Autumn/Winter 2022

Above: Casa Guidi, where the
Brownings lived during their
time in Florence.
Right: Maggie O’Farrell, (Image:
Murdo Macleod).
Far right: Lucrezia de’ Medici’s
tomb at the Corpus Domini
Monastery, Ferrara.
grown up amid the masterpieces of the Medici art
collection and been surrounded by palace walls
frescoed by Vasari and other renowned artists of
the Renaissance. Any art training she received
would have steered her towards painting genres
suitable for young women. Thus, it feels right
when the fictional Lucrezia, who finds solace
in painting fantastical scenes of wild imaginary
creatures, hides them from Alfonso by covering
them with the traditional still lifes deemed
appropriate for women artists.
It is also true, as the novel reveals, that the
Grand Duke kept a menagerie of exotic animals,
including lions, in the cellars below the Palazzo
Vecchio. The roars of the lions could be heard
by those passing behind the palace on the aptly
named via dei Leoni, and no doubt would have
fed the imaginations of the real Medici children
as well as the fictional Lucrezia. It has been
suggested that the foul odours emanating from
the animal enclosures prompted the family’s
subsequent move to Palazzo Pitti on the opposite
side of the Arno.
The ‘Marriage Portrait’ of the book’s title is an
invention of the Victorian poet Robert Browning.
His monologue ‘My Last Duchess’ is written in the
voice of Alfonso. Addressing an emissary who
has come to Ferrara to negotiate the recently
widowed Duke’s next marriage, Alfonso draws a
curtain and invites his guest to look at a portrait
on the wall. “That’s my last Duchess painted on
the wall/ Looking as if she were alive,” he says.
He describes Lucrezia’s kind and happy nature
but complains that ‘”she had a heart … too soon
made glad … twas not her husband’s presence
only” that drew her smiles; instead, she was “too
easily impressed; she liked whate’er she looked
on … [and] ranked my gift of a nine-hundredyears-old-name
with anybody’s gift’”. Chillingly, he
states, ‘”I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped
together.’” Having made this startling admission,
Alfonso resumes the tour of his artworks and
returns to discussing the arrangements for
marriage to another young girl.
In an afterword to the novel, O’Farrell recounts
that she had been rereading Browning’s dramatic
70 Restoration Conversations • Autumn / Winter 2022