Storer after Rubens. The Reconciliation of Mary de Medicis with her Son

This print was known as The Reconciliation of Mary de Medicis with her Son when it was engraved in 1807. The commentary that accompanied the image in the Historic Gallery assumed that its readers would be familiar with this subject. “The Reconciliation of this princess with her son Louis XIII through the intercession of Cardinal de Richelieu, is an event too generally known to require particular mention. . . . The queen, in mourning, is seated on her throne. Beside her, on the right, is the Cardinal de la Valette; and on the left Prudence, characterized by the serpent entwining itself round her arm. The Cardinal de la Rochefoucault induces the queen to listen to an acommodation. To express this idea, Rubens has placed Mercury near him, who presents an olive branch to Mary de Medicis. The Cardinal de la Valette seems disposed to restrain the arm of the queen, and to dissuade her from receiving the pacific emblem.” Among “the several allegorical compositions of Rubens, this had met with the severest criticism” for “making conducive to the same action two ecclesiastical princes, and the fabulous deity Mercury” (HG 1, 277).

This painting of “reconciliation” with Mary’s son Louis, like the earlier one of the marriage with her husband Henry, proceeds by proxy, the male agent being absent. Pointing to innumerable anomalies about this ostensible scene, Millen and Wolf propose The Negotiations at Anjoulême as its title (see fig. 1 below). Even though a treaty was signed between the exiled Queen and representatives of Louis XIII on April 30, 1619, “it was not until September of 1619, five months after the treaty at Anjoulême, that the meeting between mother and son took place.” Rather than reconciliation, Millen and Wolf see “duplicity” as “the picture’s keynote.” Mercury, on behalf of Louis XIII, is offering a “false peace.” The Queen knowingly accepts this gesture (and knowingly allows Rubens to depict the false peace in this cagey way) in order to justify her own position when the painting was commissioned in 1622, after the deceptions her son had inflicted on her in the years since the supposed reconciliation (187-93).

The nearly naked god Mercury offering the olive branch to the exiled Queen has provoked controversy since the painting was first displayed. Many commentators, like the one in the Historic Gallery, objected primarily to a pagan god like Mercury interacting with Christian luminaries. Jacques Thuillier is one of many who objected to the near nudity; he could not abide “a big strapping Mercury without a stitch on, just a little too much like a deckhand with his clothes off, biceps bulgjng and skin all rosy gleaming” (52). Millen and Wolf are primarily concerned with the way in which Mercury, while extending the olive branch to his mother with one outstretched arm, is hiding the caduceus, a sign of harmony earlier in the cycle, behind his hip with the other, thus signifying the “false peace” he is here to negotiate on behalf of the Queen’s son Louis. How different this is from Mercury’s role in The Education of Mary de Medicis (CAT 189), where he descends from on high to extend the caduceus of peace to the young princess being mentored by Minerva. In the Education painting, the conspicuous symmetry of the entwined snakes on the staff of the caduceus represents the harmonious condition of concordia concors. In the Negotiations painting, the same snakes “writhe around the top of the staff with a turmoil” suggesting “an unappeased conflict which belies not alone the olive branch the god offers but even the role of peacemaker and ambassador he seems to be playing” (184, 190).

We do not know when Melville acquired his copy of Storer’s print after Rubens (did he inherit it from his father or acquire it on his own?). Nor do we know when he wrote “Reconciliation of M. de M. with her son” on the face of the print itself (where no title is imprinted). Nor do we know whether he had access to the commentary that accompanied the image in the Historic Gallery (though his handwritten variation on the title in the Gallery suggests that he did). We can, however, imagine what the print might have meant to him at various times in his life.

As a young novelist visiting Europe and its galleries for the first time in 1849, Melville would have had pictorial and historical associations with images from the Marie de Medici cycle by the time he arrived in Cologne ten days after his visit to the Louvre and described that city as “this antiquated gable-ended old town . . . where Rubens was born & Marie De Medeci died” (NN J 35). By the time Melville published Pierre in 1852, the Reconciliation print may have acquired additional literary and personal associations for him, giving the testy relations between mother and son in the early part of the his novel, the degree to which the Dowager mother in the novel resembles the Dowager Queen in the painting, the degree to which the deceased father in the novel has pictorial associations with Melville’s own deceased father, and the degree to which the “great galleries of Europe” become an emotional touchstone for any “calm, penetrative person” who can “victoriously run that painted gauntlet of the gods” (NN P 350).

