Master of Shadows (15 page)

Whitehall would have to wait, but Rubens found his ambition for works vast in size and diversified in subject amply satisfied when he arrived at the doors of the Luxembourg Palace early in the winter of 1622. He was there at the invitation of Marie de’ Medici, the Queen Mother of France, who had reached out to him at some time during the previous fall. Marie was in the market for a cycle of paintings to decorate her new palace on the Left Bank of the Seine, and she was hoping Rubens might accept the commission. Of all the monarchs in Europe, none had greater want of his services, for there was no other royal whose reputation was in so desperate a need of rehabilitation.

Back in 1600, as a member of Vincenzo Gonzaga’s court, Rubens had been a witness to Marie’s proxy marriage to the French king, Henry IV, at the Duomo of Florence. There were endless
encomiums to her during the celebrations of that event, a litany of tributes to her bright future. But her career ever since had been a prolonged study in unchecked ambition, scandal, and humiliation. Her marriage, launched so auspiciously, was an unhappy one: Henry was a notorious philanderer and a divorcé who had cast off his first wife after she failed to provide him with a male heir. Established on shaky ground, the relationship between Marie and Henry degenerated over time. Marie wasn’t one to be spurned, and her considerable lust for power was stoked by a retinue of imported Italian advisers. She did provide for the succession of Henry’s Bourbon line—the dauphin, Louis, was born in 1601—but when the king was assassinated in 1610, Marie usurped authority as the head of state. (It was widely, if inaccurately, believed that she had a hand in her husband’s murder.) Years later, when young Louis XIII, no longer a minor, reclaimed the authority that was rightfully his, mother and son engaged in an unseemly struggle that resulted first in her banishment from Paris into the French hinterlands and then in a battle between armies under their respective flags. The sad affair was brought to a conclusion only through the intervention of the bishop of Luçon—the future Cardinal Richelieu—Marie’s former chief minister, who returned from his own exile to broker an uneasy peace. That agreement, the Treaty of Angers, brought Marie back to Paris and restored some of her influence. To celebrate that homecoming, Marie felt something magnificent was in order, a project grand enough to reaffirm her status as a starring player on the world stage. It was just the kind of politically loaded project for which Rubens seemed destined.

Rubens considered himself eminently suited to the commission, but as a Flemish national who pledged allegiance to Spain, he was a controversial choice for a French queen of Italian descent. French artists were particularly displeased by the snub, even if there was no local candidate with a comparable reputation. Rubens, however,
could count on a series of glowing references. He no doubt received a solid recommendation from Marie’s sister, Eleonora Gonzaga, the Duchess of Mantua, whom he had ably served for so many years. In Paris, the Flemish ambassador Henri de Vicq supported his candidacy, as did his superior in Brussels, the archduchess Isabella, who was on good terms with the Queen Mother. Indeed, Isabella was likely the intermediary when Marie first approached the painter. As a token of the women’s mutual admiration, Rubens was instructed to pick up a few gifts for Marie at Isabella’s Coudenberg Palace on the trip south from Antwerp, including a small female dog wearing a necklace of twenty-four enamel plaques. He also received an informal directive of his own: he was to pay careful attention to the activities of the royal court in Paris, and report back all that he learned. Isabella and Marie were friendly, but Spain and France were traditional foes in a volatile world, and the opportunity for the archduchess to place an agent so close to the French throne was too valuable to pass up.

Rubens’s sharp mind and special knack for endearing himself to figures of authority had prepared him well for this clandestine service. Indeed, he had gradually developed into one of Isabella’s trusted advisers, a man whose judgment she could rely on without fear of compromise. As a painter doing business across Europe, he was in communication with influential figures in nearly every capital. His network of antiquarian contacts, meanwhile, kept him apprised of political developments major and minor. For Rubens, this was only good business. He needed information on potential clients: Whose fortunes were bright? What kind of subject matter might be appealing or taboo? Who might welsh on one of his very large bills? What he learned he dutifully passed along to his sovereign.

Leaving Brussels for Paris, Rubens might well have thought back to his first diplomatic mission years earlier, when he had departed Mantua for Spain without having so much as consulted
an atlas. That neophyte must have seemed like an entirely different person. He was now a capable diplomatic operator at ease in the most rarefied precincts of European power. His artistic skill had given him entrée into this exalted world, but his success in navigating its darkened corridors was a product of his own shrewd intelligence and personal charm. He was, indeed, the perfect spy.

MARIE’S EXPANSIVE NEW RESIDENCE
, the Luxembourg Palace, made a strong impression on Rubens when he first set eyes on it. The location, a short ride from the Seine in suburban St.-Germain, was excellent: comfortably removed from the squalid and overcrowded confines of central Paris, but still connected to the Right Bank and the Louvre by the recently completed Pont Neuf. Marie had purchased the grounds from the duc de Piney-Luxembourg in the spring of 1612, and at once had it cleared for something new. Being a Medici, her natural inspiration was the Pitti Palace in Florence, seat of the family dynasty, and she went so far as to dispatch a draftsman to make measured drawings of it for her French architect, Salomon de Brosse. The first stone of his design was laid in 1615, and though it made allusions to its Florentine predecessor in its rusticated walls and enclosed court, what Rubens found on his arrival was something decidedly French in character and plan, a château more naturally suited to the fields of the Loire than to the hills of Tuscany.

