The Marriage Portrait

O’Farrell’s novel is based in historical fact and the real-life alleged murder of Lucrezia di Medici by her husband, Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, in 1561. The official reason given for Lucrezia’s death just a year after she joined him in Ferrara was sickness, ranging from consumption (tuberculosis) to putrid fever (typhus). However, O’Farrell anchors her novel in the rumor, publicized in British poet Robert Browning’s popular poem “My Last Duchess” (1842), that Lucrezia was murdered by her husband. Browning’s work is a dramatic monologue voiced by Alfonso Duke of Ferrara. Its subject matter aligns with the novel in portraying a curious duchess whose “looks went everywhere” and who bestows her favor indiscriminately on too many things and places because she is “too easily impressed” (Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess,” 1842). The poem also mentions the rare white mule that Alfonso bestows on Lucrezia in the novel. In terms of narrative voice, Browning’s dispassionate hero’s ironically understated speech reflects the cool, controlled aspect of O’Farrell’s rendering of Alfonso.

O’Farrell largely retains the facts of Lucrezia’s life prior to her death. However, while the real Lucrezia married Alfonso at age 13 in 1558 and waited two years in Florence with her family while Alfonso led military campaigns across France, O’Farrell condenses the marriage and departure to 1560 to amplify the drama of her heroine’s departure from the familiar into the unknown.

In her author’s note, O’Farrell acknowledges that there is “little known” about Lucrezia’s 16-year life, but she uses the facts available to her to draw a contrast between the relatively progressive humanist treatment of girls and women at the Medici court in Florence and the oppressiveness of Ferrara (433). For example, O’Farrell uses the fact that the Medici girls were educated alongside their brothers to generate the impression that girls were encouraged to be erudite and express their opinions in a diplomatic fashion. Indeed, her showing of Eleanora’s stringent schedule of occupations for her daughters, as well as her sons, demonstrates the wish that they should be active and purposeful, rather than passive, and acquire talents. Lucrezia’s artistic talent is encouraged, especially when the tutor shows her drawing to the real-life famous court artist Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), who chronicled the lives of his more famous contemporaries, including Michelangelo. Vasari’s opinion that Lucrezia should be able to join her brothers’ drawing lessons alludes to the potential for a woman to express her talents in the Medici court, even if she cannot make a career of them. This relative equality is also evident in the easy exchange between Eleanora and Cosimo and the fact that Cosimo brings his problems to Eleanora as a way of including her in public life.

Still, while O’Farrell shows relative female liberty at the Florentine court, she also makes it clear that a woman’s self-expression comes second to her more traditional duties as a daughter and wife. Cosimo di Medici’s determination to make a strategic alliance with the court of Ferrara sees him arranging to marry off two daughters in succession to Alfonso, regardless of their personal preferences. Later, the duty of motherhood is emphasized as much by Eleanora as by Alfonso, as she reminds Lucrezia that she needs to produce an heir to strengthen her standing at court.

At Ferrara, which is referred to as the “castello”—a castle that encompasses fortress-like connotations of imprisonment—women’s liberty is much restricted under Alfonso’s controlling regime. On the one hand, the decreased emphasis on female accomplishment and activity allows women freedom of time and thought, as is evident in Lucrezia’s long ambles and drawing studies and in Elisabetta’s leisure to conduct secret love affairs. However, the punishments for autonomy or doing anything that threatens Alfonso’s rule are also much harsher there. For example, when Lucrezia fails to become pregnant, Alfonso binds her to a stringent regime that diminishes her both physically and mentally to cover up his own infertility. His sadistic treatment of his sister in the novel is based on the historical Alfonso’s actions. In an NPR interview with Louise Kelly, O’Farrell said that she could easily believe that a man who forced his sister to watch her lover being strangled to death would also kill his wife. (Louise Kelly, “A New Novel Honors the Forgotten and Possibly Murdered Lucrezia de Medici.” National Public Radio, 6 Sept. 2022).

While in the novel O’Farrell presents Alfonso’s planned killing of Lucrezia as uniquely unjust, uxoricide was fairly common in Renaissance Italian courts. Divorce was prohibited by the Catholic Church, and in this patriarchal society a man could legitimately rid himself of an inconvenient wife only through her death. O’Farrell’s research uncovered that Lucrezia’s sister Isabella di Medici Orsini died suddenly and suspiciously on a hunting holiday with her husband in a country villa in Cerruto; she had ostensibly “fallen dead” after washing her hair (435). Both the hunting lodge locale from this story and the report from a Ferrarese spy that Isabella was strangled contributed to O’Farrell’s invention of Alfonso’s plan for Lucrezia’s death. Alfonso’s beginning marriage negotiations with an Austrian princess reflects his real-life pursuit of two more wives in succession after Lucrezia in his hope of producing an heir.