The Meeting of Marie de' Medici and Henry IV at Lyons

Marie de' Medici and Henry IV were married on 5 October 1600 in Florence, and the king was not there. It was a wedding by proxy, with her uncle the Grand Duke of Tuscany standing in for him. The two met for the first time a month later at Lyon, and that is the moment Rubens was asked to paint.

He handed the job to mythology. Henry appears as Jupiter with his eagle and a thunderbolt, Marie as Juno with her peacocks, their right hands joined under a rainbow, while the real city of Lyon sits far below them.

Marie ordered 24 of these canvases for her gallery in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris, commissioning Rubens in 1621, shortly after a truce with her son Louis XIII, who had pushed her out of power. Ten years later he pushed her out of France, and she died in Cologne in 1642, while the painted version of her life stayed in Paris.