The Marie de Medici Cycle
Melville’s prints relating to Marie de Medici from the Historic Gallery include one portrait of the Queen herself and eleven of the images that Rubens painted from the history of her life.1 The print of the queen was preserved inside the slip of paper on which Melville had written “Busts / Antique” in green crayon; the eleven history paintings were inside the one on which he had written “Rubens” in red crayon (Wallace 1986, pp. 74, 75). Each of the prints had been accompanied by considerable commentary when published in the Historic Gallery, but we do not know if Melville had access to the commentary as well as the prints (in the catalog entries below our citations will be from the seven-volume edition completed in 1819—see the introduction to Ancient Greek Busts). The anonymous authors of the Historic Gallery, like those of The Works of Eminent Masters, were struck by the fact that Marie de Medici, who had intermittently known the highest glory after becoming the Queen of France in 1610, had died in Cologne in 1642 “almost in a state of indigence” (HG 7: n.p.).
Marie de Medici (1573-1642), a niece of the most powerful family in Florence, was married, by proxy, to King Henry of France in 1601. Her uncle, Ferdinando, Grand Duke of Tuscany, stood in for the absent king. Peter Paul Rubens, four years younger than she, being then resident in Italy, witnessed that marriage (according to his later testimony). Although he had returned to Antwerp in 1608, his close association with various European courts, and especially that of the Duke of Mantua, had kept him apprised of the extraordinary events that had befallen Marie de Medici after being crowned Queen of France in 1610: the assassination of her husband King Henry IV the following day; the period she served as Queen Regent until her son Louis XIII came of age to assume the crown in 1614; his banishment of her from the country; and the reconciliation with her son by 1620 that allowed her to return to the Luxembourg Palace and begin the ambitious decorative program that caused her to summon Rubens from Antwerp to paint the history of her life (White 161).
Rubens’s artistic response to that commission commands considerable space in Melville’s copy of the 1854 Works, which emphasizes that “Rubens lost no time in presenting himself . . . to the queen, who honoured him with an order for twenty-one pictures, illustrative of the most important events of her life. He immediately acquainted himself with the history of Marie de Médicis, arranged all the principal events in due order, made spirited sketches of each subject . . . and gave them to his pupils to work from, under his superintendence.” The queen’s own imperious nature—and the need to treat very diplomatically certain treacherous periods in her royal trajectory—caused Rubens to depict her story in a style that was new to history painting. “Instead of actual history,” he “composed a sort of allegorical poem, each picture of which forms a canto. The whole is a fantastic and turbulent production, in which divinities, with the elements and abstract ideas, are embodied in diverse personages, placed on earth, in the bosom of the ocean, in Olympus and Christian heaven, in the regions of mythology, and the history of France” (1: 238).
Melville presumably would have reveled in this mélange for its imaginative panache as well as for what this series added to his impressive collection of engravings representing the history and painters of France. After six poetic paragraphs celebrating the virtuosity of the cycle, the commentator in Works concludes that “in order to astonish the spectator, Rubens seems to have exhausted all the resources of his theatrical style in the execution of the Luxembourg gallery. These paintings, which are now in the Louvre, are all prodigies, with respect to the boldness of their style, and the brilliancy of their colouring.” Having arrived to negotiate the commission in 1622, Rubens returned the Luxembourg Palace in 1625 “in order to finish the last two pictures of the gallery,” portraits of his royal patron’s parents (1: 238-39).
Whether Melville’s Marie de Medici engravings from the Historic Gallery had been inherited from his father or acquired by Herman himself, they represented what had long been considered one of the supreme achievements not only in Rubens’s career but in the art of France. This had been as true when Allan Melvill saw the original paintings at the Luxembourg Palace in 1801-02 as when his son Herman saw the same paintings at the Louvre in 1849. Jules Thuillier in his 1970 book on Rubens’s Life of Marie de Medicis showed how those paintings by Rubens had influenced French painters from Watteau and Boucher in the early eighteenth century through to David, Tallaisson, Meissonier, Delacroix, and Renoir in the nineteenth. In the process, he cited the Goncourts’ 1860 assertion that “for a hundred years it seemed that the painting of France had no other cradle, no other school, no other homeland, than the Galerie of the Luxembourg, the Life of Marie de Medici” (150). Lawrence Gowing, in his 1987 book on the Louvre, stated simply that “nothing in the Louvre contributed more to French national consciousness than the Medici pictures” (330).
Of course none of the engravings from the Historic Gallery would have shown Melville the brilliant coloring, the original “tints á Rubens,” that he would have been able to see in the actual Marie de Medici paintings series at the Louvre on November 30, 1849—or in the original paintings by Rubens he would have seen during his two visits to the private collection of Samuel Rogers in London in December of the same year. In 1857, he would again see paintings by Rubens in Italy, the Netherlands, and England when returning from his voyage to the Mediterranean. He might also have seen a few original paintings by Rubens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the late 1880s and early 1890s, when he was still revising “At the Hostelry,” the unpublished poem in which Rubens makes a picturesque entrance among the other Old Master artists who are discussing the picturesque in painting. We will consider that possibility in our Parting Thought on Rubens and Jordaens.
For now, here is one corner of the complete installation of twenty-four paintings now at the Louvre, with the portraits of Marie de Medici and her father at the far left next to The Destiny of Marie de Medici, and the next six paintings in the cycle along the wall to the right (fig. 1).
