La consegna della reggenza

Rubens took on this canvas in the early 1620s, one of 24 he painted for a long gallery in Marie de' Medici's new Luxembourg Palace in Paris. The commission was, in plain terms, a rescue of her reputation. Marie had governed France as regent for her young son, then been pushed aside and had quarreled bitterly with him, and now she needed her story told on a grand scale. This panel handles the most delicate moment of all. On the day her husband Henri the Fourth was stabbed to death in a Paris street, in 1610, she took power. Rubens keeps both events in one frame but lifts them clear of history. At the left the murdered king rises to the gods as a Roman hero, while at the right Marie takes up the globe of the regency, presented to her as if from heaven.