Maggie O’Farrell wrote the sublime historical novel Hamnet and Judith, about the children of William Shakespeare. She has a wonderful ability to evoke historical events as if they were happening in the present day, and in remarkable detail – language, people, settings, etc. She depicts places so evocatively that you feel that you are there. And, at the same time, she depicts the stream of consciousness of the characters in wholly convincing ways. She has one more particular talent: she takes one small moment or detail in history, and turns it into a complete narrative. The Marriage Portrait is based on the marriage in 1560, of fifteen-year-old Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici to the Duke of Ferrara, Modeno and Reggio, Alfonso II d’Este. The story is a psychological thriller set in Renaissance Italy, and it is heart-rending.
The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell (Renaissance Literary History, Historical fiction, Literary Fiction, Biographical Fiction. Publisher: Vintage Canada, July 11, 2023. Paperback. 352 pages)
Lucrezia was the the fifth child of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici and Eleonora di Toledo, who had eleven children, of whom six died in infancy. The purpose of the marriage was to strengthen both dynasties politically and financially, and one part of the process was to have a portrait painted of the bride. That was the done thing in those days – both a conspicuous sign of wealth and a record of the subject looking their best, frozen in time.
“Lucrezia regards the portrait; she stares; she cannot look away. It is at once scaldingly public and deeply private. It displays her body, her face, her hands, the mass of her once-long hair, which ripples down either side of her dress, with a brand of insolent indifference to its geometric pattern, but it also excavates that which she keeps hidden inside her. She loves it, she loathes it; she is dumbstruck with admiration; she is shocked by its acuity. She wants the world to see it; she wishes to run and cover it again with the cloth at the artist’s feet.”
— The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell, p. 289
Lucrezia, as she could have looked in her red dress, with her long red-brown hair, in the portrait painted of her in the novel. But this artwork is by me. In the novel, she says she loathes the portrait that Bronzino had painted of her (below).
Spoiler alert ahead
If you don’t want to know the twist in this tale, do not read any further.
This, below, is not the portrait being painted in the book
Probably the best known real portrait of Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici – not the one described in the book. That one is fictional. She is depicted with her wedding jewelry, prior before leaving her parents’ home to join her husband in Ferrara. The portrait is attributed either to the artist Agnolo di Cosimo, known as “Bronzino”, or to the artist Alessandro Allori, a trainee of Bronzino. Dated ca. 1560. Dimensions: 32 1/2 x 24 3/4 inches; 82.6 x 62.9 cm. Medium: Oil on panel. The painting is in the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.
Married young, died quickly
I immediately wanted to know whether this small detail in the history of Italy, and the De’ Medici family, is real. It is, and there are portraits of Lucrezia, but not the one described in the novel.
Also, I wanted to know about Lucrezia’s death, at the age of sixteen, less than a year after she married the Duke. This is an intriguing angle. She was born on February 14, 1545, in Florence, and died April 21, 1561, in Ferrara. Officially, she died from “putrid fever”, as it was called at the time, probably a term for malaria. Others speculate that it was tuberculosis. Others say that she died from general ill-health and fragility, and this would not be unusual, considering that in those days, the smallest thing like a cold was likely to kill someone as easily as having their head chopped off. There was just no medical diagnoses or treatments – it was all quackery.
The catch is that after her death there were rumours that she had been murdered by her husband. The reader knows this even before chapter 1 begins, but, by the time you get near the end of the book, you hope, with a sinking feeling, that it would not be the case. Her murder was after all, just speculation, based on the fact that so many of the De’ Medici family’s daughters ended up dead at the hands of their husbands. And generally, murders and assassinations were commonplace in Italian city-states in the 16th century.
Portrait by Daniele da Volterra, formerly attributed to Girolamo da Carpi, “Portrait of a Gentleman”, said to be the young Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara.A portrait of Alfonso II d’Este, in the prime of his life, while fighting in the service of King Henry II of France.Portrait by Cesare Aretusi Retrato of Alfonso II de Este, Duke of Ferrara, as an older man.
(Above) Alfonso II d’Este (22 November 1533 – 27 October 1597) was Duke of Ferrara from 1559 to 1597. He was a member of the House of Este.
