Lo sbarco a Marsiglia

Marie de' Medici had been widow, regent, and then exile, pushed out of power by her own son, Louis XIII. When they patched up their quarrel she commissioned Rubens to paint her life story across twenty-four huge canvases for her new Paris palace, and every awkward fact had to be turned into glory. This one shows her stepping ashore at Marseilles in 1600, arriving in France to marry a king she had wed by proxy and never met. A helmeted figure of France opens her arms in welcome, Fame flies overhead blowing two trumpets. And then, filling the whole bottom of the picture, Rubens crowds in three muscular sea nymphs and a sea god, gleaming and half-submerged, doing the real work of the painting, which is spectacle. The plain arrival of a foreign bride becomes an event the gods turn out to watch.