Autumn/Winter 2022

Death of a Duchess
Historical fiction or true crime?
By Margie MacKinnon
‘LM’ – a young girl from a wealthy and powerful
family; ‘AF’ – an older man with an ancient and
noble lineage. Their marriage is hastily arranged
after the untimely death of LM’s older sister, AF’s
intended bride. After a lengthy engagement, their
childless marriage of less than a year ends with
LM’s death at the age of 16. The official cause is
tuberculosis, but rumours soon circulate that LM
has been murdered, most likely poisoned, by her
husband. There is a history of violent death in
the family …
Cue the Netflix true crime series vowing to get
to the bottom of the story. Sadly, the witnesses are
all dead and the documentary evidence is slim:
a contemporary portrait of LM, a poem written
some 300 years later and, now, a novel by Maggie
O’Farrell entitled The Marriage Portrait, inspired
by both.
AF is Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, in need of a
wife to provide him with an heir to his 900-yearold
title. LM is Lucrezia de’ Medici, born in 1545, the
third and last (legitimate) daughter of Cosimo I,
the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and his wife Eleonora
of Toledo. True to her place in the family, Lucrezia,
at first glance, comes across as a Cinderella
figure. Caroline P. Murphy’s excellent biography
of Lucrezia’s older sister Isabella reports that, “at
the Medici court, [oldest daughter] Maria earned
praise for her graciousness, her rare beauty, and
regal ways” while Isabella, her father’s favourite,
was noted for her “liveliness and irrepressibility”.
Lucrezia, on the other hand, was “less gifted than
her sisters [and] attracted little comment.”
The absence of hard evidence – letters,
diaries, household accounts and inventories, on
which biographies are often based – creates a
void, which O’Farrell fills with imaginative and
evocative prose to recreate Lucrezia’s story. The
author remains faithful to the known facts of the
young duchess’s life, with a few alterations “in
the name of fiction” for narrative cohesion and
to avoid confusion amongst various characters
with the same names. The fictional Lucrezia is
highly educated, having been tutored at home,
along with her brothers. Although most girls in
sixteenth-century Italy would have received little
formal education, it was not unusual for young
women of noble or wealthy families to receive
the training necessary for them to be considered
good marriage prospects. In the Grand Duke’s
family, both the boys and the girls were taught
Latin and Spanish (their mother’s language); they
studied the works of philosophers and historians;
they learned to play several instruments and
became skilled equestrians.
With no way to make use of the intellectual gifts
so assiduously instilled by the family tutor, the
fictional Lucrezia turns to painting as a creative
outlet. While there is no evidence of the real
Lucrezia having been an artist, she would have
68 Restoration Conversations • Autumn / Winter 2022