Destiny vs. Chance Theme Analysis

Eleonora’s mind, as she sets down her stylus, raises herself from her desk and walks through the archway towards her daughter, fixes once more on Lucrezia’s conception, the way her eyes had passed over the maps of ancient lands, had been focused on strange and wild seas, filled with dragons and monsters, beset by winds that might blow a ship far off course. What a mistake for her to make! How she has been haunted by it, punished for it!

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 very body felt unfamiliar to her, as if it wasn’t hers, as if these arms and legs and head belonged to another, as if she could no longer tell it how to sit in a chair, to raise a spoon to the lips, to breathe in and out. Dread began to cover her, like moss on a stone. There was a sense that something or someone had crept up unseen and now stood at her back. She sat there in front of her empty plate, with a growing horror of what was behind her. […] It was, she knew, without looking around, her death. If this marriage went ahead, she would die, she suddenly saw, perhaps now, perhaps later, but soon. She would never get away from this spectre, this ghost of her own demise.

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.

“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.”

“A boiling pot fell. It missed you by this much.” Emilia holds up a hand, finger and thumb indicating a tiny space between them. “You screamed when it happened, as if you had been the one hurt, and you hugged me very tightly. I’ve never forgotten that.”

“Emilia, how terrible. I—”

Emilia gives a sad smile. “Better that it was me and not you.”

“Better that it had been neither of us.”

“But if it had to be one of us, it was better that it was me who was disfigured.”

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?

It seems to her that there is another Lucrezia is in the room, one who cowers still in the bed, plaintively asking her what on earth she is doing, imploring her to stay here, where she is safe and warm.

Her choice, as she sees it, standing there clinging to the outer wall of the fortezza, is death by poisoning, by stealth, death in her chamber, perhaps with a fever, with spasms of pain, unbearable and unsupportable, vomiting into a basin. Or a death out here, somewhere in the woods or out on the road, in the open countryside, with Alfonso bearing down on her on horseback, perhaps wielding his sword. She will turn and face him, she will look him in the eye, daring him to do it, defying his mastery of her. This is what she will do, if it comes to it. She will.

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.