In her latest novel, The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O'Farrell takes readers to Renaissance Italy. Lush metaphors and minute description of life in ducal palaces abound in her reimagining of the life of Lucrezia de’ Medici, daughter of the Grand Duke of Florence, Cosimo I de’ Medici, and his Spanish wife, Eleonora di Toledo.

In 1558, Lucrezia wed Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. It was a marriage of political convenience. Lucrezia was 13 years old. Less than three years later, she was dead. The young duchess died of tuberculosis, but rumours abounded that Alfonso had killed his wife in a fit of jealous rage.

Review: The Marriage Portrait – Maggie O'Farrell (Hachette).

O’Farrell opens The Marriage Portrait with Lucrezia seated at a long dining table, facing her husband, contemplating her imminent death.

The couple are at Alfonso’s hunting lodge on the outskirts of his duchy and he is regaling his wife with tales of his childhood hunting prowess. The duchess is distracted by the manner in which the duke will murder her. A fall from a horse? A knife in a corridor? He will have make it look like an accident, she thinks, to avoid her father’s wrath.

O’Farrell is not the first writer to be inspired by the life and death of Lucrezia. Speculation about the duchess was fuelled in 1842 by Robert Browning’s popular poem My Last Duchess. In the poem, Alfonso d’Este reveals a smiling portrait of his late wife hidden behind a curtain. He claims that in life she smiled too much; now, in death, she smiles only for him.

The picture in question, from which The Marriage Portrait derives its title, is probably the work of Alessandro Allori, produced in the studio of Agnolo di Cosimo, known as Bronzino. It was painted for Lucrezia’s brother Francesco on the eve of her departure for Ferrara. A companion portrait depicting Francesco also features a miniature of Lucrezia. Clothed in a cochineal jerkin, Francesco holds a golden locket embellished with his sister’s features.

Allori’s Lucrezia, however, is not smiling. Her serious gaze shows no creasing at the edges, her lips curl downwards, and her brows are frozen. Instead, her portrait displays the opulence of her family. She is dressed in black velvet and wears a string of pearls. She has a diadem, a belt and a brooch of gold, set with rubies, pearls and emeralds. Her hand delicately rests upon a crystal orb set upon a marble table.

Lucrezia’s only surviving contemporaneous portrait inspires Browning and O’Farrell in significantly different ways. Browning’s dramatic monologue is centred on Alfonso’s resentment; O’Farrell is interested in the young duchess’s subjectivity. What emerges from O'Farrell’s novel is a literary portrait of an isolated and inexperienced young woman, who knows little beyond the palace walls. O’Farrell depicts the pressures faced by dynastic wives with a deft hand, while imaginatively recreating the finery and personalities of Renaissance Italy.

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O’Farrell has claimed that she was struck by the sad circumstances of Lucrezia’s marriage. Her imaginative connection to the duchess is palpable in the way she takes us into the mind of Lucrezia. But, as with much beautifully drawn historical fiction, the historical facts have been significantly altered and embellished to appeal to a 21st-century audience.

The wedding of Alfonzo and Lucrezia was a late consequence of the Italian Wars (1494-1559), a series of conflicts fought between the monarchs of France and Spain for dominance of the Italian peninsula. The Spanish emerged victorious and former French allies, like the aristocratic Estes, were forced to make a series of concessions as part of the peace treaties.

One such concession was the union of the Este dynasty with the Spanish-aligned Medici family. It was initially proposed that Alfonso marry Lucrezia’s older sister Maria, but Maria died in 1557 before the marriage could take place.

O’Farrell’s novel is replete with interactions between Alfonso and Lucrezia, but in reality the couple barely saw one another. Alfonso left Florence three days after their wedding and rarely corresponded with his wife, who lived with her mother and her sister Isabella for two years in relative isolation at the Medici palazzo.

When Alfonso’s father Ercole II d’Este died, Alfonso was forced to return from his war games to take control of the duchy in late November 1559. Lucrezia finally joined him in February 1560, but Alfonso was rarely at court and his sisters, Eleonora and Lucrezia d'Este, spent little time with the Medici transplant.

Lucrezia died on April 21 1561 after two months of illness. She had been a poorly child and had frequent health complications since birth. That she likely died of tuberculosis was no surprise to those who knew her. The doctor sent by her father provided regular updates on her worsening condition. News of her demise must have been anticipated in Florence.

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We do not know what Lucrezia thought about her fate. In the absence of extant sources from the duchess’s perspective, The Marriage Portrait fleshes out the loneliness she must have felt.

O’Farrell acknowledges that she has altered details of Lucrezia’s life in the name of fiction. She has simplified Lucrezia’s marriage so the wedding and departure took place at the same time, rather than in 1558 and 1560. Alfonso’s sisters are renamed to avoid confusion, and a crime of passion depicted in the book took place in 1575, not 1561.

These alterations do not detract from O’Farrell’s immersive depiction of Lucrezia’s short life, but it must be stressed that the author’s intention to depict the duchess as a resilient young woman who is seeking to liberate herself is a wholly modern concern.

Much is made of the duchess’s innocence and simplicity – O’Farrell even writes that she is barely out of the nursery. But people in early modern times had vastly different ideas of childhood and adolescence. Some scholars have claimed that the latter concept did not exist. In the eyes of her contemporaries, Lucrezia was very much an adult, ready for the obligations that came with being a dynastic wife.

Of course, it is likely she possessed a degree of naïveté, but the infantilisation of Lucrezia is probably at odds with the duchess’s experiences. She would have received a courtly and spiritual education that emphasised her role in the dynastic system. The individualism espoused in O’Farrell’s novel was not as starkly evident in the early modern period, in which collective familial identity drove decision-making and defined a person’s sense of self.

The duchess must have felt unease and insecurity when travelling to a new court after spending most of her time alone with her sister and mother. Given the gravity of the marriage and her understanding of her dynastic role, however, such emotions were likely infused with a sense of reassurance that she was assisting her family with an important task.

O’Farrell’s prose draws the reader in, inviting us to sympathise with the young duchess. The Marriage Portrait rails against the dynastic system that produced a child bride. The novel is extraordinarily successful in this regard. O'Farrell has written an effective feminist account of the trauma of political marriages for inexperienced girls who have no notion of love and know only obedience and duty.

Yet inscribing Lucrezia’s story with this kind of sentiment risks erasing the real Lucrezia. It replaces her with a character who meets the modern expectations of a naïve young heroine who suffers a tragic fate.

The Marriage Portrait reflects the way popular culture tends to romanticise women from this period. Such reimagining can make it difficult for historians to communicate the complexities of past lives to modern audiences. Even when depictions are ostensibly positive, in the sense they reconstruct the agency of young women in contexts where they had very little, the heavy-handed contrasts between oppression and freedom do not allow much room for the shades of grey present in early modern courts.

Popular depictions of young women from the early modern era as spirited and driven say something about how our society tends to project its moral concerns onto the past. In 21st-century Western societies, pop culture tells us women should reject misogynistic structures and seek out opportunities to be themselves. When we superimpose such expectations on different historical periods, we get a distorted portrait of individuals like Lucrezia.

O’Farrell’s novel is a page-turner and a fine example of literary historical fiction, but readers should keep in mind that giving a voice to forgotten individuals of the past is a delicate enterprise. Modern hopes for a character may not always align with the character’s hopes.

This article is republished from The Conversation is the world's leading publisher of research-based news and analysis. A unique collaboration between academics and journalists. It was written by: Jessica O'Leary, Australian Catholic University.

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Jessica O'Leary does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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