Summer Reading: Ferrara & Maggie O’Farrell’s Marriage Portrait

By Kathleen Olive

Like many readers, I enjoyed Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet and its different perspective on Shakespeare’s life. Reading it, I felt as if I’d been parachuted into Elizabethan England, so my ears pricked up when I discovered that her most recent novel, The Marriage Portrait, would take me to sixteenth-century Ferrara.

The Marriage Portrait’s protagonist, Florentine noblewoman Lucrezia de’ Medici, is the probable subject of a lovely portrait by Bronzino, and of Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess”. Like you, perhaps, I studied that dramatic monologue in school, so I was prepared for the story of Lucrezia to end badly. (Scholars are now in tentative agreement that the historical Lucrezia died a prosaic and natural death.)

No plot-spoiling here, but O’Farrell charts a different and surprising course through Lucrezia’s short life. Elements of this are very enjoyable: Lucrezia’s childhood home, Florence’s fortress-like Palazzo della Signoria (or Palazzo Vecchio), for example, is vividly brought to life in the novel’s early chapters. Many well-researched historical threads are worked into the narrative tapestry, including the lions kept in cages behind the palace by successive governments, as living mascots of the city’s crest; O’Farrell uses the unfortunate beasts in a dramatic moment that reveals a young Lucrezia’s inner strength.

O’Farrell is also adept at turning the cityscapes of Renaissance Ferrara and Florence – places that so charm modern visitors – into a claustrophobic and confining world for Lucrezia, who as a teenager is married to Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. This constant sense of restriction reflects the reality of life for prized wives and breeders of Lucrezia’s class: one fifteenth-century visitor to Florence even complained that he never got a sense of how beautiful the city’s aristocratic women were, because they were so thoroughly shut away. The Marriage Portrait is full of “vast, fortified … thick” stone walls and narrow passageways, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that Lucrezia never really sets foot in either city.

But I was most charmed by O’Farrell’s conjuring of Ferrara and its string of ducal pleasure palaces, or delizie, stretching along the Po River. I was fortunate enough to spend time in Ferrara earlier this year, and was reminded of how elegant and compact it is, the perfect size for appreciating its significant cultural riches. Pity O’Farrell’s poor Lucrezia, so consumed by the need to produce an Este heir that she never gets to enjoy Ferrara’s lovely squares.

Today Ferrara’s piazze are an elegant open-air salon, filled with cafes and bookstores, the perfect incubator for cultural titans – and Ferrara has produced many. In the modern era, there’s Giovanni Boldini, the fin-de-siècle ‘Master of Swish’ who was the preferred portraitist of high society ladies from Europe to America. There’s Giorgio Bassani, novelist and Ferrara’s greatest chronicler, as well as painters Giorgio De Chirico and Filippo De Pisis, with their wonderful and distinct visions of the world. Film-maker Michelangelo Antonioni, who made some of the best and most beautifully filmed statements about post-war Italy, was also a native.

In Lucrezia de’ Medici’s time, Ferrara was even more at the cultural forefront. From Ludovico Ariosto to Torquato Tasso and Boiardo, Italian schoolchildren are still taught literature that came about thanks to Este patronage. In painting, Cosmè Tura, Ercole de’ Roberti and Francesco del Cossa were inspired by an imported Flemish aesthetic to create a distinctive style that is still known as the ‘Ferrara School’.

Art plays an important part in O’Farrell’s novel: court portraitist Sebastiano Filippo, ‘Il Bastianino’, is commissioned by Lucrezia’s husband Alfonso to paint her likeness, giving the duchess (herself a skilled artist) the chance to meet two apprentices who will transform her life. We are given glimpses of iconic art in the halls of Ferrara’s Castello Estense, great paintings by Bellini, Titian and Dosso Dossi that Lucrezia sees obliquely as she is hurried from room to room.

In the chauvinist world of the novel and of sixteenth-century Ferrara, these paintings are often violent or erotic (or both), and I couldn’t help but wish that O’Farrell’s Lucrezia might instead spend some time in Duke Borso d’Este’s Palazzo Schifanoia. This was a suburban retreat, built by Lucrezia’s great-great-uncle-in-law to ‘chase away boredom’ (the meaning of its name), and one of its rooms is entirely decorated with a glorious cycle of frescoes by Francesco del Cossa.

Del Cossa is less known today but he was an accomplished fifteenth-century artist with the temerity to demand a higher rate of pay upon completing these frescoes – principally because their quality was so much higher than the original contract had foreseen. He is also the protagonist of Ali Smith’s intriguing How To Be Both, to my mind the best fictional representation of art in Renaissance Ferrara.

