Analyzing the first sales data for Sant Jordi, it is obvious that there is a great hidden winner. Northern Ireland’s Maggie O’Farrell (Coleraine, 1972) is the only author to appear among the best-selling titles in both Catalan and Spanish, occupying third place in both cases, with her novel El retrato de casada (Asteroide/L’Altra ), so it can be presumed that, combined with both editions, we could be talking at least about the second best-selling author, which has more merit since she did not go to Barcelona to sign last Sunday. The author spoke with this newspaper a few days ago in a Madrid hotel.
What was the first idea for the book? Do the same thing he did in Hamnet, about Shakespeare’s son, with other characters?
One day I was rereading My Last Duchess, a poem by Robert Browning (“behold my last duchess painted on the wall, as if she were alive…â€), narrated by a wicked duke who mocks the wife he has murdered. I wondered if it was based on real events or not and that’s how I discovered Lucrezia de Medici, who married Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara, her deceased sister’s fiancé, at the age of 15 by parental obligation, and then died at 16. Then I looked at the portrait of her that Bronzino painted and it was clear to me that I would write a novel for her. That face was much more expressive than what was usually done at the time: she looked worried, anguished, she had something to tell me. I thought about writing the story that she wanted to tell the painter.
I have searched for the portrait you speak of in the book but it does not exist.
Sometimes those old paintings turn up in someone’s attic, or suddenly they realize the subject was mistakenly thought to be someone else. They have recently discovered one that they believe is his sister’s, Isabel’s. So you never know. The only one there is, the one I saw, was painted just before her marriage.
He officially died of tuberculosis.
Yes, they said so, but there were rumors of poisoning.
There are funny scenes in the Medici zoo.
They had a caged tiger in the basement, too. A zoo was a common symbol of power among the rulers of the time.
Lucrecia belongs to a rich family, but it is hard to imagine a more horrible life.
That is the key. She was unhappy, like other Medici, even though she was born with enormous privileges and wealth, she had an incredible upbringing because her parents were quite progressive and gave their daughters the same training as her sons. She and her sisters spoke several languages, including ancient Greek. But, at the same time, they lived locked up all their lives because it was too dangerous for them to leave the palazzo. There were so many assassination attempts that her father Cosimo never left the house without armor or mail.
Can you give more examples of that lack of freedom?
The brothers lived in a couple of rooms in the palazzo, and if they wanted fresh air, they had to go out onto the battlements, where they were safer. They had a written destiny: boys were trained to be soldiers and rulers and politically advantageous marriages were expected of girls.
It reflects the world of portrait painters of the nobility.
Today we think of painters like Bronzino, Da Vinci or anyone else and we have the idea that they painted the portraits that we attribute to them. This image is not true. They had a large studio for apprentices and they commissioned it to them, they even shared out the same painting, there were specialists in painting hands or certain details. This kind of communal effort is a fascinating thing.
Hence the importance he gives to painters’ assistants.
I didn’t want to focus only on the dukes. I worked as a cleaner in hotels and I know the amount of work involved in keeping a place clean, making everything work, washing clothes, cooking… A 16th century palazzo required an army of servants. I can see through their eyes: unknown people who walked through corridors traveled by people of great power, heard many things. I tell the untold story of the people who coexisted with the powerful.
The advice to make love every five days to engender…
It’s real, a fertility method of the time! They even detailed different positions during intercourse so that it was a boy or a girl.
The whole book has an atmosphere of terror.
Yeah, I reread a lot of thrillers while I was writing it, and Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White. I liked that atmosphere of feeling that her husband is going to kill her. Is it true or are you imagining it? Alfonso also has very affectionate gestures, I wanted to show ambiguity.
Is it a feminist novel?
I don’t know. What I set out to do is write about a family, but the story speaks for itself: girls were married off, often killed by their relatives.
