B&N Reads, Fiction, Guest Post, Historical Fiction

Overlooked and Underloved: Maggie O’Farrell on the Inspiration Behind The Marriage Portrait

By Maggie O'Farrell / October 2, 2022 at 4:31 am

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The Marriage Portrait (B&N Exclusive Edition)

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If you loved Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell is back with Lucrezia’s story, and she’s back with a bang! Set during the Renaissance in Italy, The Marriage Portrait is a dramatic story of resilience and survival that will keep readers on the edge of their seat. As Lucrezia sits for a painting to preserve her image, it becomes clear to her that her survival is dependent on her provision of an heir, and readers will be enthralled by the alliances formed by marriage, her discovery of the man who was supposed to marry her sister, and a court who isn’t thrilled by her presence. Keep reading to find out what inspired Maggie O’Farrell to write The Marriage Portrait.

The Marriage Portrait is novel based on real events: the short life of sixteen-year-old Lucrezia de’ Medici, who may or may not have been murdered.

Just before lockdown began in the spring of 2020, I came across a small oil painting of Lucrezia de’ Medici, attributed to the studio of Renaissance artist Agnolo Bronzino. The portrait shows her against a dark background, in a black mourning dress, adorned with costly jewellery, one hand raised to her throat. What mesmerised me was the expression on her face: she looks anxious, her eyes filled with apprehension. She looked, to me, very much like someone who had something she wanted to say.

Only a year or so later, she would be dead, at the age of sixteen. The official cause of death was given as “putrid fever” – a catch-all diagnosis that could imply any number of diseases or conditions. Rumours spread that she had been in fact been poisoned by her husband, Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara.

Either way, I knew as soon as I saw her that I had my next novel, that I wanted to imagine the story she might have wanted to tell.

Lucrezia makes an appearance – unnamed and of course entirely wordless – in Robert Browning’s poem, “My Last Duchess.” In it, she is already dead, and Browning’s Duke keeps her portrait hidden behind a curtain, which is only drawn back by his hand.

The writing of this novel was entirely bookended by the pandemic and all its various lockdowns and lockins, anxieties and strangeness, homeschooling and circuitous walks around the local streets. Had the world been operating normally, I would have gone fairly quickly to Italy to research the various locations and to gaze upon the portraits of Lucrezia and her family. The way things were, however, meant that like everyone else, I was stuck at home. To reimagine and recreate my fictional versions of these long-dead Renaissance people, I peered at portraits on the website of the Uffizi Gallery. I steered myself around the streets of Florence and Ferrara via the internet. I trawled books and webpages for photographs and maps of various palazzos and castles and villas. I was, essentially, armchair travelling – and it was a blissful balm during that time of restriction and sameness.

As soon as travel restrictions were lifted, I got myself on a flight to Tuscany (an act which, at the time, involved more paperwork than when I bought my house). I wandered through the rooms of the palazzo where Lucrezia had been born, I walked the corridors of the castello where she spent her final months, I visited her tomb in a monastery in the south of Ferrara city. I also went in search of the portraits I’d been gazing at for two years. The Uffizi has a room dedicated to Lucrezia’s family: mostly painted by Bronzino, the portraits of the Medicis hang in a riot of coloured silk and glittering jewellery and sentient gazes on dark walls, almost as if they are suspended in space. There are several glorious paintings of her mother, Eleanora, resplendent in ornate gowns, her beautiful ivory face impassive as she embraces one of her sons. Her father, Cosimo, is there, adorned in spiked armour, despite the fact that he never in his life ever fought in a battle. There are several others of Lucrezia’s numerous siblings on display – but no Lucrezia.

I looked and looked for her, all over the Uffizi, without any luck. There is a version of the Bronzino portrait, painted by Alessandro Allori, held in North Carolina Museum of Art, but could I find one in Europe? It eventually took the assistance of three art historians in Florence to track her down, to a small and distant room of the Palatine Galley, over the river Arno. Bronzino’s Lucrezia is about the size of a hardback book, hung low down on a crowded wall, next to a fire extinguisher. I took a photograph of it next to an adult woman (me) for scale. It seemed emblematic of the way I felt she has been treated withing her own family and her husband and by history: overlooked and underloved.

The Marriage Portrait aims to brings her out from behind Browning’s curtain and into the light. I hope you enjoy it.

Maggie O’Farrell, Edinburgh, Sept 2022