Art, Voyeurism, and Control Theme Analysis

The tigress swung her vivid, complex face around, as if to examine the person behind such a caress, as if to ascertain its meaning. To look into her eyes was to behold the visage of an incandescent, forbidden deity.

Lucrezia and the tigress regarded each other, for a stretched moment, the child’s hand on the beast’s back, and time stopped for Lucrezia, the turning world stilled. Her life, her. name, her family and all that surrounded her receded and became void. She was aware only of her own heart, and that of the tigress, pulsing inside the ribs, drawing in scarlet blood and shooting it out again, flooding their veins.

Her husband’s face comes in and out of visibility. She watches, with fixed fascination, as his expression changes with every flicker of the candle: first thoughtful, then kind, now stern, now animated, now forbidding, now handsome, then amorous and then detached. It is true: she has no idea what he is capable of, and she does not want to find out.

She looked at the delicate, scaled feet, which would never again cling to the twig of a tree or the stone lintel of a window; she looked at the folded, layered wings, which would not be outstretched, catching the upwards motion of a breeze, would not carry the bird over roofs and streets. She looked at her painting, saw where it had failed to capture the exact line of the beak, the lustrous green of the soft throat.

Sofia’s “no” tolled through her head. No, she had said, definite and sure. She had looked at Vitelli and said: No.

Lucrezia shut her ears and mind to everything around her. She propped the painting of the stone marten in front of her, leaning it against a vase. She gazed at it, gazed and gazed. She had the strange and unaccustomed sensation of having been observed and, perhaps, understood. How odd it was that the person who seemed to comprehend her, to see into her very soul, should be a man who had glimpsed her only once.

“No.” Eleonora’s jewels tinkle as she shakes her head. “I saw him but I pretended not to. I knew he was there. I knew he admired me. I knew, in that moment, how things would be.”

She tightens her fingers around the rosary, once more, and thinks of the small painting she has been working on for weeks: a nurse standing in the middle of a rug, looking defiantly up at a tall adviser; rabbits, many of them, gambol delightedly around her feet, their silver-brown coats glinting in the light. If looked at very closely, it could be seen that the nurse has her fingers crossed. Lucrezia made it specially for Sofia, the keeper of all her secrets.

“We shall have to have you painted, one day soon,” he mutters; she feels the words leave his lips and land on her cheeks as tiny explosions of air. “How the court artists will fight over the task. They will all want to do it. The very paint shall adore you.” He surveys her brow, her eyes, her chin. “A portrait…or perhaps a classical scene. Hmm.” He seems to be conversing with himself so Lucrezia makes no reply.

Here, on the pillow next to hers, is yet another version of the man she has been given to. There are, it seems to her, many Alfonsos, all fitted inside one body. […] And now, here is another: a sleeping satyr, with a naked chest, his unnerving lower half concealed by the folds and drapes of the sheets.

What a boon it is, what a piece of luck, to be able to take her time like this, to examine every part of him.

“Hold it in your mind that you are my duchess. We need to see this in your bearing, in your features, in everything about you.”

Lucrezia presses her lips together, then nods. “I will try.”

When Alfonso steps away, she sees that Jacopo’s eyes are resting upon her. Lucrezia looks at Jacopo and Jacopo looks back. His drawing hand has ceased, hovering over the page. She has, she can see, become visible, no longer the subject of his sketch, but as a person.

Lucrezia suddenly sees that some vital part of her will not bend, will never yield. She cannot help it—it is just the way she is built.

[…]

If she is to survive this marriage, or perhaps even to thrive within it, she must preserve this part of herself and keep it away from him, separate, sacred. She will surround it with a thorn-thicket or a high fence, like a castle in a folktale; she will station bare-toothed, long-clawed beasts at its doors. He will never know it, never see it, never reach it. He shall not penetrate it.

They see her as the portal, the means to their family’s survival. Lucrezia wants to fasten her cloak about herself, to hide her hands up her sleeves, to tie her cap to her head, to pull a veil over her face. You shall not look at me, she wants to say, you shall not see into me. I will not be yours. How dare you assess me and find me lacking? I am not La Fecundissima and never will be.

What liberty she gains by casting off her identity, by donning Emilia’s clothes, what fortuities are hers! She can go anywhere, be party to anything. These people do not see servants, do not recognise them as vessels of judgement or emotion. A maid in a brown dress might as well be a table or a sconce on the wall. She has access suddenly to the private, hidden life of the castello, the wrong side of its embroidery, with all the knots and weave and secrets on display.

She is aware, to an almost unbearable degree, of the different gazes in this room, and the way they stream towards her, like the sticky, silken threads of a spider’s web. That of her husband, somewhere to the left of her, standing just behind her; that of the artist, no doubt comparing her appearance today, haggard and ill, with that of the woman he rendered into paint only a few weeks ago […] and that of Jacopo. His is unlike any of the others. It is a beam of comprehension, from his eyes to her. It draws up awareness and knowledge as a thirsty plant will water. Does he see that she will die?

In the painting is a woman who looks like her, or a version of her, or an ideal—she cannot tell which. This is her, yet not her; it is so disturbingly like her, while being completely unlike her. It is Lucrezia, but it is also someone else. […] She stares out at the viewer with frankness close to defiance, her head high, her lips showing the hint of a smile. The dress, with its voluminous dark red folds, and its pattern that either imprisons or cringes behind the colour, seems tame and insignificant, utterly overshadowed by the boldness of the girl’s expression, the way she seems to pose questions to the viewer: what do you want from me, why have you interrupted me, whatever do you mean by gazing at me like that?

“It is hard to define. 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. I had no knowledge of it prior to our marriage, no sense of it. I was assured of her balanced disposition, her good health. She seemed so biddable, charmingly so, young and innocent. But now I 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.”

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.