FICTION
Sep 02, 2022
3 minutes
By Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Here is a novel inspired by a poem describing a painting portraying a young woman who actually lived. Art and artifice are intrinsic to it. In Maggie O’Farrell’s imagining of 16th-century Italian courtly life, manners make the man, clothes make the woman, and an image is more durable than a person.
In 1558, Lucrezia, daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, was married to Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara. A year after entering her husband’s court in 1560, aged just 16, she died. Poison was suspected.
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