The Triumph of Truth

This tall, narrow canvas closed Marie de' Medici's picture gallery. It hung at the end of the right-hand wall, answering the equally narrow first picture on the left, the Destiny of the queen, and Rubens worked out both on one oil sketch, also in the Louvre. Winged old Time lifts naked Truth into the light, so that all can see mother and son in perfect agreement. Marie and Louis XIII float above as equals, hands joined through a laurel wreath around a flaming heart. Rubens took the Time and Truth group from his own earlier Boreas carrying off Oreithyia, now in Vienna, where the same embrace is an abduction. The harmony did not hold. On the Day of the Dupes in November 1630 Louis backed Cardinal Richelieu against her, and in 1631 she fled to the Spanish Netherlands, never to return. The Medici gallery at the Louvre is currently closed for restoration.