A review by duckoffimreading
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

4.0

Fictional but based a tragic true early death of a 16 year old de’Medici daughter in 1560’s Italy. In The Marriage Portrait, Lucrezia is the bohemian wild child of Florentine royals who is married off to Duke Alfonso of Ferrara. Lucrezia is the replacement bride to her older sister who (fortunately) died just before her planned marriage to Alfonso. Lucrezia is kept like a caged bird by Alfonso, where optics are more important than actual relationships. He puts more effort into their wedding portrait than actually building a union with Lucrezia. Unsurprisingly, Lucrezia’s only value is to produce an heir for Alfonso and in her short year long marriage, is unsuccessful. In real life, Duke of Ferrara was unable to produce heirs with 3 separate wives but you know who got the blame anyway. I thought this was going to be much stuffier than it read, O’Farrell writes beautifully and with easy to follow language. Lucrezia’s character is the wild animal caged for entertainment and killed off when no longer useful, just like the lions and tigers her dad kept. A life lived too short, but at least in O’Farrell’s version there may be some small redemption. I don’t know a lot about the de’Medici’s besides they were crazy powerful in their time and women lived suspiciously short lives on the regular. Just like other books I have read recently - being a girl born into wealth is a prison of its own.