The Marriage Portrait(93)
Emilia is excited, clapping her hands, going up to the skirt and stroking her palm over its whispering silk, picking up a sleeve, then putting it down, chattering about the fine cloth, the embroidery, the bold pattern. Even Clelia has managed to raise what might pass as a smile. She, too, cannot keep from touching the dress.
Lucrezia stands to let them clothe her. She raises her arms, she drops them, she turns, she bows her head, keeping her face averted, so that her gaze is trained on the sky, which is grey and bilious, hoarding rain.
When Emilia and Clelia lead her to the mirror, she sees a person looking back at her with a faintly perturbed expression. The dress is slender, with a skirt that spills and swirls around her. A high collar rises up around her neck, making it hard to turn her head: the lace claws at her throat. Her arms are swathed, invisible, inside huge ballooning sleeves that rear over her shoulders, and end just below her wrists: her hands appear like the pale and ineffectual paws of a mouse, peeping out of frilled and ornate cuffs. It is like nothing she has ever worn in her life: the waist clamps her middle, the enormous sleeves and gathered skirt making her seem as inconsequential and slight as a reed. She cannot recognise the person she is in this gown. It doesn’t look like the dresses she brought from Florence but it doesn’t look like what Elisabetta, Nunciata and the other women at court wear. What, she wonders, as she lifts an arm, as she pushes a toe against the hem, does it signify that her husband had this made for her, that this was how he wanted her to appear in the marriage portrait? Most disturbing is the fabric itself: dark red with a raised black damask pattern, which, if stared at, can seem to recede behind the red at certain moments, then leap out and impose itself on top the next. Is the black over the red or the red over the black? Lucrezia stares and stares but cannot make it out, cannot see if the intricately wrought black lattice imprisons the red or sets it free. It makes her feel dizzy, uncertain, as if the relations and boundaries between things might all begin to collapse and merge.
In the Salone dei Giochi, among his frescos of men wrestling and fighting, stands Il Bastianino. When he sees her, he gives a wide grin, revealing his mouthful of snaggled, wolfish teeth. “Yes, yes,” he says, folding his arms and shaking his hair out of his eyes, “it is perfect, Your Grace, quite perfect. What a portrait this will be.”
Alfonso stands with one foot resting on a stool; in his hand, he holds a book or pamphlet, which he doesn’t close. He regards Lucrezia over the top of whatever he is reading. Il Bastianino is ushering her towards a chair, where he arranges the dress around her, all the while letting out a litany of compliments and hyperbole, smoothing the skirts, twitching the hem one way, then the other, inching it back so that the tips of her shoes are revealed. He places a cushion behind her back which forces her to sit up straight, moves her arm to the table.
He then takes three rapid paces backwards, then another, more slowly, and another. “Now,” he says, holding out his arms, as if he means to rush forward and embrace her. “Do you see?”
Two figures move towards him: Lucrezia sees them advance from opposite sides of the large salon; one is Alfonso, walking from where he had been reading near the fireplace; the other comes from the furthest reaches of the room, where Il Bastianino has set up his materials. One is tall, with long legs and boots that echo on the tiled floor, the other is stockier, with a thick mass of curls and shoes that slide noiselessly over the floor.
One is her husband; the other, she sees, as the quivering light reflecting up off the moat falls on him, is the apprentice Jacopo.
Lucrezia is immediately conscious of the ridiculous figure she must cut, sitting as she is, enclosed in a lake of finery. She feels the tightness of her bodice, the prickle of starch in her collar, the shuddering motion of the ruby that hangs from her neck. Jacopo doesn’t look at her. He comes to stand behind Il Bastianino and looks perhaps at the floor in front of her, the hem of her dress. He holds, between his fingers, sticking out like weapons, a brush, a charcoal stick, a palette knife, a small phial, perhaps some type of fluid to cleanse the brushes and canvases. The skin over his knuckles is raw, reddened, and stained with flecks of colour: madder red, orpiment yellow. She wonders for a moment what he had been painting to have accrued those colours. The wings of a cherub? The petals of a flower? The favourite pet of a patron’s family?
A movement to the side of Jacopo distracts her from this train of thought. Alfonso is nodding, one hand tucked into his giubbone. Then he smiles and, among all his many yet rarely appearing smiles, it is her favourite: unguarded, spontaneous, wide, involving his whole face, transforming it from forbidding to lively and handsome.
“There she is,” he murmurs, the words reaching her where she sits, across the room, and she smiles back at him. Then he adds: “My first duchess.”
She is still smiling when she sees Il Bastianino direct a fleeting, puzzled frown towards the floor. Jacopo turns his head slowly towards Alfonso, which in itself seems shocking—a commoner in rough clothing daring to behold a duke at close quarters.
But Alfonso amends his utterance to “My beautiful duchess,” and Il Bastianino composes his face once more into an obsequious smirk, and Jacopo turns away, and Lucrezia feels the strange buzz of tension and fear move further away from her, like a craft on a river.
That is what he meant, she is certain. “Beautiful,” not “first.” Why would he say “first,” when she is his wife, his only wife? A slip of the tongue, a momentary lapse. She herself has them all the time, words inserting themselves without warning, forcing entry without permission or consciousness. Utterances inappropriate and unintended. He would have meant to say “beautiful duchess,” not “first duchess,” because “first duchess” makes no sense, none at all: it sounds as if he believes there will be others, in the years to come. And that in itself is so wild, so strange a notion, as to be impossible.