“A Portrait” (“Un ritratto”)

Translated by Robin Pickering-Iazzi

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “A Portrait” (“Un ritratto”), tr. Robin Pickering-Iazzi. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2025.

“A Portrait” (“Un ritratto”) made its initial appearance in the daily newspaper Corriere della Sera on June 21, 1914. A few years later, in 1917, it was included in the miscellany collection And Tomorrow, Monday (E domani, lunedì), published by Treves in Milan. Its journey continued in 1928, when Pirandello decided to include it in Candelora, the thirteenth Collection of Stories for a Year, which brought together sixteen narratives, commonly referred to as the “Milanese tales,” a name that reflects their shared origin as all were first published in Milan.

In this deeply introspective tale, Pirandello explores the lingering effects of childhood trauma through the character of Stefano Conti. The story unfolds when the narrator—an old childhood friend—pays an unexpected visit, unintentionally prompting Stefano to confront a long-suppressed memory linked to a mysterious portrait they happen to observe together. What emerges is a narrative steeped in emotional intensity, where jealousy and existential disillusionment intermingle as Pirandello returns to some of his most enduring themes: the instability of identity, the fragility of human emotions, and the shattering of comforting illusions. Stefano’s visible distress when asked about the boy in the portrait slowly gives way to a painful confession. He recounts the moment he discovered that his mother had a son from a previous marriage, who became for him just a brother he had never known existed. The boy had died young, but this fact did little to mitigate Stefano’s sense of betrayal. The revelation destroyed his illusion that he alone occupied his mother’s love and emotional world. Suddenly, she was no longer his in the same exclusive, almost sacred way. She became, in his eyes, a woman with a past and affections that extended beyond him, causing a rupture that deeply unsettled the foundations of his identity. The portrait thus becomes a silent but potent symbol of this fracture: a haunting reminder of the unattainable wholeness Stefano once imagined and has forever lost.

Pirandello structures the story within a distinctly modernist frame, one in which characters grapple with dislocated identities and fractured perceptions of reality. In fact, Stefano’s crisis is not just personal, but it reflects a larger philosophical dilemma. As with many of Pirandello’s protagonists, he suffers a double displacement: losing both his sense of self and his relation to someone else who is central to his world. The image of the mother, which was previously idealized and unchanging, is now recast as someone unfamiliar and even unknowable. This destabilization of relational certainty lies at the heart of Pirandello’s tragicomic vision of humor, which he theorized in his essay On Humor (L’umorismo, 1908): once the scaffolding of our illusions collapses, so does our sense of who we are.

The story channels Pirandello’s enduring preoccupation with illusion and its collapse, linking it to many others in his corpus. Like Mattia Pascal in The Late Mattia Pascal (Il fu Mattia Pascal, 1904) or the six Characters of Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, 1921), in this story Stefano finds himself caught between lived experience and a disconcerting reality he can neither control nor deny. His emotional breakdown is the price he pays for clinging to a vision of emotional totality that does no stand up to closer scrutiny. The portrait, in this sense, does more than evoke a lost past: it reflects a deeper psychological dissonance, akin to that found in an earlier short story, “With Other Eyes” (“Con altri occhi,” 1901), or in seminal plays such as Henry IV (Enrico IV, 1922), and As You Desire Me (Come tu mi vuoi, 1930) where the act of seeing (or being seen) becomes inseparable from questions of selfhood and truth.

The Editors

“Stefano Conti?”

“Yes, Signore…. Come this way, make yourself comfortable.”[1]

And the maid ushered me into a lavish parlor.

What a strange feeling I had at being addressed with the word “Signore” on the doorstep of my childhood friend’s home! I was a “Signore” now. And certainly Stefano Conti was a “Signore” too, at thirty-five or thirty-six years old.

I remained standing in the gloomy, dimly lit parlor, looking with an indefinable sense of irritation at the new accent tables and cabinets placed around as if only for show.

