Storer after Peter Paul Rubens. The Coronation of Mary de Medicis

Historically, the event depicted in this engraving followed soon after that depicted in the previous one: “When Henry IV was on the point of quitting France to carry the war into Germany, he resolved upon the coronation of the queen, to whom he was desirous of committing the government of the kingdom. This ceremony took place on the 10th of May, 1610, of which the picture of Rubens, now before us, presents a faithful representation” (HG 1, facing p. 276).

Melville’s copy of The Coronation of Mary de Medicis appeared in the first volume of the 1819 edition of the Historic Gallery, as it is creased in three sections in the manner of the fold-out print that was bound within that edition (in the four-volume 1811 edition this engraving was printed within the dimensions of a regular page, its horizontal rotated into a vertical format). Since Melville’s copy of the three-part fold-out was lacking the impress of a title, he wrote “Coronation Mary de Medicis” vertically up the left margin. The engraving by Storer reverses the orientation of the painting itself, where the Cardinals conducting coronation are on the right rather than the left side of the image (fig. 1). The Coronation print is much wider than the previous ones because the original painting was the first horizontal one in the cycle, thirteen feet high by twenty-four feet wide (in contrast to the vertical paintings thirteen feet high by ten feet wide).

The editors of the Historic Gallery had a daunting task in identifying and explicating the major players in this expansive ceremony. Here are selections from their commentary: “The Cardinal de Joyeuse is placing the crown upon the head of Mary de Medicis, while her two children, the young Dauphin (Louis XIII) and the Princess Henrietta of France, are standing by her side. The Cardinals Gondi and Sourdis, with several bishops, and another cardinal, are on foot, and accompany the Cardinal de Joyeuse. The Duke de Ventadour and the Chevalier de Vendome are seen behind the queen: the former is holding the sceptre, the other the mace of Justice. The princesses of the court form the train of Mary de Medicis: among whom may be distinguished the divorced queen, Margaret de Valois. Henry the Fourth is upon a tribune [a loge]—the foreign ambassadors occupy a balcony. . . . To these personages, so conformable to history, Rubens, with his usual fondness for allegory, has added two imaginary beings, who are floating in the air . . . scattering flowers, fruit, and money, the type of Abundance . . . . The background represents the Gothic architecture of the church of St. Denis, where this ceremony was performed” (HG 1: 275).

After the identification comes the encomium: “A subject of such importance required those extraordinary talents which Rubens possessed: no other artist could, perhaps, have executed it with equal success. The ministers of religion have individually a character grave and severe. Although placed on an elevation at some distance, Henry IV is very easily recognized, and his features betray expressions of benevolence. It may be very readily discovered, that the figures of the princesses, many of whom are remarkable for youth and beauty, are not only portraits, but that their portraits have been depicted by Rubens in strict conformity with history. Some of the heads have even a decided expression. . . . In the physiognomy and attitude of the queen Margaret there is an air of melancholy, which the painter designedly portrayed” (HG 1: 275-76). So able was the painter, and so capable the engraver, that nearly all of the features in the above commentary can be made out in Melville’s fold-out engraving.

Mellin and Wolf begin their superb elucidation of this painting in 1989 by emphasizing the tight constraints under which it was created, the Queen having provided very specific instructions not only as to who was to be depicted but as to the pictorial perspective to be employed. It was as if she gave Rubens “one of those outline pictures in a coloring book where nothing is left for would-be artists but to brush in the paint.” Even within such constraints, however, Rubens did much more than “present a faithful representation” of the actual coronation ceremony (as the Historic Gallery and many others had assumed). Not only does his painting record the moment in which Marie de Medici “enters the role destined for her from before her birth” in the first painting of the cycle. It also presents a retrospective image of the coronation that took place a decade earlier in which her now problematical son, King Louis XIII, then “the heir to the crown, unmistakably urges his mother to accept it.” The painting also satisfies the Queen’s need that “the assent and participation of certain individuals and families who had by then threatened her position or might still do so . . . be firmly recorded. Mellin and Wolf quite plausibly suggest that Marie showed herself to be a true “Florentine Machiavelli: by the way she made sure Rubens would obstruct her current enemies in the court by the way he depicted them in the painting.” One way he did this was “by displaying them, not at their ages in 1610, when they took part in the ceremony . . . but as the grown men they were when the painting was painted” (107, 112, 114, 119).

Rubens similarly supported the queen’s legitimacy by the way he depicted the Dauphin, the future King Louis XIII, in the coronation scene. He is not simply “standing by” his mother, in the words of the Historic Gallery. Nor is he reaching up as if to grab the crown for himself, as he does in a sketch Rubens made for this painting. In the painting itself, the Dauphin, seen from behind, standing near his mother’s elbow, twists his body around in a “balletic pose” by which he appears to be accepting, rather than challenging, his mother’s coronation. As he does this, the two dogs that are prominent in the foreground (later copied by Watteau) seem blissfully unconcerned with the royal doings behind them. Pictorially they anchor a descending line that runs from the King in the loge, to the Queen beneath the crown, to the Dauphin beside the Queen, to the dogs beneath them all. Crossing this vertical motion down to the dogs is the V-like motion that runs diagonally from the allegorical figures overhead, through Bishop Joyeuse bestowing the crown, to the two red-vested bishops before stretching horizontally through all the witnesses on the floor, spatial dynamics that add to the legitimacy of the coronation as much as the does the depiction of the various personages (Mellin and Wolf, 114, 119).

The text that accompanied the three-part fold-out print from the seven-volume edition of the Historic Gallery on which Melville wrote “Coronation Marie de Medicis” in the left margin included only part of the text that had accompanied the vertical orientation of the same image in the earlier four-volume edition. Viewers of Storer’s Coronation engraving in that edition would have read that the Queen, on the night of her coronation, awoke screaming from a nightmare during which, she told the king, she had witnessed him assassinated, foretelling the assassination that did occur next day. This text discussed some of Henry IV’s conspicuous flaws (“the number of his mistresses” and “his passion for sex”), but it also declared that his death “was one of the most fatal wounds ever inflicted upon the peace and happiness of France—which then became the victim of a weak and turbulent regency.” This tribute to the deceased king expressed sympathy for the widowed queen only by declaring that her “capacity was not of a nature to qualify her for government at such a turbulent period” (Willoughby edition, HG 4, p. 83-84).

Melville preserved his portraits of Machiavelli (CAT 105) and Marie de Medici (CAT 186) together inside a folded slip of paper on which he had written “Busts/Antique” in green crayon. These two celebrated, controversial products of Florence, born less than a century apart, are conspicuous as “modern” figures among Melville’s personal groupings of Ancient Greek and Roman writers and rulers (CAT 6-14 and 70-77).