The final reconciliation between Maria de' Medici and her son, Louis XIII of France (sketch)

With this scene Rubens's account of Marie de' Medici's life catches up with the present. The reconciliation it celebrates was sealed over the winter of 1621 to 1622, and during 1622 she took her seat on her son's council again. Rubens was hired for the gallery in those same months, so when he sketched this panel the event was barely a season old, closer to current news than to history. The Munich museum reads the picture as a victory over the powers of darkness, the forces that were said to have stood between mother and son and so against the good of the state. Rubens gives those forces a body. At the bottom a many-headed monster is struck down, while above it, in open sky, Louis XIII and his mother come together.