Those pieces of furniture certainly weren’t there waiting for anybody in that parlor, tucked-away and always kept shut.  The sense of sorrow I felt while looking at them now made the furnishings appear as if they were astonished to see me among them—not hostile, but not inviting either.

By now I had long been used to the pieces of antique furniture in country homes—comfortable, solid, and familiar—which acquired an almost patriarchal soul from long use and all the memories of a calm, healthy life that makes them dear to us. Those new pieces of furniture stood around me stiffly, as if comprising all the rules of polite society. It was clear they would have suffered and been offended by even a slight transgression of those rules.

“Long live my shabby couch,” I thought, “my large, soft, old shabby jute couch that knows my hearty slumbers on long summer afternoons and doesn’t get offended by contact with my ugly shoes, muddied with clay, and the ashes that fall from my old pipe!”

But upon looking up at a wall, I suddenly felt a mingling of astonishment and strange uneasiness as I seemed to discern my same discomfort and my same sorrow, though much more intense, verging on anguish, in an oil portrait that depicted a young boy, sixteen to seventeen years old.[2]

I stayed there looking at him, as if caught out in an act of betrayal. It seemed as if, while I was making those observations about the furnishings in the parlor, unbeknownst to me, ever so silently, someone had opened a little window, up high on the wall, and had looked out of it to spy on me.

“You’re right. That’s exactly how it is, Signore!” the boy’s eyes told me so as to immediately relieve my embarrassment. “We’re here, so sad about being left so alone, without any life, in this small room deprived of air and light, excluded forever from the intimacy of the home!”

Who was that boy? Where had this portrait come from and how had it arrived in that parlor? Maybe it had first been in Stefano Conti’s parents’ old living room, in the home where I used to go visit him so very many years ago. I had never gone into that living room because Stefano would meet me in his small study or in the dining room.

The portrait appeared to be from some thirty years ago.

Mysteriously though, yet most certainly, the way the image looked made it unthinkable that from the day the painter had captured it there, these thirty years could have been alive to it all the same.[3]

That boy must have stopped there, on the threshold of life. In his strangely open eyes, intent and seemingly lost in a desperate sadness, there was the resignation of one who remains behind in a march of war, worn out, abandoned with no help in enemy territory, and watches the others who go forward and move ever further away taking every sound of life with them, so that soon, in the silence that will come closer up to him, he’ll feel certain, imminent death around him.

Certainly no forty-six or forty-seven-year-old man would ever have opened the door to that parlor to say, pointing at the portrait on the wall:

“That’s me when I was sixteen years old.”  

It was unquestionably the portrait of a dead boy, and that was clearly demonstrated also by the place where it was located in the parlor, like a sign of remembrance, though not very fond if it was left there among those new furnishings, far from all the intimate spaces of the home: a place of respect rather than affection.

I knew Stefano Conti didn’t have any brothers and never had. Nor, after all, did that image bear any characteristic trait of my friend’s family, not even a trace of resemblance to Stefano or his two sisters, who had already been married for quite a while. Besides that, the date of the portrait and what could be seen of the clothing couldn’t lead one to think he might be some bygone relative of his mother or father, who had died as a boy long ago.

Shortly thereafter Stefano suddenly arrived, and after our initial exclamations about finding each other so changed, when we started to recall our memories, as I looked up at that portrait again and asked my friend for some information about it, I had the strange feeling of committing an act of violence for which I should be ashamed, or rather, a betrayal, which had to bother me all the more inasmuch as I was taking advantage of no one being able to throw it in my face,  if not for that very feeling I had. It seemed as if the boy portrayed there were speaking to me through the desperate sadness in his eyes, saying: “Why are you asking about me? I confided in you that I feel the same sorrow that you felt when you came in here. Why are you now emerging from this sorrow and wanting information from others around me that I, here a mute image, cannot correct or deny?”

Upon hearing my question, Stefano Conti turned his head around and raised his arm, as if to shield himself from the sight of that portrait.

“Please! Don’t talk to me about it! I can’t even look at it!”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t think...” I stammered.

