George Cooke after Rubens. Journey of Mary de Medici to the Pont de Cé

Melville’s next engraving in the cycle, Journey of Mary de Medici to the Pont de Cé, returns to the vertical format. In the Luxembourg Palace it followed after two additional horizontal paintings designed for the far end of the royal apartment. In The Death of Henry IV and the Proclamation of the Regency, Rubens allegorized the death of the king the day after his wife was made queen on the same canvas in which she takes control of the state. The Council of the Gods is an allegorization of the political intrigues and alignments into which the court was thrown. This engraving of Journey of Mary de Medici to the Pont de Cé was thought to have allegorized a major victory that solidified the position of the new Queen Regent. In the words of the Historic Gallery, “Under the Regency of Marie de Medicis a multitude assembled at Pont-de-Cé, which threatened France with civil war. The queen marched to attack the city, with a body of troops, and immediately reduced it to obedience” (HG 3, n. p.). Subsequent scholarship has established that the victory being celebrated here was not at Ponts-de-Cé in 1620 (where Marie’s own “rebellious forces” had been defeated “by those of her son,” resulting in her “full capitulation and humiliation”) but rather at Jülich, or Juliers, in 1610 (when Marie successfully completed the plan of her late husband to take back the provincial German capital from the Austrian Imperial forces who had seized it). The painting itself is now known as The Regent Militant: The Victory at Jülich (Millen and Wolf, 156-59; fig. 1 below).

The Historic Gallery gives this account of the way Rubens has “combined allegory with history”: “Mary de Medicis is mounted on a white horse, with a staff in her hand. Her head is covered with a helmet, decorated with a plume of feathers. Beside her La Force is seen, attended by a lion. Victory is floating in the air, and places a crown on the head of the queen, whose success is announced by Fame. An eagle darts upon some birds of prey, which she puts to flight—in allusion to the defeat of the insurgents. This event is delineated on the back ground of the picture, where the rebels are observed presenting the keys of the city to the generals of the royal army” (n. p.). As a depiction of the siege of Jülich in 1610, the scene of surrender being formalized on the battle field represents “the capitulation of the Austrian Imperial forces to the French in league with Protestant Dutch, English, and German forces” (Mellin an Wolf, 157).

Cooke’s outline engraving equalizes the figures in the foreground, bringing out the mane and the tail of the white horse as much as the plume of the queen’s helmet. The face of the lion alongside La Force and the horse supporting the queen are clearly delineated—as are the victorious eagle and the face of the angel blowing the trumpet of Fame in the sky. The military and diplomatic aggregation in the background is delicately depicted beyond the lifted leg of the horse. Millen and Wolf follow those earlier authorities who see the female figure with the lion as representing not Fortitude (La Force) but rather Generosity. This theme extends to the surrender scene on the battlefield at Jülich depicting “the generous French action in turning over the keys of the conquered city to the German princes on whom the rule devolved by right” (157). Militarily, the Austrian surrender to the forces of the Queen Regent achieved the purpose for which Henry IV had himself been preparing to go to war in Germany. Pictorially, the scene in which the German princes receive the keys to their conquered city echoes the scene in which Marie de Medici receives the orb of the Regency in Melville’s engraving of Henry 4th setting out to War (CAT 193).

Although the victory at Jülich in 1610 provided the historical occasion for Rubens’s depiction of The Regent Militant, that painting is about much more than the victory of her forces on the battlefield. The Queen Regent herself is front and center, and everything about the way she is depicted shows her to be “splendid in magnanimity, the true image of a power that can temper its might with right.” As Mellin and Wolf show, her magnanimity extends from the historical to the personal and from the allegorical to the mythological. In the historical context of the victory at Jülich, her equine portrait serves as a “personification of royal France” at the same time that it represents the Queen Regent “as her official self . . . gowned in luscious embroidered satins . . . spangled with fleurs-de-lis.” Yet we do not see her “merely as a queen” because Rubens also presents her as a “manifestation of her emblematic tutelary diety Minerva.” He does not depict Queen Marie in “the full armor” in which the mythological Minerva often appears. But he does endow her with “Minerva’s sphinx-headed helmet,” associating her with the sagacious goddess “whose warlike undertakings are tempered always by divine wisdom and exercised only in just causes.” In all of these ways, “the Dowager Queen of the 1620s was making her claim that the Regent of the 1610s had been in every way a satisfactory ruler, even in the exclusively male province of miliary victory” (158).