If you visualize the portrait as hanging over a staircase, the mood is immediately changed. The Duchess's picture is in a far more prominent position in the household, presiding over an area that is heavily travelled by the Duke and his visitors. For whatever reason, the Duke wants to make sure that everybody notices it. Is this a warning, to make sure that everybody knows what happens to anyone who is not sufficiently loyal and attentive to him? Or do you think he has feelings of guilt and that this is some kind of posthumous compensation--I'm sorry I had to have you killed, but I'll try to make it up to you by giving your portrait pride of place?

Frankly, I'm inclined toward the former point of view, if only on account of the curtain he's got hanging over the thing. If you cover something with a curtain, you're going to make everybody who passes by painfully curious. The Duke establishes a power over his guests and dependents, forcing them to pass by this mysterious object until he decides to reveal its secret.

If the conversation is taking place on the staircase, it takes on a very different character from the formal "set piece" that we saw in the gallery, where the Duke consciously took the envoy into the room with the express purpose of luring him into a conversation about the portrait. One gets the feeling that they have met on the stairs, perhaps by accident, and perhaps that the Duke has seen the envoy looking at the curtain and wondering what is behind it.

Where do you think they're sitting? It almost boggles the mind to imagine our stuffy Duke plopping down on the bannister. Maybe he's got a bench or a couple of chairs in front of the painting? If so, who are those supposed to accommodate? Remember that nobody but him ever draws the curtain. Does he spend hours sitting in front of this picture? Why? Or maybe the seats are designed for looking down. Does he sit there keeping an eye on his household, making sure nobody steps out of line? With his dead Duchess looming over his shoulder?

Do you think he unveils her picture often? He does seem to be very proud of it and exclaims about her beauty, "the depth and passion of its earnest glance" (8), even as he immediately denies any interest in the Duchess herself by claiming that she only looks striking because he hired such a talented artist: "I said/'Frà Pandolf' by design, for never read/Strangers like you that pictured countenance" (5-7) without turning to the Duke and seeming "as they would ask me, if they durst/How such a glance came there" (11-12). "Durst" means to dare--one wonders why a person wouldn't dare ask the Duke why his wife was so beautiful. Are they afraid to intrude upon a widower's grief, or what? Anyway, isn't that a weird question? Who asks why a person in a picture is striking or beautiful? Instead, we usually just exclaim. At this point the Duke seems to be twisting the conversation around so it will become what he wants to hear. Remember that Glenn Everett claimed in his page on the Silent Listener that Browning's speakers tend to do exactly that. Does the Duke deny that the Duchess had any real beauty of her own because he feels bad about killing someone so beautiful, and he's denying even to himself what he has done or that he cared for her? Or is he such a control freak he has to take credit even for her personal appearance?

Upon completion of his story, the Duke says "Will't please you rise? We'll meet/The company below, then" (47-48). Quite possibly they have been in plain view of the "company below" the whole time, leaving them waiting while the Duke tells about what happened to the Duchess. Either that or they might be within earshot of the Count's party. The whole encounter becomes much less private, and the relationship between Duke and envoy becomes correspondingly more distant. The story sounds less confessional and more like something that the Duke is quite comfortable with discussing out in the open.

The seahorse, too, becomes an item less fraught with significance. Although we still have that "taming" issue (the Duke did, after all, commission that particular subject--it was "cast in bronze for me"), we are no longer in a gallery where he singles out that particular item for attention. Instead, the seahorse is a decorative piece that the two men pass on their way down to dinner, or the negotiating table, or wherever it is they're going.