“No! Don’t imagine anything bad,” Stefano hastened to add. “The pain I feel at the sight of this portrait is so difficult to speak about. If you only knew!”

“Is he a relative of yours?” I hazarded to ask.

“A relative?” Stefano Conti repeated, shrugging his shoulders, more perhaps to shrink back from an imagined contact that disgusted him than from not knowing what to say. “He was... he was a son of my mama.”

Such distressed amazement and so much embarrassment ran over my face that Stefano Conti, blushing suddenly, exclaimed: “Not illegitimate, please believe me! My mother was a saint!”

“But say your half-brother, then!” I yelled at him almost angrily.[4]

“You bring him too close to me using that word, and you hurt me,” Stefano replied, his face contorted in pain.

“I’ll tell you, then. I’ll force myself to explain to you an extremely difficult complication of emotions that, as you see, has this effect of making me keep that portrait there, as if to make amends. The sight of it still shocks me, and so many years have gone by! Know that my childhood was poisoned in the most cruel of ways by this boy, who died at sixteen. Poisoned in the most saintly love, a mother’s love.”

Just listen.[5]

We were living in the country then, where I was born and where I lived until I was ten, that is until my father, deeply unlucky, abandoned the Mandrana business, which then produced honors and wealth for other people.

We were living there alone, as if exiled from the world.

But I think of it as exile now. I didn’t feel that way then because I didn’t even imagine that there might be another world far away from that land, from that solitary house where I was born and was growing up, there beyond the hills that I would catch sight of, grey and sad on the horizon. My whole world was there. The only life that existed for me was my home, I mean my father and my mother, my two sisters and the servants.

Based on experience, I’m among those who judge it bad advice to leave children in ignorance about so many things that, once suddenly discovered by chance, in the end shock the soul and corrupt it, sometimes irreparably. I’m convinced that there’s no other reality beyond the illusions that feelings create for us. If a feeling suddenly changes, the illusion collapses, and that reality in which we were living along with it. Then we’re immediately lost in the void.

This happened to me when I was seven, because of the sudden change of a feeling, which at that age is everything, the feeling, I repeat, of maternal love.

I believe no mother was ever so totally devoted to her children like mine was. Seeing her from morning to night around us, really inside our life, during my father’s long absences from home, neither I nor certainly my sisters imagined that she could have a life for herself beyond ours. It’s true, now and then, once every two or three months, she would go with papa to the city for an entire day. But we believed she wasn’t going away from us at all on those trips, taken, as it seemed to us, in order to restock supplies for the country house. On the contrary, so many times we had the illusion we had pushed her ourselves to go to the city, for the little gifts, the toys she would bring back to us when she returned. Sometimes she would return pale as a corpse with swollen, red eyes. But that pallor, even if we noticed it, was explained by the fatigue from the long journey in the carriage; as for her eyes, was it possible she might have cried? They were so red and swollen because of the dusty main road.

Except that one evening we saw our father return home, alone and somber.

“Mama?”

He looked at us, his eyes almost ferocious. Your mama? She stayed in the city, because... because she felt ill.

That’s what he told us, at first.

She felt ill. She had to stay in the city for a few days. Nothing serious. She needed a treatment that she couldn’t have in the country.

We were so dismayed that my father, to shake us out of it, treated us harshly, with an anger that not only increased our dismay but offended and wounded us like an extremely cruel injustice.

Shouldn’t it have seemed natural to him for us to react that way upon such unexpected news?

But the unjust anger and the sharpness weren’t directed at us. We understood that about ten days later, when my mother came back home, and not alone.

If I lived to be a hundred, I still wouldn’t be able to forget her arrival in the carriage, in front of our home’s main entrance.

When we heard the cheerful ringing of the bells from the end of the road, my sisters and I rushed downstairs to welcome her gleefully. But we were suddenly stopped at the front doorstep by our father, who had gotten off his horse right at that moment, all out of breath and dusty, in order to arrive a few steps before the carriage bringing our mama.