By 1869, when Melville, no longer a novelist, but now a serious collector of prints, asked Elias Dexter to preserve “the Lettering at bottom” when framing his “mezzotint, The Healing of the Blind” (see CAT 111), the issue of reconciliation with one’s son had become piercingly personal for Herman and his wife Elizabeth after their son Malcolm had taken his own life in their own home at age eighteen in 1867. Malcolm, the Melvilles’ first child, had been born in March 1849, nine months before his father arrived in Cologne and wrote that there was “much to interest a pondering man like me” in the town “where Rubens was born & Marie De Medeci died” (NN J 35). There was much more to ponder about the lives of Rubens and Maria de Medici eighteen years later, his then infant son now dead, his career as a writer of fiction now dormant for a decade, his day job as a customs inspector in the city of New York and his new literary ambitions as a poet somehow allowing him enough time to build a print collection including the prints from the Marie de Medici cycle on which he wrote “Coronation Marie de Medicis” and “Reconciliation of M. de M. with her son.”

By the time Melville was writing Clarel, the epic poem about the Holy Land that he published in 1876, his poetic and print collecting ambitions were evolving side by side. In the poetry, as in the print collection, Mercury appears occasionally, usually sporting one or both of the attributes so visible in Melville’s “Reconciliation” print: the winged sandals and the winged helmet. His appearance is metaphorical in “The Night-Ride” near the end of Clarel, when the sudden buoyancy Clarel feels on the way to Jerusalem is compared to “the passion that could give / Feathers to thought, yea, Mercury’s feet” (NN C 484). Mercury’s poetic appearance is more dramatic and acrobatic in “An Afternoon in Naples in the Time of Bomba,” the poem Melville was still revising at the time of his death, when, during the performances of the juggler, “lo, like Mercury dropped from heaven, / Precipitate there a tumbler flew, / Alighting on winged feet” (NN BBO 190). The Roman god Mercury also appears in the guise of his Greek counterpart Hermes in “Disinterment of the Hermes,” a poem Melville published in Timoleon in 1891, a few months before his death.

The poem about Hermes was inspired by an ancient statue that German archeologists had unearthed at Olympia in Greece in 1877. This ancient Greek god made of marble would have been even more naked than Mercury in the “Reconciliation” print inspired by the Rubens painting. Melville expresses own sense of divine wonder in the opening lines of the poem: “What forms divine in adamant fair— / Carven demigod and god, / And hero-marbles rivalling these / Bide under Latium’s sod” (NN PP 312, 853). Whatever interpretation Melville might have given to Mercury’s encounter with Marie de Medicis in his copy of the Reconciliation print, Storer’s engraving of the winged feet of the near naked Mercury painted by Rubens in the 1620s would have been fascinating to compare with the winged feet of Hermes clad in an Asian costume in E. Salandri’s engraving of an ancient Persian image (fig. 2 below) in the copy of The Handbook of Engraved Gems that Melville acquired as a gift to his wife Elizabeth as a Christmas present in 1874 (see MBB 1.1)

After cataloging the panoply of colors necessarily absent from its 1807 engraving of The Reconciliation of Mary de Medicis with her Son, the commentator for the Historic Gallery addressed the cycle as a whole: “The paintings which formerly composed the Luxembourg gallery, have been so highly appreciated by the lovers of art, that any elogium on their merits is unnecessary.” He therefore left any further appreciation to the English artist Fuseli, whose tribute suggests and breadth and depth with which the Marie de Medici cycle from the 1620s was still embraced by artists in the early nineteenth century: “In whatever light . . . we consider this astonishing work, whether as a series of sublime conceptions, regulated by an uniform comprehensive plan, or a system of colours and tones, exalting the subject, and seconded by magic execution; whatever may be its Venetian or Flemish flaws of mythology and Christianity, antique and modern costume, promiscuously displayed, it leaves all plans of Venetian allegory far behind . . . . If it equals not in simplicity, nor emulates in characteristic dignity, the plans of Michael Angelo and Raphael, it excels them in the display of that magnificence which few modern eyes can separate from the idea of majesty” (278).