Grieg after Rubens. Birth of Mary de Medicis

This symbolically laden childbirth scene allows the commentator on the print in the Historic Gallery to elaborate on the combination of the “allegorical and the poetical” which Rubens has “invariably followed” in the series as a whole: “Lucina, the goddess who presides over child-birth, presents to the city of Florence, Mary de Medicis, who is just born. The head of the young princess is surrounded by an emblem of her future grandeur. Her tutelary genius holds a cornucopia, from which issue the crown and sceptre of France, and a hand of justice. Other divinities are floating in the air, and scatter flowers upon the Queen. Two children support an escutcheon, upon which is a fleur de lis, adverting to the permission granted by Louis XI to the Medici, to annex it to their arms, as a symbol of alliance. In the heavens, the sign of Sagittarius indicates the month in which the princess was born. On the fore ground is the river Arno; which with the lion, have been introduced by the painter in order to characterise the city of Florence” (HG 3, n.p.).

In the painting itself (fig. 1), the mélange of parts is harmonized, to a degree, by the blending of colors: blue, green, and purple for the city of Florence, red for Lucina; white, grey, violet, and dark green for the “geniuses” filling the sky. If Melville took even a quick look at this painting during his visit to the Louvre in November 1849, he would have had an immediate of sense of what the Philaréte Chasles had meant in the review of Mardi published in New York in August of the same year, calling attention to Melville’s “tints á la Rubens, his warm and violent coloring, his predilection for dramatic effect, his efflorescent colors” (90). Writing for the Revue de Duex Mondes in Paris, Chasles’s sense of Rubens’s dramatic use of color would have been strongly influenced by the Marie de Medici cycle at the Louvre.

In Melville’s own copy of Grieg’s outline engraving of Birth of Mary de Medicis, the harmony of the whole is achieved by the lines of the of the shapely figures: from the sweet embrace of the river god and the lion in the foreground, to the tilt of Lucina toward the cradled baby in the middle ground; to the fashionable flow of the floating, doting forms above them. In the engraving, the heavy flesh and blood of the original painting has been etherealized into more of an elegant dance. The river god and the lion are more prominent than in the actual painting, and Grieg has gracefully extracted the expressive face of the lion from the flow of the paint on the canvas.