Henry IV awards the Regency to Maria de Medici

In the spring of 1610 Henri IV was getting ready to leave for a war in Germany, and before he went he made his wife regent, to secure the throne for their young son. This panel, not quite half a metre tall and one of the smallest of the Munich sketches for the cycle, is Rubens's design for that handover. The king holds out the orb to Marie de' Medici, and the boy standing between them is the future Louis XIII, eight years old. The museum draws attention to his look. He turns to his parents with approval, and that glance carries the whole point of the picture, that her authority came with the heir's consent and kept the line of kings unbroken. It was a loaded thing to paint in 1622. By then that same boy was king himself, and he had spent much of the past five years at odds with his mother.