The Marriage Portrait

The Marriage Portrait (2022) is Northern Irish writer Maggie O’Farrell’s ninth novel and became an instant Sunday Times bestseller. O’Farrell was made a Royal Society of Literature fellow in the United Kingdom in 2021. The novel presents a fictionalized account of the life of Lucrezia di Medici, the subject of Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess” (1842). Little is known about Lucrezia, who died in 1561 at age 16, and O’Farrell’s narrative explores Browning’s suggestion that her husband, Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, murdered her after she failed to produce an heir.

O’Farrell’s awards include the Betty Trask Award for her first novel, After You’d Gone (2001), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for her eighth novel, Hamnet (2020).

This study guide uses the Tinder Press ebook, published in 2022.

Plot Summary

O’Farrell uses two timelines. The first begins with 16-year-old Lucrezia di Medici at the Fortezza, a remote rural retreat, in 1561; her husband, Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, took her there. The second timeline begins in the Medici palazzo in Florence in 1544 at the time of Lucrezia’s conception.

In the 1561 narrative, Alfonso pretends that he brought sickly Lucrezia to the Fortezza to recover from her latest illness. Lucrezia, however, senses that he wishes to kill her, and she has numerous visions of crossing over into the next life. She senses that he poisoned the dinner he gave her, which she largely pretended to eat, consuming only a few mouthfuls. She confides her fears in Emilia, her maid from Florence, who physically resembles her and came to the Fortezza undercover with Il Bastianino, the artist Alfonso commissioned to paint Lucrezia’s marriage portrait. Il Bastianino’s assistant, Jacopo, confides to Lucrezia that he thinks her life is in danger and that he pressed oiled rags into a lock, allowing her to escape.

The narrative that begins in 1544 documents Lucrezia’s early life, beginning with her haphazard conception as the fifth child of her mother, Eleanora, who was contemplating maps at the time, rather than focusing on sex with her husband, Cosimo di Medici. Lucrezia grows up solitary and wild in the Medici palace, preferring to eat on the floor and befriending a tiger that all her siblings fear. Still, she shows excellent academic and artistic prowess and creates numerous wonderful works that impress the drawing master Giorgio Vasari.

When she is about 10, she meets her older sister Maria’s betrothed, Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, and he makes a mouse face to amuse her. She does not anticipate that he will play a significant part in her future. However, when Maria unexpectedly dies in 1557, 13-year-old Lucrezia finds herself the subject of the marriage negotiations with Alfonso. Her nurse, Sofia, who is a close friend and whose Neapolitan dialect Lucrezia has learned, delays the marriage a year by feigning that Lucrezia has not yet started her period. However, when Eleanora discovers that Lucrezia is menstruating, the marriage goes ahead in 1560. Emilia, who was the daughter of Lucrezia’s wet nurse, accompanies her on the trip to Ferrara.

Lucrezia’s first months of marriage are spent at the delizia, Alfonso’s delightful country residence, where she is mostly free to paint and spend her days as she likes. However, shadows lurk in her horror of sex with Alfonso, his controlling nature, and his wish to keep his troubles with his Protestant mother and his renegade sisters a secret from her. Additionally, his consigliere, Leonello, is hostile to Lucrezia and confides his suspicion that Alfonso is infertile, as he has never gotten any of his mistresses pregnant. At the delizia, Lucrezia also meets Jacopo, the Neapolitan-speaking artist whose life she saves and who was commissioned to prepare preliminary sketches of her portrait on Il Bastianino’s behalf. She senses chemistry and understanding between them already.

In Ferrara, Lucrezia meets friendly Elisabetta and spiteful Nunciata, Alfonso’s sisters. Elisabetta is in love with a guardsman called Contrari. Lucrezia keeps her secret, but Alfonso finds out about the affair and forces Elisabetta to watch when he has Contrari executed. Meanwhile, he imprisons Lucrezia in her room so that she cannot interfere. Lucrezia, however, manages to visit Elisabetta before her departure and learns that by donning Emilia’s maid clothes, she can creep about the Ferrara castle unnoticed. Work on her portrait continues, and she continues to sense a silent understanding with Jacopo; they begin to communicate secretly with each other in Neapolitan. When Elisabetta leaves, Lucrezia is miserable and writes to her parents, asking them to let her return to Florence. They refuse, and Eleanora reminds her that her position can be best secured by producing an heir. Alfonso, also focused on this subject, gets a doctor to prescribe fertility treatment for Lucrezia, even though he is the one with the problem.

When the doctor’s cures, including cutting off Lucrezia’s flame-colored hair, do not work after two months, Alfonso feigns that he is taking her to the countryside to recover. The two narrative threads meet at this point; Jacopo tells Lucrezia that he secured an escape route for her. Lucrezia wears Emilia’s clothes while the latter is asleep in her bed, and she creeps out into the night. She escapes to join Jacopo and live anonymously as an artist in Venice. Meanwhile, Alfonso and Leonello find Emilia, who resembles the escaped woman, and strangle her, thinking that she is Lucrezia.