Yes, the theme of appearance vs. reality is important to this poem. The text appears to capture a well-mannered negotiation between the duke and the servant of a count, sent, presumably, to broker the marriage of the count's daughter to the duke. Toward the end of the poem, the duke says that
"his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed / At starting, is my object."
This shows that his purpose, at least, is to settle marriage arrangements.
However, the text's purpose really has a lot more to do with the sad story of the duke's last duchess. The duke talks about her as he shows her portrait, saying,
"She had / A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er / She looked on, and her looks went everywhere."
In other words, he wanted her undivided attention, to be the only one who could elicit her smiles and blushes, and, instead,
"she ranked / [His] gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name / With anybody’s gift."
She was no more flattered or pleased by his important and expensive gifts than she was by a branch of cherries or a sunset. She smiled for him, certainly, but she smiled for everyone, and he found this to be unacceptable. So, he says, "I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together." It sounds as though he had her killed! That, or he treated her so harshly, demanding that she stop being so happy about everything but him, that she perished. In a similar way, then, the duke appears to be a polite but is actually a childish tyrant.
Thus, on both the textual level, and on the level of the duke's character, the poem very much focuses on the discrepancy between appearances and reality.
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