Rubens liked what he saw, and was particularly satisfied with the ceremonial gallery on the first floor of the palace’s west wing that would be the site for his work. It was a grand setting, with gilded ceilings and velvet-covered walls. Tall windows ran down either side of the room toward a massive stone fireplace flanked by doors leading into Marie’s private apartments. Rubens’s charge was to fill the
spaces between those windows, and above the fireplace and doors, with a cycle of paintings celebrating the life and achievements of the Queen Mother. With that job completed, he was to begin on a corresponding series devoted to the life of Marie’s deceased husband, Henry IV, to be placed in corresponding position in the opposite gallery on the eastern side of the palace. It was an immense task that would require an efficient and well-honed studio operation. Indeed, Rubens’s reputation for organization and alacrity was a significant factor in his selection for the job. With the enormous ceiling program for the Jesuit Church of St. Charles Borromeo, the workshop had proven itself capable of tackling projects of great size. “Italian painters could not do in ten years what Rubens promised to do in four,” noted Marie’s adviser Claude Magis, the abbé of St. Ambrose.

The scale of work was the least of Rubens’s problems. The real challenge, one that would demand every bit of his artistic and political savvy, lay in arriving at a program for the paintings that would celebrate the less-than-salutary life story of his client without causing ridicule, offense, or some combination of the two. There was hardly even an artistic tradition on which he could readily call as precedent. Women were not typically the subjects of painting cycles of a heroic nature.

Rubens stayed in Paris for two months hashing out the subject matter of the cycle, with St. Ambrose negotiating on behalf of Marie. The painter relied on the advice of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, the French antiquarian with whom he had been engaged in a weekly correspondence for several years. Their friendship, formed with the pen, only grew once they met in person. “There is no more lovable soul in the world than that of M. Rubens,” Peiresc would write. Admittedly, they made for an unlikely couple when they stood side by side. Rubens, tall and handsome, was the charismatic center of any room he entered. Peiresc was short with a beaky nose and the
slightly disheveled air of a man who spent an inordinate amount of time with his head buried in ancient manuscripts. For all their physical disparity, though, they had much that drew them together, beginning with their shared interest in the classical world. Both had received an intensive Jesuit education as boys (Rubens was older by just three years); and both had traveled to Italy to expand the breadth of their knowledge as young men. Most pertinently, both had been drawn into political affairs when their primary interests lay elsewhere. Peiresc, a parliamentary representative of his native Provence, proved especially useful to Rubens as a guide to the subtleties of Marie’s political position—critical for the artist as he developed a plan for decorating her palace.

With Peiresc’s assistance, Rubens did his best to monitor the intrigues of the French court, though with mixed results. In particular, he was appalled by the tendency to resolve disputes via the duel, which he described as an “incorrigible mania.” The Parisian taste for dramatics offended his sense of moderation and reason, and made for an unfavorable contrast with Isabella’s admittedly sterile court in Brussels. “We fight a foreign foe,” he wrote, “and the bravest is he who conducts himself most valiantly in the service of his King. Otherwise we live in peace, and if anyone oversteps the bounds of moderation, he is banished from the Court and shunned by everyone … All these exaggerated passions are caused by mere ambition and a false love of glory.” The philosopher in Rubens disdained the most decadent indulgences of Parisian society, but as a painter he would celebrate the sophistication of the French court, conferring a sense of dignity on the insouciant modishness that disgusted his more scholarly friends. It helped that he was just a visitor on the scene. As Peiresc told him, the French court is “a comedy much more agreeable to watch from afar than when one finds oneself caught up in it.” This fact, however, did not prevent Peiresc from
attempting to keep Rubens in Paris. He even suggested that Marie take measures to liberate the painter from his Antwerp home and keep him in the French capital on a permanent basis.

Peiresc underestimated Rubens’s dedication to his homeland. Indeed, the painter was dutifully gathering intelligence for the archduchess Isabella throughout his time in France. If he had anything to report back to her, it was Richelieu’s increasing consolidation of power within the French monarchy, and a sense of the cardinal’s rather icy and calculating manner. This Rubens had the chance to experience firsthand at a meeting with Richelieu, who was impressed enough with the painter to commission several works. When Rubens finally left for home at the end of February, he had those commissions and, more important, a contract that would pay him a queen’s ransom—20,000 crowns, the equivalent of 60,000 guilders—for his work on the Luxembourg Palace pictures. Still, the conceptual program for that cycle remained unsettled.

Consultations continued through the summer, when the parties finally agreed on a twenty-four-panel series culminating with
The Triumph of Truth
—an ironic final flourish considering the pains that would be taken to whitewash Marie’s history and sweep aside unflattering and inconvenient facts. The language of the series was to be allegorical, a system of representation that allowed the painter to associate Marie with heroic figures from ancient and Christian history, and to depict her as an object of ethereal beauty. (That was absolutely a fabrication; Marie was notoriously homely.) Uncontroversial moments from her life, like her wedding to Henry, could be pitched as straight narrative, with little obfuscation. But the scope of the program required several more creative productions. The rift with her son Louis XIII was presented largely in the context of their reconciliation. On this front, satisfying Marie was no more critical than appeasing Louis, the combustible head of state.

In late August, for a brief moment, it seemed as if the whole project might be dead—though not as a result of any disagreement about the subject matter. The cause was even more dire: Rubens was rumored to have been murdered, killed by a deranged member of his own studio. The false news spread like a contagion across France, right to the ear of Marie herself. Peiresc had heard tell of it a few weeks earlier, and he claimed the news had left him completely beside himself. There was a core of truth in the tale. Rubens had been assaulted by one of his printmakers, a young man of extraordinary skill, grand ambition, and fragile temperament. The master, however, had survived the attack, and was alive and well, though aggravated beyond measure.