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Rubens’s Life of Maria de’ Medici: Dissimulation and the Politics of Art in Early Seventeenth-Century France*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Sara Galletti
Sara Galletti*
Affiliation:
Duke University
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Abstract

The Life of Maria de’ Medici, the biographical series of twenty-four large-size paintings executed for the Queen Mother of France by Peter Paul Rubens in 1622–25, is traditionally regarded by historians as both a masterpiece of Baroque art and a monument of political naïveté. According to this view, the series was a disrespectful visual bravado that exposed both patron and painter to scandal by publicly advertising the queen’s political ideas and ambitions, which were not only audacious, but often in opposition to those of her son King Louis XIII. This article challenges this assessment by reading the Life within the context of seventeenth-century uses of dissimulation and spatial control as strategies to limit both intellectual and physical access to information. It argues that the series was imbued with multiple layers of meaning, intended for different audiences, and that access to these was strictly controlled by the queen and her circle.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 67 , Issue 3 , Fall 2014 , pp. 878 - 916
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2014

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Footnotes

*

I am very grateful to John Jeffries Martin for reading the first draft of my manuscript and for offering his invaluable advice. I also wish to thank for their observations and comments Giovanna Benadusi, Judith Brown, Caroline Castiglione, and Jacqueline Gutwirth, who participated in the panel “Aristocratic Women in the Late Renaissance: Art, Religion, and Politics in France and Italy” at the 2012 New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Sarasota, FL), where I presented a first version of this article. Finally, I am grateful to Francesco Benelli, Rossella Gotti, and Eva Renzulli for helping me obtain copies of rare materials from the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Avery Library. All translations are mine except where otherwise noted.

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