Marie De' Medici Cycle - The Paintings

The Paintings

Originally the paintings were hung clockwise in chronological order, decorating the walls of a waiting room expanding from a royal apartment in Marie de' Medici's Luxembourg Palace. The paintings are now displayed in the same order in the Louvre. There is an additional claim that Marie had envisioned these paintings to be studied alternately, left to right, so the thoughtful viewer would have had to crisscross down the gallery. Coolidge also argues that Marie envisioned the subjects as falling into pairs, and further into groups. Therefore, Marie's visual biography was divided into three main chapters: childhood, life as a married queen, and the regency as a widow. All of the paintings have the same height although they vary in width in order to fit the shape of the room they were intended for. The sixteen paintings that covered the long walls of the gallery measure about four meters tall by three meters wide, the three larger paintings at the end of the room are four meters high by seven meters wide.

Originally the viewer would have entered the gallery from the southeast corner. The most visible works from this angle were The Coronation in Saint Denis and The Death of Henry IV and the Proclamation of the Regency. The cycle began at the entrance wall, featuring images of Marie's childhood years and her marriage to HenryIV. Four of the images are devoted to the marriage, possibly because marriage at Marie's relatively advanced age of twenty-seven was quite rare for a woman at the time. This half ends with a depiction of Marie's coronation. The wall opposite the gallery's entrance presents an image of the assassination and assumption of Henry IV, as well as the proclamation of the widowed Marie's regency. From there, the second half of Rubens' cycle begins addressing the more controversial issues from Marie's reign. For example, both the altercation and reconciliation with her son Louis XIII are subjects Marie de' Medici commissioned Rubens to paint for this gallery.

The historical period that encompassed the subject matter for the paintings was a time of political upheaval in which Rubens sought not to offend the reigning French monarch. Rubens thus turned to mythological allusions, emblematic references, personifications of vices and virtues and religious analogies to veil an often unheroic or ambiguous reality. Within this context Rubens' approach to 'historical truth' may appear selective or, worse, dishonest, but he was neither a historian in the modern sense, nor a journalist; the Medici cycle is not reportage, but rather poetic transformation.

As a narrative source for the Marie de' Medici cycle Rubens used an ancient genera of writing in which ideal kingship, and good government were explored. This genera of writing is called the Panegyric. Panegyric writings were usually written during an important political event, the birth of a prince for example, and were used to exalt the qualities and ancestry of a ruler. A formal chronological structure is followed in Panegyric writings detailing the ancestry, birth, education and life of the individual. Rubens followed this structure in his series of paintings about Marie de' Medici.

The price of Marie de' Medici Cycle was roughly 24,000 guilders for the 292 square meters, which calculates to about 82 guilders, or 1,512 dollars, per square meter.