaissance womanhood. She combines the virtues of fertility and beauty, which a patriarchal society seeks in all women, with an upper-class, educated woman’s intelligence. While her physical features are supremely feminine, her “mercurial mind”—referring to the Roman god of communication and wit, Mercury—indicates an aspiration to live in the public realm as well as the domestic one.

“She felt the secret of the tigress move within her, like a bright ribbon weaving in and out of her ribs.”

The surreal yet visceral description of Lucrezia’s wonder at seeing the tigress weaving in and out of her ribs like a ribbon conveys her capacity for astonishment. The simile of the ribbon echoes the shape of the tigress’s stripes and indicates Lucrezia’s feeling that she has absorbed the animal’s essence. The secrecy of this experience foreshadows the way Lucrezia lives, staying quiet about the things that excite her because they do not conform to social expectations of how a young woman should behave.