R. Sands after Rubens. The Destiny of Mary de Medicis

This image is very high and narrow (the original painting is thirteen feet high by five feet wide). The three Fates are in charge. Much more than in the original painting, this outline engraving relegates the attentive gods to a recessive plane in the sky. The text strives mightily to help the reader imagine the vivid color of the painting itself while identifying the mythical divinities as Jupiter and Juno: “The Fates weave the destiny of the Queen; they are ingeniously disposed in order to unite the composition with the sky of the picture, where Jupiter and Juno are seen presiding over their labours. The head of the goddess is full of expression: her robe is of a clear violet; and her veil, transparent and light, floats in the heavens. Jupiter, to whom the artist has had the address of giving those traits by which he is characterized in the works of the ancients, has a red drapery. The Fates are somewhat heavy in point of drawing; but the colouring is brilliant and correct” (HG 7, n.p.). All the colors and shapes described in the words of the Historic Gallery in 1819 were visible in the original painting (fig. 1) during Melville’s visit to the Louvre on November 30, 1849, were he savored “heaps of treasures of all sorts” in what he later called the “painted gauntlet on of the gods” (NN J 31; P 350):

Rubens’s image of the three fleshy Fates weaving the destiny of Marie de Medici in the opening painting of this cycle anticipates Melville’s evocation of the “invisible police officer of the Fates” who has woven the destiny of Ishmael into “Loomings,” the opening chapter of Moby-Dick (where Ishmael imagines his own “Whaling Voyage” as part of “the grand programme of Providence that was drawn a long time ago"). The visible thread running through the hands of the three female weavers in the painting is a pictorial analogue to Ishmael’s “Loom of Time” in the “Mat-Maker” chapter  (through which he realizes that any attempt to “weave my own destiny” is compromised by the fact that “chance, free will, and necessity” are “all interweavingly working together"). The thread of destiny will play out in the rest of the Medici cycle much as the whale-line does in Ishmael’s meditation in “The Line”: “All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life” (NN MD 7, 214-15, 281).

As Melville was writing Moby-Dick in 1850-51, the Marie de Medici whose pictorial cycle Rubens had painted in the 1620s was still serving as a queenly epitome of the “ever-present perils of life” to which all are subject. The breadth of sympathy still felt for her while Melville was writing “The Line” is suggested in the sentiment that immediately follows the account of her death in his copy of The Works of Eminent Masters, published in 1854: “Mockery of human greatness! The widow of Henry IV; the daughter and mother of a king; the woman whom the painter was delighted to represent, surrounded by emblems of imperishable greatness, was destined to fall, one day, from the height of her grandeur and to die in exile, the sorrow attendant on which was still more embittered by poverty” (I: 225-26).

By setting the first painting of the cycle on the edge of the heaven of the gods, Rubens signals that his pictorial depiction of the real-life queen will oscillate between Heroic Deeds and Mystic Figures (in the title of the book that Millan and Wolf devote entirely to the Marie de Medici series). Like Melville in Moby-Dick, Rubens presents us with a complex weave in which human destiny is both anchored and shaped by myriad forces seen and unseen. Juno in The Destiny of Marie de Medici embodies his “poetical-poetic approach” to the entire cycle in that she is “more, and other, than the queen of the gods.” She is also “one of Marie de Medici’s alter-egos, an avatar, a transfiguration: her essence as a royal consort.” Each queen has been similarly betrayed by her kingly companion (Millen and Wolf, 27). Rubens, when making such connections, is both elusive and allusive. As Ishmael says of “the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow” in Moby-Dick: “I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can” (347).