The Author’s Preface to Nils Büttner’s study of the Medici Series in the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, the complete catalogue of Rubens’s oeuvre, conveys within its first two paragraphs the scope of his subject matter. He establishes that the contract Rubens signed on Saturday, February 26, 1622 to produce twenty-four paintings depicting the “illustrious life and heroic deeds” of Maria de’ Medici, Queen Mother of France, along with a separate series celebrating her late husband, Henri IV’s, military triumphs, was the largest commission of Rubens’s career. Although the Henri IV Series remained unrealized, the Medici Series was still Rubens’s largest completed project. (A separate Corpus Rubenianum volume on the Henri IV Series by Alexis Merle du Bourg was published in 2017; reviewed in this Journal February 2019). Büttner also notes that the Medici Series has “probably” attracted the most extensive scholarly literature of any work in Rubens’s vast oeuvre. As the current editor of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, and author of the previous Corpus volumes Allegories and Subjects from Literature (Part XII) and Genre Scenes (Part VII), as well as contributor to the multi-authored Mythological Subjects II: Hercules to Omphale (Part XI), Büttner brings his deep knowledge of Rubens’s capacities as a painter of narrative and allegorical subjects, especially those charged with political meaning, to the vast undertaking of this Corpus volume.

The Medici Series commission presented Rubens with the unique challenge of developing and producing the cycle while mindful of the fraught relations between Marie and her son, Louis XIII. Following the assassination of Henri IV in 1610 Marie ruled as Regent until Louis attained majority age. In 1617, Louis, now King, exiled his mother from Paris. After the King and Queen Mother achieved an uneasy reconciliation that allowed her return to Paris in 1620, she established residence at the Palais de Luxembourg. Decorating it in a manner proclaiming her status as the late widow of Henri IV and celebrating the achievements of her regency was a matter of considerable importance for her continued, albeit diminished, and ever-precarious, role within Louis’s court.

The Introduction, organized into eight short sections, offers a deft overview of the issues at stake in a comprehensive catalogue of the series. In the historiographic first section, Büttner informs the reader that he aims to build upon previous research and introduce under-used sources to illuminate the creation and historical reception of the pictures (pp. 18-20). At the same time Büttner distinguishes his approach from that of the still-canonical full account of the series by Millen and Wolf published in 1989 (p. 19).^[1] In contrast to their unified interpretation of the series as a whole, Büttner’s focus on individual works is consistently alert to their operation in court culture as material for the negotiation of a fluid array of political, social, and gendered meanings. The succeeding sections of the Introduction offer a concise biography of Maria de’ Medici, followed by a year-by-year chronology of the commission which describes the complexities of Rubens’s negotiation with Maria and her advisors, often conducted with his friend Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc as intermediary. The remaining sections of the Introduction focus on the operation of allegory in the series; on the fraught enterprise of heroizing an embattled female ruler on an unprecedented scale; on the process of production and the role of studio assistants and other painters; on the installation of the cycle in its original site in the western gallery of the Palais du Luxembourg, and lastly, a section of the cycle’s extensively documented critical reception.

Following the established format of previous volumes of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, entries on individual works begin with technical notes, a provenance report, lists of copies including partial and variant copies in all media including prints, and a bibliography followed by the catalogue essay. Oil sketches and drawings related to the main works are given separate entries. The essays provide masterfully condensed accounts of each work in relation to the topics developed in the introduction. Büttner’s own interpretive arguments arise from his judicious deployment of the scholarship he has amassed. For example, his description of The Birth of the Dauphin (cat. No. 11) as “essentially a genre scene” depicting the queen in the seated position she assumed for childbirth, as noted in the midwife’s report, provides a useful framework for understanding the particular attention in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century criticism to Maria’s tender facial expression at she gazes at her newborn child (p. 275). Büttner also enlivens his essays with vividly specific texture. He engages the reader in the challenge for Rubens of the representation of a well-documented historical event in the entry on The Wedding by Proxy (cat. No. 8) with a passage from a letter to Rubens from Peiresc reminding the painter that one of the figures in attendance had been wearing “Polish stockings” with no garters below the knee (p. 211).

While rejecting the notion that the cycle promotes a singular stable overarching message, Büttner carefully analyzes its visual effects of orchestrated cohesion. Arguing that it remains impossible to reliably distinguish studio assistants’ and other artists’ work from that of Rubens, Büttner attributes to the master the coordinated effects of painterly consistency within the individual pictures, an effect that crucially contributes to the overall unity of the cycle (p. 95). Büttner also carefully considers how the cycle was displayed and understood by viewers in its original installation at the Palais du Luxembourg. The height at which the paintings were hung (much higher than their current installation at the Louvre); the lighting in the west gallery; and the conditions of court decorum in that private area of the palace, dictating how viewers moved within the space, were all factors inherent to the design and ordering of the individual works and to the unified effects of the whole. Büttner notes that after Maria de’ Medici was banished from France in 1631 the paintings were no longer “part of the Gesamtkunstwerk of Maria’s court and a political instrument” but now operated as an “aesthetic ensemble that could be viewed with more or less ‘disinterested pleasure’” (p. 102).

Most fundamental to Büttner’s rejection of any determined overriding interpretive unity is his understanding of the inherently dynamic operation of allegory in Rubens’s practice.^[2] The often-cited advice to Rubens from Peiresc, that in order to avoid displeasing her son, Rubens should use “mystic figures” underscores the particular pressures this commission put on Rubens’s inventive allegorical language (p. 68). However, Büttner also considers Rubens’s reliance on allegory as not only a device for smoothing over possible offence to the king but as a discourse that actively engaged viewers in the construction of multiple meanings for the figure of Maria throughout the cycle (pp. 65, 77-78). In the unprecedented life-sized equestrian portrait of a female ruler that Rubens devised for The Triumph at Jülich (cat. no. 17) Maria is accompanied by figures who have been variously interpreted as Fame, Magnanimity, Generosity, and Fortitude in a painting that offers both a general image of her victory over forces of rebellion and a more specific representation of her faithful execution of her late husband’s military/political aims. Maria, who directly encounters the viewer, wearing an extravagantly plumed helmet, and cloaked in brilliant satin patterned with the fleur-de-lis, vacillates here between symbol and actor (pp. 376-379).

What Büttner has accomplished here is surely its own “heroic deed” as he charts an erudite and illuminating path through the vast terrain of scholarship on the Medici Series while engaging with both older and more recent scholarship. This addition to the on-going Corpus Rubenianum project not only offers a comprehensive resource on the Medici Series but also demonstrates the robust state of research pertaining to this monumental work of painterly imagination in the service of court politics.

Lisa Rosenthal
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

[1] R.F. Millen and R.E. Wolf, Heroic Deeds and Mystic Figures: A New Reading of Rubens’ Life of Maria de’ Medici (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press,1989)
[2] The introduction to his CRLB volume on allegories usefully augments the more abbreviated discussion of Rubens’s allegorical practice in this volume. See Nils Büttner, Allegories and Subjects from Literature (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, Part XII). London/Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers, an Imprint of Brepols Publishers, 2018.