The De’ Medicis, and other noble families, were notoriously war-like, and their wealth, land and armies matched their brutishness. Alfonso d’Este was busy fighting in the service of King Henry VII of France, representing the House of Este, before he found the time to marry Lucrezia – very much a business deal. Daughters of noble houses existed in order to be married to the right men, and bear many children. They were isolated and guarded, like invaluable, virtuous assets, in their virginal states, until they were married. Love? “Faugh!”, as the expression went. It was not a factor.
An imagined portrait of Lucrezia
So, that is the background. O’Farrell turns Lucrezia into a fully rounded, interesting character, purely through her imagination and her writing skills. O’Farrell provides an Author’s Note at the end of the book to explain which aspects of the story are factual and which are imaginary. This is useful, because overall the depiction is convincingly realistic.
A late-born child, Lucrezia is not like her siblings. She is introspective, imaginative and high-strung. She notices what others do not see, and she can paint, producing captivating miniatures on tiny wood panels. She is also beautiful in an unconventional way. Why would her new husband, who is at first attentive and loving, murder her? Because he is a killer, and calls her his “first duchess” – first, meaning, he intends having other wives. However, he is impotent, though he blames this lack of children on Lucrezia. In those days, that was how it was. When she does not get pregnant, he has to get rid of her, to try with another woman. History reveals that though he married twice after Lucrezia, he died without having children (legitimate or illegitimate) to inherit from him, and his properties were taken over by the Catholic Church.
What you feel strongly when you read the story is the sense of dizzying confusion and self-doubt that Lucrezia feels all the time. She wants to believe that Alfonso loves her, but her acute sense of observation tells her otherwise. She is like a pebble swept away on a riverbed, rolling over and bumping along. Every place that she goes to, every person who she meets, is deceitful and intent on hurting her. The sisters of Alfonso are particularly nasty, at first being friends and then revealing their maliciousness. Though it must be said that Alfonso does kill the unsuitable suitor of one of them, Elisabetta, and you can hardly blame her for turning on Lucrezia.
A reviewer wrote of the novel that it is like time-travel – you are so immersed in this Renaissance world, that it really does feel as if you are there.
“Lucrezia dreams she is in one of the painting that hang on her father’s walls, walking shoeless over dark, leaf-strewn soil, which is studded with spring blooms – white, red, delicate yellow. She worries, in the dream, that her feet will crush the flowers, so she steps carefully, choosing her path, dreading the sensation of a stem snapping beneath her or the cold crush of petals against her sole.
Through the thick foliage, she can hear the voices of women singing; she catches glimpses of their thin, pale robes as they circle each other in a loose, improvised dance. But they themselves remain elusive, always ahead or to the side of her.
Somewhere in the branches is a presence malign and predatory: she either knows this or recalls this, she cannot say which. But an icy breeze threads from him, through the tree trunks, to lick insistently at the bare skin of her arms. The awareness that she must keep watch, must avoid this being at all costs, swirls about her mind like smoke.”
— The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell, p. 296
A twist in the tale
Lucrezia is just a very naive, very frightened, teenager. She had been so cosseted by her parents that she has hardly been touched by another human’s hands, least of all a man who wants to exercise his marital rights. Half the time she cannot even say anything without stuttering or mumbling. She is no match for the older and much tougher Alfonso, or his hangers-on.
The surprise element in this story is the painting, and the artists who produced it. But that, like the ending, is something that you will have to discover for yourself.
I admit that by the last half of the book, I was in a cold sweat from the sheer ominousness of the atmosphere that O’Farrell depicts. The horribleness creeps up on you like nausea and I really needed to know how it ends. I cheated – I jumped ahead. I will not reveal here how it turns out. But I will say that it is a fitting and satisfying ending.
Beautiful words
Apart from her imaginative realization of this historic incident, O’Farrell writes beautifully. Her descriptions are marvellously poetic. Every word and every sentence is carefully crafted and a pleasure to read and absorb, and the overall effect is lyrical and flowing. The dreamlike atmosphere in some parts of the book are contrasted with no-holds-barred depictions of the brutal daily grind of 16th century life; the horrible lack of medical knowledge and cures, the commonplace brutishness and violence, the poverty and oppression of ordinary people, and the abuse of both male and female offspring for political purposes (in a way, Duke Alfonso was also a victim). It’s no wonder that portrait artists were commissioned to depict idealized, beautiful images, rather than the reality of those times and the true appearance of the sitters.
