That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive.
-Robert Browning ‘My Last Dtechess’
In 1560, 15-year-old Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici left Florence to begin her married life with Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. Less than a year later, she would be dead. The official cause of her death was given as “putrid fever”, but it was rumoured that she had been murdered by her husband.
A wild and lonely place
Fortezza, near Bondeno, 1561
Lucrezia is taking her seat at the long dining table, which is polished to a watery gleam and spread with dishes, inverted cups, a woven circlet of fir. Her husband is sitting
