Sands after Rubens. The Felicity of the Regency

In the contract she negotiated with Rubens, the Queen had veto power over any of the subjects she had originally obligated him to paint. One of the more visually dramatic, but politically treacherous, subjects would surely have been The Flight from Paris, in which the Queen “had rapidly to escape from Louis XIII,” her son. The Queen “decided at the last minute to suppress this subject entirely and Rubens was called upon to paint another more innocuous scene of The Felicity of the Regency” (White 162).

The text that accompanies engraving of The Felicity of the Regency in the seven-volume edition of the Historic Gallery summarizes the “very complicated allegory” by which “Rubens has represented the happiness which accompanied the government of Mary de Medicis.” In this painting, she “is seated upon a throne richly ornamented. In one hand she holds a sceptre, and rests it upon the globe of France, which a genius upholds. In her other hand is placed the balance of Justice. Minerva appears to deliver her counsels to the queen, adjoining whom is one of the loves, symbol of the affection of the people. Abundance and Equity are contiguous to the throne. Equity distributes crowns of laurel and medals to the genius of the arts. Ignorance, Envy, and Calumny are overthrown, and rendered harmless, although one of these monsters extends his arm towards the attributes of the arts, which he attempts to destroy. Time, under the figure of Saturn, crowned with fruits and flowers, shows to France the golden age, ornamented by two Fames floating in the air. In the back ground we perceive the columns of a temple decorated with foliage” (HG 6, n. p.). In the original painting, the complications of the allegory are harmonized by the ensemble of shapes and colors surrounding the Queen (fig. 1).

In this pictorial allegory, the attributes of the earlier Education painting appear to have achieved true felicity in the world of political and personal affairs. The formerly studious princess is now a royal ruler. Minerva, no longer a mentor to the young, is now a wise advisor. The allegorical graces who encouraged Marie’s youthful studies are now bestowing riches on children young enough to be her own. The books and instruments she had studied in her youth are now gathered together before figures imprisoned by ignorance and envy. Rubens declared his own intention to honor the Queen in a painting that “shows the felicity of her regency and the flourishing of the Kingdom of France, with the resuscitation of the sciences and arts thanks to the liberality and splendor of Her Majesty who, seated on a resplendent throne, holds a pair of scales in her hand and with her prudence and equity holds the world in equilibrium.” Millen and Wolf see The Felicity of the Regency as the “governmental obverse of The Regent Militant,” this painting showing “the Right that balances the Might” (164-65).

The pride and security of Marie de Medici in The Felicity of the Regency found a transatlantic counterpart two centuries later in Melville’s depiction of Mary Glendinning, Pierre’s mother, in the opening pages of Pierre, the novel Melville published in 1852, three years after his one visit to the Louvre. Mary Glendinning, like Marie de Medici, was a Dowager widow endeavoring to extend and burnish the legacy of her deceased husband. Pierre, in a playful mood, once addressed his mother as “Dowager Duchess Glendinning.” Pierre’s mother, like the Dowager Queen, was “an affluent, and haughty widow; a lady who externally furnished a singular example of the preservative and beautifying influences of unfluctuating rank, health, and wealth, when joined to a fine mind of medium culture, uncankered by any inconsolable grief, and never worn by sordid cares. In mature age, the rose still miraculously clung to her cheek; litheness had not yet completely uncoiled itself from her waist, nor smoothness unscrolled itself from her brow, nor diamondness departed from her eyes. So that when lit up and bediademed by ball-room lights, Mrs. Glendenning still eclipsed far younger charms” (NN P 4, 12).

The above portrait in words converts to a more active image at the end of Book 7 chapter when Mary Glendenning’s “glad proud eye” sees “the old General’s baton,” a relic from the heroic deeds of Pierre’s grandfather in the Revolutionary War. “She lifted it, and musingly swayed it to and fro; then paused, and staff-wise rested with it in her hand. Her stately beauty ever had somewhat thing martial in it; and now she looked like the daughter of a General, as she was” (20). In this moment, Mary Glendinning resembled Marie de Medici as Rubens has painted her twice, first astride her white horse, with a staff in her hand, on the battlefield in The Regent Militant (CAT 195), then on her throne, scepter in hand, in the allegorized depiction of The Felicity of the Regency.

Pierre’s mother continues to embody the kind of felicity, power, and self-satisfaction symbolized by the Dowager Queen in Rubens’s cycle until her own felicity is punctured by the arrival of Isabel, the mysterious stranger with whom Pierre becomes so enchanted that he no longer embodies the reverential docility that his mother expects. After a tense conversation in the breakfast room, Pierre’s mother, alone, “unconsciously” holding a fork her hand, flung it away “impulsively.” Hearing a “quivering” sound, she turned to see “her own smiling picture pierced through, and the fork, whose tines had caught the painted bosom, vibrantingly rankled in the wound” (130).

If the fated flight of the fork seems somewhat overwrought, so does the language by which the eyes of the Dowager Duchess lose their “diamondness” in one sentence only to be “bediademed” in the next (4). Mellin and Wolf noted several ways in which Rubens “gilded the lily” when painting The Felicity of the Regency. One is the way depicts the music making in the painting. The buxom trumpeter in the upper left corner is pushing a lot of air through the tube of her horn, but she has no way to regulate the succession of the notes because her the fingers of her other hand are holding on to a second horn, resulting in nothing but an “awkward squawk.” Her counterpart at the upper right impresses the eye by playing two horns at once, but doing so could not possibly produce sounds whose rhythms or pitches could please the ear. The overwrought language in the opening chapters of Pierre in this way resembles the “impossible music” in The Felicity of the Regency (Millen and Wolf, 164).