I guarantee that you will love this book, and that it will move you. And I guarantee that it will make you think of many things in your life, in this modern age, for which you can be grateful.
SEVEN CIRCUMSTANCES 
Maggie O’Farrell wrote the sublime historical novel Hamnet and Judith, about the children of William Shakespeare. She has a wonderful ability to evoke historical events as if they were happening in the present day, and in remarkable detail – language, people, settings, etc. She depicts places so evocatively that you feel that you are there. And, at the same time, she depicts the stream of consciousness of the characters in wholly convincing ways. She has one more particular talent: she takes one small moment or detail in history, and turns it into a complete narrative. The Marriage Portrait is based on the marriage in 1560, of fifteen-year-old Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici to the Duke of Ferrara, Modeno and Reggio, Alfonso II d’Este. The story is a psychological thriller set in Renaissance Italy, and it is heart-rending.
Lucrezia was the the fifth child of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici and Eleonora di Toledo, who had eleven children, of whom six died in infancy. The purpose of the marriage was to strengthen both dynasties politically and financially, and one part of the process was to have a portrait painted of the bride. That was the done thing in those days – both a conspicuous sign of wealth and a record of the subject looking their best, frozen in time.
“Lucrezia regards the portrait; she stares; she cannot look away. It is at once scaldingly public and deeply private. It displays her body, her face, her hands, the mass of her once-long hair, which ripples down either side of her dress, with a brand of insolent indifference to its geometric pattern, but it also excavates that which she keeps hidden inside her. She loves it, she loathes it; she is dumbstruck with admiration; she is shocked by its acuity. She wants the world to see it; she wishes to run and cover it again with the cloth at the artist’s feet.”
— The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell, p. 289
But this artwork is by me.
In the novel, she says she loathes the portrait that Bronzino had painted of her (below).
Spoiler alert ahead
If you don’t want to know the twist in this tale, do not read any further.
This, below, is not the portrait being painted in the book
She is depicted with her wedding jewelry, prior before leaving her parents’ home to join her husband in Ferrara. The portrait is attributed either to the artist Agnolo di Cosimo, known as “Bronzino”, or to the artist Alessandro Allori, a trainee of Bronzino. Dated ca. 1560. Dimensions: 32 1/2 x 24 3/4 inches; 82.6 x 62.9 cm. Medium: Oil on panel. The painting is in the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.
Married young, died quickly
I immediately wanted to know whether this small detail in the history of Italy, and the De’ Medici family, is real. It is, and there are portraits of Lucrezia, but not the one described in the novel.
Also, I wanted to know about Lucrezia’s death, at the age of sixteen, less than a year after she married the Duke. This is an intriguing angle. She was born on February 14, 1545, in Florence, and died April 21, 1561, in Ferrara. Officially, she died from “putrid fever”, as it was called at the time, probably a term for malaria. Others speculate that it was tuberculosis. Others say that she died from general ill-health and fragility, and this would not be unusual, considering that in those days, the smallest thing like a cold was likely to kill someone as easily as having their head chopped off. There was just no medical diagnoses or treatments – it was all quackery.
The catch is that after her death there were rumours that she had been murdered by her husband. The reader knows this even before chapter 1 begins, but, by the time you get near the end of the book, you hope, with a sinking feeling, that it would not be the case. Her murder was after all, just speculation, based on the fact that so many of the De’ Medici family’s daughters ended up dead at the hands of their husbands. And generally, murders and assassinations were commonplace in Italian city-states in the 16th century.
(Above) Alfonso II d’Este (22 November 1533 – 27 October 1597) was Duke of Ferrara from 1559 to 1597. He was a member of the House of Este.
The De’ Medicis, and other noble families, were notoriously war-like, and their wealth, land and armies matched their brutishness. Alfonso d’Este was busy fighting in the service of King Henry VII of France, representing the House of Este, before he found the time to marry Lucrezia – very much a business deal. Daughters of noble houses existed in order to be married to the right men, and bear many children. They were isolated and guarded, like invaluable, virtuous assets, in their virginal states, until they were married. Love? “Faugh!”, as the expression went. It was not a factor.
