Lucrezia de’ Medici by Alessandro Allori

Alessandro Allori - Lucrezia de’ Medici, 1560, oil on panel, North Carolina Museum of Art

One of the poems that stuck with me when I first started to read Eng Lit properly as a young student is Robert Browning’s sinister and chilling My Last Duchess. This well-known verse ventriloquises the speaking voice of Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara who talks to a visitor about a portrait of his recently deceased wife, Lucrezia, a picture that hangs on the wall of his palace. It (the poem) reads as a monologue (we don’t hear the response of the visitor) and only by degrees as the lines unfold do we begin to understand that Lucrezia’s death may not have been due to natural causes. The visitor in the poem is an envoy, come to arrange a new marriage, and we are left to imagine the creeping suspicion and realisation forming in his mind just as it does in ours as readers.

It’s a poem about male power and control, about boastfulness, jealousy and entitlement. The duke reveals that he didn’t like his late wife’s spirit, her heart that was ‘too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed’ by other men. Basically, she was too flirtatious for his liking, so we infer that he had her killed because he could do so with impunity - murder was simply his prerogative. It’s a demonstration of an unchallenged power to silence others, all communicated while looking at the portrait, at the last Duchess before any new one appears on the scene. Lucrezia, it seems, was quick to blush and the artist might have attempted to depict the ‘spot of joy’ on the Duchess’s cheek, maybe brought there by somebody other than the duke, and then more disquietingly ‘the faint / Half-flush that dies along her throat.’ It’s as if the duke has commissioned the painting to stand there to be admired as his beautiful possession; but he has muted what was once too alive, too jealousy-inducing. All of this is largely Browning’s invention, it should be said. Most scholars believe that Lucrezia actually died of tuberculosis although rumours that she had been poisoned began to circulate not long after her demise. The duke went on to marry twice more.

Maggie O’Farrell ‘s beautifully imagined novel The Marriage Portrait  fantasizes Lucrezia’s survival as if in performance of a kind of wish-fulfilment. It fictionalises the painter that made her portrait as a character named Bastiano, who plays a critical role in the plot. But there is a real painting of her by Alessandro Allori that pictures her in all her finery. Allori’s dates are 1535 – 1607, so he would have been 25 when he painted this portrait while his sitter was just fifteen, albeit that this was considered to be perfectly adult for the purposes of arranged noble marriages. I don’t believe that we are meant to read Bastiano directly as Allori, but while the details of the latter’s works are pretty well-documented, his life and character remain relatively sketchy, so open to O’Farrell’s fictionalisation.

The real Allori paints Lucrezia unsmilingly and looking slightly to his right and downwards, perhaps embarrassed or otherwise unable to hold the eye of the young man looking at her so closely. Having said this, their respective stations in life could not be more different, so any imagined awkward attraction between them would have been unthinkable. She was a daughter of the hugely powerful and wealthy Cosimo I de' Medici and now wife to the influential and powerful Duke of Ferrara. She is shown appropriately dressed in a well-fitted black velvet dress and with jewels and pearls adorning the diadem on her head and on the girdle draped around her slender waist and with more large pearls circling her neck and hanging from her ears. Allori by contrast would have been a humble artisan in her eyes. He was orphaned aged five and adopted by his uncle, the artist Bronzino (who made him his pupil) and went on to create art that was inspired by, and imitative of, Michealangelo. There is undoubted skill demonstrated in this portrait, but in my IMHO judgement, it falls short of masterpiece status. I think it is more interesting for the subject than the artist; more for the poetry and the novels that Lucrezia’s story inspired. But despite any shortcomings of artistic innovation, the viewer can’t help but feel touched by Lucrezia’s presence.

The three-quarter length figure is set against a sombre, tenebrous background and painted in a slightly stiff, artificial or Mannerist style, and seems to be more about the wealth represented rather than the character. Her left hand rests a little awkwardly on some kind of orb, perhaps to represent the aristocratic worlds dominated by her authoritative father and influential husband, while her right holds to her breast a jewel-encrusted gold locket or broach between finger and thumb, perhaps to represent her prized virginity, locked away from the marriage bed until she reached full maturity. The dress puffs at her shoulders and her high collar projects an authority of rank that perhaps this teenager was yet to fully inhabit (speculation, I know). The multiple pearls worn by Lucrezia not only represent wealth but also symbolise her purity. That orb, half hidden by her hand, possibly to suggest some equivocal concealment as much as dominion, also looks like an unfeasibly oversized and flawless pearl too.

O’Farrell makes some interesting comments in her novel about the dress style worn by Lucrezia and shows her to be very much under the influence of her mother, Eleanor of Toledo. The Spanish style was more severe and less showy than was normal for the upper echelons of Florentine society, and I think this formality and stiffness idea is drawn from Allori’s portrait. The dress is clearly beautifully made with luxurious fabrics, the black velvet intercut with silver grey silk, but these colours are reserved and stately rather than joyful and the cut of the dress is highly structured rather than elaborate or gaudy. O’Farrell uses the tension between the fashion norms of the court and Lucrezia’s need to conform to her mother’s preferences to highlight Lucrezia’s sense of estrangement.

Robert Browing saw a copy of the portrait when visiting the Palazzo Pitti in Florence in the winter of 1845-46 and the story goes that he became intrigued by Lucrezia’s gaze and then by the accounts of her arranged marriage and suspicious death. He too fictionalises the artist in his poem, referring to him as Fra Pandolf. This is interesting because not only does it conjure up the names of other Franciscan or Dominican artist brothers (the title Fra, meaning brother, is an honorific), such as Fra Angelico or Fra Filipo Lippi, Renaissance artists working roughly one hundred years before Allori, but each of these produced works that dealt almost exclusively with religious subjects.  I think Browning is underlining a couple of subtle ideas here; not only is there a very clear hierarchy involved, a real difference of rank between the duke and the lowly ‘brother’ painter under his command, but that painter would also create works that were typically devotional; they would hang on the wall to be admired for their artistry, yes, but were also intended to inspire piety and reverence. In other words, making the artist someone holy, a picturer of the sacred, is another Browning indicator of the duke’s absence of conscience, of the disconnect between art and morality in his mind.

Towards the end of the poem, the duke alludes to the dreadful truth of Lucrezia’s fate: ‘I gave commands; / then all smiles stopped together’. He has put an end to her youthful and displeasing coquetry but through the stasis of the painting, he has exerted the ultimate control; ‘There she stands / As if alive’. He goes on to talk about another fictional artist, Claus of Innsbruck, from whom he has commissioned a bronze statue of himself, so that Lucrezia, once living and breathing, now just takes her place among any number of other artworks in the duke’s no doubt extensive collection, destined for cool appraisal, a simulacrum of warm flesh and blood.