The Wedding by Proxy of Marie de' Medici to King Henry IV

The wedding in the title took place without the groom. On 5 October 1600, in the cathedral of Florence, Marie de' Medici was married to Henry IV of France while the king remained in France, so her uncle Ferdinando, Grand Duke of Tuscany, stood in for him at the altar and Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini conducted the service. That is the moment Rubens shows, the stand-in taking the bride's hand. He painted it more than 20 years afterwards for the queen's new Luxembourg Palace in Paris. By then Henry had been assassinated, Marie had been exiled by her own son Louis XIII and then patched things up with him, and the 24 canvases she ordered set out her life with the difficult parts smoothed over. They hang in the Louvre now, along one long gallery.