The Marriage Portrait(119)
The Duke Alfonso does not receive them himself but sends his trusted adviser, Leonello Baldassare, to the courtyard to greet them, when they reach Ferrara. Baldassare communicates the Duke’s regret that grief at his wife’s passing compels him to remain in his apartment.
The Florentine physician and emissary are shown to the castello state room, where a coffin stands on a table. Even from the doorway, the scent is overwhelming—the sweetish, cloying odour of decay. It has, the servant stationed at the door says, apologetically, been five days since the Duchess’s passing. What the men see within the coffin is discoloured, bloated, blackened and bruised. It looks barely human: decaying matter swathed in a rose silk dress with a dark damask pattern. The physician takes in the Duchess’s rosary, which has been twisted into the hands, the purplish tint to the fingernails, the plait of pale hair which coils into the neck—strange how the hair can fade in death; there is little sign of the red in the Duchess’s tresses but he has seen this phenomenon before. Behind him, the emissary retches meekly into a handkerchief.
They will depart, with no small shudder, from the gates of the Ferrara castello. They will ride back, and report what they found to the Grand Duke, omitting the parts about the putrefaction, the smell and the retching. The Duchess looked peaceful, they will say instead, and at rest. She was laid out beautifully and fittingly: a duchess to the last.
A Mass will be said in Florence, in Santa Maria Novella, where Lucrezia was married. Her mother will weep throughout; her father will grip his wife’s hand, his face white, his teeth set.
The coffin of Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrara, is taken with great ceremony, from the castello, through the streets, to a monastery in the south of the city. Citizens line the streets; they throw flowers; they cry; they look with pity on the set face of their Duke, so stoic, so brave. The Duchess is interred in the family tomb, beneath a slab of marble, which is engraved with a crest that is half her father’s and half her husband’s and the words: Wife of Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara.
The marriage portrait is hung in the Duke’s private chamber, covered at all times in heavy velvet drapes. No one is permitted to pull back the curtain and look upon the Duchess’s face without the Duke’s express permission. He keeps her there, hidden from view. Alfonso retreats from court, and from the world, for several months, as is perhaps only to be expected after such a loss. He is not seen either in the castello or in the city. Some say that he has taken himself off to one of his country villas; others report with certainty that the Duke has shut himself inside his rooms in the castello, where he sits, brooding over the portrait of his deceased wife.
Then a citizen sees his familiar silhouette up on the walkway surrounding the tower—tall, hawkish, hands behind back—looking out over the province. The rear of the castello chapel is once again occupied during the daily rehearsals of the evirati. By late spring, in the early mornings, it is possible to hear the clatter of hoofs as the Duke and his men go out riding.
As the summer approaches its end, it is said on the streets of Ferrara that the Duke has entered into negotiations with an Austrian family, for the hand of their daughter.
* * *
Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrara, pulls shut the small, hidden door of the fortezza behind her. She takes a leap from the ledge, brown gown billowing out around her. She lands on the frost-hard grass below, and almost before her feet make contact, she is running.
The ground is unstable, pitted with holes, tussocks and marshy patches, but she keeps going, stumbling, her muscles weak and aching from her illness, almost falling but pulling herself up.
Jacopo is waiting in the trees—she hopes. He will be there—he must be there. He promised he would be, just as he promised to fix the lock on the door.
They will make their way north-east, Jacopo and Lucrezia, via back roads, to a city of uncertainty, where land and sea meet and mingle with each other, where the streets are water, where houses seem to float on bolts of turquoise silks, where she will learn to propel a boat, standing up in the stern, her skirts hitched up around her knees, the wet pole gripped in both hands, dwelling after dwelling sliding by, the windows framing endless portraits of people lighting candles, turning towards each other, lifting infants to their shoulders, putting down pots, shaking clothes in the air, living, eating, loving, talking.
Later—much later—there will be a craze in the city for the work of one particular artist. The paintings are small enough to be held in the palm of a hand, and some collectors decide not to hang them on the wall but to keep them on a table, so that they may be handled and passed around, as a novelty or conversation piece. They are almost all of animals: minks and cats and monkeys, imperious peacocks, spotted cheetahs, mules, lambs, oxen and doves. The paint, while applied thinly, has an intriguing layered quality, standing up from the tavola on which it has been applied, by the artist’s meticulous and loving hand. The people who collect them—the rich, the dissolute, the aristocrats, the rulers, the noblemen and -women, the courtiers, the bankers, the princes, the courtesans—whisper among themselves that beneath the uppermost painting are said to be other, hidden, secret underpaintings, sometimes many of them, sometimes none at all. Only the bravest, or perhaps the most rash, are ever tempted to take a cloth soaked in a solution of vinegar and alcohol, and rub away at the work, to dissolve the colours, to erase and wash away the iridescent wings and ochre beaks, the resplendent sprays of feathers or the gleaming umber of hides, the sentient and watchful gloss of bestial eyes. Those who have done so, it is said, have discovered quite a different scene underneath: classical compositions of warring deities or landscapes never seen by a human eye, or triptychs of portraits, gazing back at the viewer. Always, in these miniature underpaintings, there is the face of one particular woman, in a crowd, perhaps, or as a dryad in the background. There she will be, often looking out sideways, addressing the viewer with an enigmatic, unfathomable gaze, always with the air of someone who cannot quite believe her good fortune, to be a nymph, swimming in a warm sea, or a peasant with a basket of peaches. But others who worked away at dissolving these paintings have found nothing at all, just a plain piece of tavola, carefully sanded to a silken grain.