The Disembarkation of Marie de' Medici at Marseille, 3 November 1600
Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) · 1622-1625
Marie de' Medici, married to Henri IV of France by proxy in Florence, steps onto French soil at Marseille. A woman in a blue cloak sewn with golden fleurs-de-lis, France herself, opens her arms in welcome; overhead a winged Fame blows two trumpets at once; behind the queen the galley flies the Medici arms and a Knight of Malta lifts the gangway cloth. In the water below, three nereids and a bearded triton haul on the mooring ropes with their whole muscular weight, and it is they, not the courtiers, who dominate the lower half of the canvas.
The scene is the keystone of the twenty-four paintings Rubens produced between 1622 and 1625 for the queen's gallery in the Palais du Luxembourg, and it shows his method exactly. Historical fact occupies the top of the picture, mythology occupies the bottom, and the two are fused by light and by a single sweeping diagonal. Stand back and watch the paint: the sea deities are built from warm ochres, cool greens and pearly greys laid wet into wet, with the flesh so freely brushed that the surface is alive at a distance and almost abstract close up. Rubens designed the composition and painted the principal passages himself while a large workshop carried the rest.
The commission was a delicate one, since Marie's career included a regency, a rebellion and an uneasy truce with her son Louis XIII, so Rubens converted an awkward biography into allegory. The cycle came to the Louvre after the Revolution and, since the Grand Louvre works of the early 1990s, has hung together in the purpose-built Galerie Médicis, where the paintings can be read in sequence as Rubens intended.
Did You Know? Rubens was commissioned to paint a matching cycle on the life of Henri IV, but Marie's fall from power in 1631 left it unfinished.
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