“The Underpainting and the Overpainting”: Layers of Power and Powerlessness in Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait

Abstract

Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait (2022) revisits late-Renaissance Italian courtly life, with its intrigues of dynastic politics, to explore the short life and mysterious death of Lucrezia de’ Medici, third daughter of Cosimo, Duke of Florence. Lucrezia, aged sixteen in the novel, is married off to the older Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, a pawn in her father’s hands to fulfill his wish for a political alliance between the two families. O’Farrell enters the young woman’s life inspired, as she acknowledges in the Author’s note, by Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1842), a dramatic monologue that, in turn, draws inspiration from a portrait of Lucrezia. Both Browning and O’Farrell endorse the rumour that the girl was murdered by her husband, though the official records suggest that she probably died of ‘putrid fever’.

O’Farrell’s historical narrative, the article argues, is both an act of appropriation of a true story and a creative re-reading of it, that intertextually engages with a different source, Browning’s poem. Through the figure of Lucrezia, O’Farrell aims to explore the life of women who are obscured by men, entrapped and circumscribed by a patriarchal society that suffocates their aspirations and expectations, and ruthlessly stifles any attempt at autonomous choices.