A Medici princess rebels against her gilded cage
Robert Browning’s oft-recited 1842 poem “My Last Duchess” begins, “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive.” Irish-born writer Maggie O’Farrell brings that young woman back to pulsating life in her captivating new historical novel, “The Marriage Portrait.”
Browning’s speaker, believed to be based on Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, paints a chilling picture of the dynamics of his relationship with his 16-year-old first wife, Lucrezia di Cosimo de’Medici. She died under mysterious circumstances in 1561, less than a