She wasn’t alone! Do you understand? Next to her, propped up with pillows, all wrapped up in wool shawls, pale as a ghost, with these bewildered eyes you see on his face in the portrait was this boy, her son! And she was so focused on him, so entirely his in that moment, so concerned about the difficulties of lowering him down from the carriage in her arms without hurting him that she didn’t even greet us—we who were her only children up to the day before—she didn’t even see us!

Another child, that boy? Our own mama, the mama who had been entirely ours up until the day before, had had another life beyond ours? Another child, apart from us? That boy? And she loved him like us, more than us?

I don’t know if my sisters felt what I felt, to the same extent. I was the youngest child. I was barely seven. I felt my insides being ripped apart, my heart suffocating in anguish, my mind being consumed by a dark, very violent feeling of hate, jealousy, disgust, and I don’t know what else, because my whole being was turned inside out, shaken by the sight of something inconceivable: that my mother could have another son besides me, who wasn’t my brother, and that she could love him like me, more than me!

I felt my mother being stolen away from me... No, what am I saying? Nobody was stealing her away from me. She, she was committing an inhuman violence in front of me and within me, as if she were robbing me of the life she had given me by separating herself from me, excluding herself from my life, in order to give the love that was supposed to be all mine, that same love she gave to me, to another, who, like me, had a right to it, the same right that I had to it.

I still yell, you see? When I think about it, I feel all over again the same exasperation I did then, the hate that could never subside anymore, as much as they told me the pitiful story of that boy from whom my mother had to separate when she got married a second time, to my father. My father hadn’t demanded that separation. The relatives of her first husband had demanded it.  It seems that because of serious disagreements with my mother, a young girl then, after four or five years of tempestuous married life together he had killed himself.[6]

Now you understand. The rare times my mother went from the country to the city, she went there to see that son of hers, of whom we knew nothing, who was growing up far away from her, entrusted to a brother and a sister of her first husband. Then that brother had died. Shortly thereafter the boy had become ill with a fatal disease and my mother had rushed to his bedside, vied with death for him; and, as soon as he was convalescing, she brought him back to the country with her, hoping her love and care would make him recover his health. It was all in vain. He died three or four months later. But neither did his suffering ever serve to arouse a stirring of pity in me, nor did his death placate my hate. I would have liked for him to recover, in fact, for him to remain there among us so the hate his presence inspired in me would fill the horrendous void between me and my mother left after his death. Seeing her become attached to us again, after his death, as if by then she could become entirely ours again, like before, was an even greater torment for me because it implied that she hadn’t felt what I had felt at all; and in fact she couldn’t feel it because that boy was a son for her, as I was.

Perhaps she thought: “But I don’t love only you! Don’t I love your sisters too?” Without understanding that I was also inside that love she bore for my sisters, I felt inside it, I felt like it was the same love she bore for me. Whereas there no, inside the love she bore for that boy of hers, no! I wasn’t there, I couldn’t get inside it because that boy was hers, and when she was his and was with him, she couldn’t be mine, be with me.

You see, I wasn’t so much offended by being robbed of love as I was offended by the fact that that boy was hers. I couldn’t tolerate it! Because then my mama didn’t seem mine anymore. She no longer seemed the mama she had been for me before.

Since then—believe me—I’m telling you something horrendous... since then I haven’t felt my mama in my heart anymore.

I lost my mother twice. But I also almost had two of them. This one who recently died wasn’t my mama anymore, my real mama, the mama who, as people say, is the only one you have.[7] My real mama, my only mama, died back then, when I was seven years old. And back then I really mourned her, with tears of blood like I will never shed again in my lifetime, tears that run deep, and leave an eternal, unbridgeable furrow.

I still feel these tears that poisoned my childhood inside me, and I owe them to him. That’s why I told you that I can’t even look at him. I recognize that he, too, was an unfortunate boy. But at least he was lucky enough not to live through his misfortune, whereas I, not for any fault of his but certainly because of him, lived so many years beside my mother without ever feeling her in my heart as I had before.