Portrait of a Young Girl and The Decameron
7:00 AM |
| Giovanni Battista Moroni, Portrait of a Young Girl, 1564 |
A rare portrait of someone so young, this young girl posing in such elegant clothing reflects the image of a young Ghismonda, placed on a pedestal by her obsessive father. In the first story of the fourth day in The Decameron, the possessive Tancredi, Prince of Salerno, kills his daughter’s secret lover because of his lack of rank. The daughter, Ghismonda, in grief, drinks her dead lover's heart blood with poison, and dies. Giovanni’s Portrait of A Young Girl follows the beginning of this same pattern.
Embellished with pearls, the young girl stiffly looks straight at the painter. However her hand’s playfulness lead the reminder of the child behind the parental decoration. Similarly, Ghismonda’s suppression, and overwhelming devotion brought upon her by her father ultimately led her to yield “to a man who was not [her] husband.” The fact he was of lower rank shows her rebellion against the standard her father unknowingly provided her. It was the elaborating, and smothering of his daughter that Tancredi went wrong. When I see Portrait of a Young Girl, I see a wealthy child forced to pose for hours, in order to add a prop to her family’s household. The child is a prop that the family would be unwilling “to part with,” just as Tancredi feels about Ghismonda
However, the bond Tancredi holds for his daughter surpasses any usual father daughter love. The obsession stage the Portrait of a Young Girl is in is only but a stage of every father/daughter relationship, and the daughter naturally will grow up, and be her own person-separate from her father’s image. But, Tancredi never outgrows this phase. Tancredi “was so devoted to her that he was in no hurry to make her a second marriage,” because letting her go the first time was hard enough of such a possessive man. Although odds are, the young girl in Moroni's portrait did not drink her dead lover’s heart besprinkled with poison, she probably did rebel against her father’s adornment at one time.
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