Themes of concealment and invisibility persist throughout The Marriage Portrait. As a child, Lucrezia is constantly exploring passageways and hidden rooms, quietly skulking around the palazzo and collecting secrets and privileged information. As an adult, she comes to think of these passageways as a foundational part of herself, not just her surroundings—she likens her own secrets to unknown alleyways within herself, choosing to figuratively lock Alfonso out of certain places for her own emotional well-being. 

To Lucrezia, secrecy is safety. She secretly learns of her impending marriage to Alfonso, and she and Sofia conspire to hide her menses for a year to delay the proceedings. She secretly learns the Neapolitan dialect to eavesdrop on the nurses, which later allows her to covertly communicate with Jacopo. 

When she learns about underpaintings through her tutor’s examination of the stone marten portrait, she starts keeping secrets this way, too: she paints her truest desires and thoughts for just herself and then conceals them with paintings of subjects deemed more acceptable. Eventually, this understanding of her own multitudes allows her to see the same fractures as they occur in others. In the chapter “Man Asleep, Ruler at Rest,” she stares at Alfonso sleeping next to her and sees him as half a dozen men living in the same person:

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. There is the heir she met on the battlements, as a child, then the person behind the marten painting and the loops and dashes of the letters sent from France during the two-year wait for marriage, then the duke who claimed her at the altar, the person in the carriage, and the man in shirt sleeves who gave her a tour of the garden. And now, here is another: a sleeping satyr, with a naked chest, his unnerving lower half concealed by the folds and drapes of sheets.

At various points throughout the text, Lucrezia describes herself, favorably and unfavorably, as “invisible.” But in “Honey Water,” during her portrait sitting, she has the startling experience of perhaps being seen for the very first time by one of the artist’s assistants: 

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.

Being seen this way by Jacopo is the first of several encounters that recalibrate Lucrezia’s notion of what both visibility and romance might look like. Crucially, it is only because Jacopo truly sees her in this way that he also sees what a danger Alfonso is. Because he sees her, and by extension sees her circumstances, he helps her escape and survive.

Throughout the narrative of The Marriage Portrait, Lucrezia is routinely trapped by and subject to the power and control of the other characters. Her parents’ legal authority and social power keep her from living an everyday life as a youth, sheltering her in the palace and instilling harsh expectations for what is and isn’t deemed proper behavior. Eventually, this turns her into a political pawn and, against her will, she is married off to Alfonso for the sake of diplomatic relations.

Within her marriage to Alfonso, she is systematically stripped of her power. She is given freedom to roam the grounds at will, which...