You can survey a fraction of Ferrara’s artistic riches in its state gallery, housed in the Palazzo dei Diamanti. The building’s Renaissance exterior is studded with the pointy “rustications” that give it its name and is set within a district that has an equally charming name: the Herculean Addition, a courtly neighbourhood laid out by Lucrezia’s great-grandfather-in-law, Ercole d’Este, as an ideal planned suburb.

If you kept walking to the edge of the Herculean Addition, you’d end up at the Jewish Cemetery, which features in the novel and film of Bassani’s Garden of the Finzi-Contini. The Jews of Ferrara don’t get a look-in in O’Farrell’s portrait of the Renaissance city, which might seem a historical reality unless you took a closer look at Francesco del Cossa’s Palazzo Schifanoia frescoes.

Here, in a fresco depicting the month of April, you’d spy a detail showing a footrace through the city. This race or palio was an opportunity for the good people of Ferrara to reinforce their own status by deriding those they considered outcasts, from sex workers to Jews. It’s a rare intrusion of marginalised people into a grand Western art commission like this one, and a revealing detail.

Ferrara’s modern Jewish history is best explored in the work of local novelist Giorgio Bassani. Many of us are most familiar with the city thanks to his Garden of the Finzi-Contini, and, as a Jewish intellectual whose youth was greatly affected by the Italian government’s racial laws, he offers the clearest view of life under Fascism. Any of Bassani’s works are worth reading before you visit Ferrara, but the best place to start is his Novel of Ferrara. This final compilation brought together key works and is readily available in translation.

There’s a saying in Italy: “italiani, brava gente.” It refers to the trope that Italians were reluctant bystanders to Axis violence and discrimination before and during World War II. These are the ‘good Italians’ of partisan songs like Bella, ciao, rather than the many who supported the 1938 racial laws – introduced well before occupation by Germany, in 1943 – or who watched as citizens were deported to concentration camps in Italy and beyond.

Bassani sheds light on what it was like to live in Ferrara under such conditions, and today the city has Italy’s most important museum of the Holocaust. The Museo nazionale dell’ebraismo italiano e della Shoah (National Museum of Italian Judaism and of the Holocaust) is as much an exploration of the history of the Italian Jews as it is a commemoration and collective acknowledgement of Italian victims of anti-semitism. It’s thoughtfully done, and when I visited in April there were groups of schoolchildren learning more about a less-discussed aspect of their modern history.

Ferrara aside, much of O’Farrell’s Marriage Portrait takes place outside the city, in the country villas in which the Este dynasty enjoyed recreation. These are the Este delizie, or ‘delights’, and they share the UNESCO World Heritage status of the city, despite being less known. Many of them were originally fortresses that controlled trade and custom duties on the mighty Po, but their location in its marshy delta also made them perfect for aristocratic hunting.

Lucrezia spends a crucial period at the Bondeno delizia, herself a metaphorical prey, and she identifies immediately upon her arrival that this so-called Rocca di Stellata looks suspiciously “imposing […] like a fortress.” Small and “strangely geometric”, it’s perhaps the least impressive of the Este pleasure palaces, but it offers a perfect setting for The Marriage Portrait’s most dramatic scenes. In reality, the Rocca di Stellata was destroyed at the order of Lucrezia’s husband, Alfonso II, and today’s star-shaped castle was rebuilt in the seventeenth century.

Lucrezia spends her first weeks as Alfonso’s bride at another delizia, that of Belriguardo. This summer palace, built in the fifteenth century, was famous for a garden over thirty hectares in size. It’s here that Lucrezia comes to know the stranger she has married, and the garden is cool and enticing but ultimately closed off and seemingly inescapable – a foreshadowing of Lucrezia’s relationship with her husband.

It is in the delizia at Belriguardo that O’Farrell has Alfonso present Lucrezia with “an animal like a horse, but smaller, with a graceful, sloping head and a long, whisking tail […] pure white, from the long mane that drapes over its neck, down to the smooth fetlocks.” This is one of the novel’s few allusions to Browning’s poem, “My Last Duchess.” As Browning’s unnamed duke explains to an ambassador, his duchess was “too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed” – as equally by her husband as by “the white mule / She rode with round the terrace.”

O’Farrell’s take on the story of Alfonso II d’Este and Lucrezia de’ Medici offers the unfortunate duchess a different fate to Browning’s dark imaginings, but one no less dramatic. Like Lucrezia, the reader of The Marriage Portrait is given a beguiling view of the Este city and its delizie, and an opportunity to reflect on Ferrara and its proud Renaissance heritage..

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