An imagined portrait of Lucrezia
So, that is the background. O’Farrell turns Lucrezia into a fully rounded, interesting character, purely through her imagination and her writing skills. O’Farrell provides an Author’s Note at the end of the book to explain which aspects of the story are factual and which are imaginary. This is useful, because overall the depiction is convincingly realistic.
A late-born child, Lucrezia is not like her siblings. She is introspective, imaginative and high-strung. She notices what others do not see, and she can paint, producing captivating miniatures on tiny wood panels. She is also beautiful in an unconventional way. Why would her new husband, who is at first attentive and loving, murder her? Because he is a killer, and calls her his “first duchess” – first, meaning, he intends having other wives. However, he is impotent, though he blames this lack of children on Lucrezia. In those days, that was how it was. When she does not get pregnant, he has to get rid of her, to try with another woman. History reveals that though he married twice after Lucrezia, he died without having children (legitimate or illegitimate) to inherit from him, and his properties were taken over by the Catholic Church.
What you feel strongly when you read the story is the sense of dizzying confusion and self-doubt that Lucrezia feels all the time. She wants to believe that Alfonso loves her, but her acute sense of observation tells her otherwise. She is like a pebble swept away on a riverbed, rolling over and bumping along. Every place that she goes to, every person who she meets, is deceitful and intent on hurting her. The sisters of Alfonso are particularly nasty, at first being friends and then revealing their maliciousness. Though it must be said that Alfonso does kill the unsuitable suitor of one of them, Elisabetta, and you can hardly blame her for turning on Lucrezia.
A reviewer wrote of the novel that it is like time-travel – you are so immersed in this Renaissance world, that it really does feel as if you are there.
“Lucrezia dreams she is in one of the painting that hang on her father’s walls, walking shoeless over dark, leaf-strewn soil, which is studded with spring blooms – white, red, delicate yellow. She worries, in the dream, that her feet will crush the flowers, so she steps carefully, choosing her path, dreading the sensation of a stem snapping beneath her or the cold crush of petals against her sole.
Through the thick foliage, she can hear the voices of women singing; she catches glimpses of their thin, pale robes as they circle each other in a loose, improvised dance. But they themselves remain elusive, always ahead or to the side of her.
Somewhere in the branches is a presence malign and predatory: she either knows this or recalls this, she cannot say which. But an icy breeze threads from him, through the tree trunks, to lick insistently at the bare skin of her arms. The awareness that she must keep watch, must avoid this being at all costs, swirls about her mind like smoke.”
— The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell, p. 296
A twist in the tale
Lucrezia is just a very naive, very frightened, teenager. She had been so cosseted by her parents that she has hardly been touched by another human’s hands, least of all a man who wants to exercise his marital rights. Half the time she cannot even say anything without stuttering or mumbling. She is no match for the older and much tougher Alfonso, or his hangers-on.
The surprise element in this story is the painting, and the artists who produced it. But that, like the ending, is something that you will have to discover for yourself.
I admit that by the last half of the book, I was in a cold sweat from the sheer ominousness of the atmosphere that O’Farrell depicts. The horribleness creeps up on you like nausea and I really needed to know how it ends. I cheated – I jumped ahead. I will not reveal here how it turns out. But I will say that it is a fitting and satisfying ending.
Beautiful words
Apart from her imaginative realization of this historic incident, O’Farrell writes beautifully. Her descriptions are marvellously poetic. Every word and every sentence is carefully crafted and a pleasure to read and absorb, and the overall effect is lyrical and flowing. The dreamlike atmosphere in some parts of the book are contrasted with no-holds-barred depictions of the brutal daily grind of 16th century life; the horrible lack of medical knowledge and cures, the commonplace brutishness and violence, the poverty and oppression of ordinary people, and the abuse of both male and female offspring for political purposes (in a way, Duke Alfonso was also a victim). It’s no wonder that portrait artists were commissioned to depict idealized, beautiful images, rather than the reality of those times and the true appearance of the sitters.
I guarantee that you will love this book, and that it will move you. And I guarantee that it will make you think of many things in your life, in this modern age, for which you can be grateful.
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