The Marriage Portrait(120)

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Look. Here is Lucrezia, a small figure in the corner of a landscape with a river, a forest, an imposing stone building. She is moving across open ground, through the dark winter night, running, running, with all her strength, towards the merciful canopy of trees.





Author’s Note


Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, is widely considered to have been the inspiration for Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess”; Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici d’Este, Duchess of Ferrara, is the inspiration for this novel.

I have tried to use what little is known about her short life but I have made a few alterations, in the name of fiction.

Lucrezia was born in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. In 1550, when she was five years old, the family of Cosimo I de’ Medici moved across the river to the Palazzo Pitti. I kept them in the first location, for the sake of narrative cohesion.

The real Lucrezia was married to Alfonso II, at the age of thirteen, in May 1558 (the dowry paid by her father was an astonishing two hundred thousand gold scudi, which is around ￡50 million in today’s currency). She remained in Florence with her family for the following two years, while Alfonso went to France to lead military campaigns for Henri II. On his father’s death in 1559, Alfonso became duke, and he returned to Ferrara, arriving in Florence in the summer of 1560 to fetch Lucrezia and accompany her to his court. I have conflated both the marriage and the departure, so that Lucrezia in this novel is married and leaves for Ferrara in one single event at the age of fifteen.

Cosimo I de’ Medici became ruler of the Duchy of Tuscany in 1537, at the age of seventeen; he was elevated to Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1569. I refer to him by his latter title for the duration of this novel for the purpose of differentiating him from Alfonso.

There was indeed a collection of exotic animals in the basement of the Palazzo Vecchio; the street behind it is still named via dei Leoni. It’s been suggested by several biographers that the animals’ odour was one of the reasons Eleonora insisted on moving to the Palazzo Pitti. The story of the tigress and the lions was inspired by an incident at the royal menagerie in the Tower of London, when a keeper mistakenly opened the interconnecting door between cages.

The two sisters of Alfonso II who remained at the Ferrarese court after their mother’s departure were named not Elisabetta and Nunciata, as here, but Lucrezia and Eleonora. I took the liberty of renaming them here to avoid confusion with other characters in the book.

The grim conclusion to the love affair between Ercole Contrari, head of the guards, and Elisabetta/Lucrezia d’Este took place in 1575, not 1561.

The only portrait of Lucrezia on display in Europe, at the time of writing, can be seen at the Palatine Gallery, two streets away from Casa Guidi, Robert Browning’s Florence residence. It is a small oil painting, about the size of a hardback book, commissioned by her parents shortly before Lucrezia left for Ferrara, and attributed to the studio of Agnolo Bronzino. In it, she is depicted against a dark background, wearing both Medici and Este jewellery; her face bears a slightly uncertain, apprehensive expression. The Uffizi Gallery has other iterations of the same portrait in its archives; a larger (and, to my eye at least, less flattering) version of it, by Alessandro Allori, is in the North Carolina Museum of Art.

The Ferrarese marriage portrait of Lucrezia, which forms the basis of Browning’s poem, is, to the best of my knowledge, entirely fictional. If one ever does come to light, I would be very keen to know about it.

A final note about uxoricide among Lucrezia’s family: her sole surviving sister, Isabella de’ Medici Orsini, met a very sudden and highly suspicious death at the age of thirty-four, in 1575, while on a hunting holiday with her husband at a country villa in Cerruto. According to the official account, written by her brother Francesco, who was by then Grand Duke of Tuscany, it occurred “while she was washing her hair in the morning…She was found by [her husband] on her knees, having immediately fallen dead.” There are, unsurprisingly, differing opinions on the cause of her death. The scene at the close of this novel, with Alfonso and Leonello enacting their violent ritual in the fortezza chamber, and the resulting unrecognisable corpse, is taken from another account of Isabella’s demise—that of Ercole Cortile, who was operating as a spy in the Florentine court for none other than Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara. After conducting his own enquiries from eyewitnesses to the deed, he wrote to the Duke: “Lady Isabella was strangled at midday. The poor woman was in bed when she was called by Signor Paolo…Hidden under the bed was the Roman Cavalier Massimo, who helped him to kill the lady.”

Only a few days before Isabella’s death, her cousin Dianora—now married to the youngest Medici brother, Pietro—also died a mysterious death at a country villa in Cafaggiolo. Pietro wrote to his brother Francesco with sinister composure: “Last night, at seven o’clock, an accident and death came to my wife, so Your Highness can take peace, and write to me about what I should do, if I should come back or not.” The reason given was that she suffocated accidentally while in bed. Ercole Cortile, once again writing to Alfonso II, was more forthcoming: “She was strangled by a dog leash by Don Pietro…and finally died after a great deal of struggle. Don Pietro bears the sign, having two fingers on his hand injured from the bite of the lady.”

The deaths of Isabella and Dianora appear to have had the tacit approval of their families. Neither Paolo Orsini, Isabella’s husband, nor Pietro de’ Medici, Dianora’s husband, was ever held to account for the sudden and unexplained deaths of their wives.