305 BOEKBESPREKINGEN/BOEK REVIEWS Ronald Forsyth Millen

BOEKBESPREKINGEN/BOEK REVIEWS Ronald Forsyth Millen and Robert Erich Wolf, Heroic Deedsand sequently, they see in Mercury's pose a metaphor of fate thrusting Mystic Figures: A New Readingof Rubens' Life of Maria de' Medici, 'the freight of future responsibility on a girl as yet unwarned of Princeton University Press, 1989.1 griefs to come, of dilemmas and burdens to be resolved only through this gift of peacemaking and peacekeeping.' Likewise, in This book broadens and deepens in several ways our understand- The Death of Henryi v and the Proclamationo/?lhe the picture ing of Rubens's series of twenty-four paintings depicting the life which contains the peripeteia of the story and which is given the of Maria de' Medici, executed for the Grand Gallery of the Queen greatest visual prominence both through its double size and its Mother's new Luxembourg Palace between i 6 z and The position alone at the end of the gallery, Millen and Wolf fix their authors assume that every aspect of each picture is pregnant with attention on the Caduceus held by Mercury, one of the group of meaning and consequently organize their chapters as a sequence Olympians in the upper background who admit the apothcosized of exhaustive picture-by-picture analyses. They argue that the King among their number. Their analysis separates the attribute series as a whole and each picture is an intricate revision of histo- from the god and places the Caduceus - as emblem of peace - at a ry, constructed to reflect and justify the life and actions of the convergence of diagonals.In the authors' eyes the Caduceus be- Queen Mother from the vantage point of her policies and senti- comes the visual and symbolic center of the whole series, but this ments current at the inception of the project late in 1 6zi and view strikes me as exaggerated and contrived. The Caduceus, not evolving until its completion in the spring of 1 6z , New. material really at all prominent in the composition, identifies only one of is introduced from two major sources: one being emblems; the several gods, all of them in the background. other, historical documentation of events depicted in the series. Given these reservations, I am inclined, nevertheless, to agree First, more extensively than previous writers, the authors rely with Millen and Wolf's contention that each picture is studded upon the personal emblems of Maria de'Medici, Henry m, and with symbolic objects. What convinces me is their keen percep- Louis x I I I -especially those in the format of medals published by tion that in two of the more controversial pictures at the end of Jacques De Bie (La France metallique, Paris, T636); material al- the series - The Negotiationsat An goul?meand TheQueen Opts for ready used for iconographic analysis of the series by writers such Security - Mercury, as god of peace, holds a Caduceus around as Grossmann and Von Simson.? The emblems are applied as which two snakes entwine, only not balanced in symmetry as on symbolic keys to the interpretation of details the authors think the several other Caducei included in the series, but writhing in misunderstood or ignored. Sometimes this emblematic reading turmoil as if one would strike at the other. Millen and Wolf make produces convincing results. In The Education qf the Princess, for a good case for interpreting the writhing snakes as a subtle indica- example, the cascade prominently featured in the background had tion that the peace offered by Louis xiii at Angoulcmc was been identified with the Hippocrene Spring and consequently flawed and insincere, and that when the Queen opted for security associated with the viola da gamba player in the left foreground by agreeing to the Treaty of Angers on August ro, 1620, instead who was called Apollo. Millen and Wolf, however, point to ma- of either fighting on or escaping to a safe haven from which she nuscript lists in the Archivio di Stato, Florence, of Medici em- could negotiate better terms, she established uncertain peace with blems which include the description of one emblem exclusively her enemics. Although the authors argue this point by analogy linked to Maria: MARIAdetta. Acqua cascante da una Sommita. with Rubens's images and Gevartius's commentaries from the Motto. EN CAIDAMl LIMPIEZZA.If this emblem had widespread commemorative volume of the Pompa introitus honori serenissi?rzi currency or were known even to the limited circle of the French principÙ Ferdinandi Austriaci (Antwerp, 1642), they apparently court, it could supply a meaning in place of the more obvious skipped over the most persuasive evidence from this source. In mythological explanation. Freed from the Hippocrcnc, the viola Gevartius's chapter on the Temple of Janus, there is a detailed da gambist could be identified as Orpheus, which he is in the excursus on the Caduceus as symbol of peace. Drawing on an- earliest description of the painting, the manuscript program in cient texts and coins for proof, Gevartius concluded that the the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, discovered by Thuillier.j But Mercury's staff symbolizes Right Reason which separates two the authors never stop to ask how viewers were initiated into this hostilc armies represented bythe snakes (Pompa introitus, T 2 4 - kind of knowledge, which otherwise left no public traces. Per- If this is their meaning, then Rubcns's snakes are accurate haps they believe it sufficient that Maria herself was aware of the symbols of the tense situation depicted in the two pictures of the emblematic meaning, because in the final analysis they under- Medici series. Gevartius's commentary is significant in a larger stand the series to be the Queen Mother's highly personal state- sense because it offers a paradigm of symbolic interpretation for a ment of aggrievement and vindication against her enemies. The program very much like the Medici series. Millen and Wolf validity of this understanding will be questioned further on. detailed iconography promises to elucidate the significance of An important assumption of Millen and Wolf interpretation is each picture and of the whole series, while it sometimes over- that certain objects can be isolated as symbols and that when states the programmatic consistency and the abstruse complexity repeated - these objects keep the same meaning throughout the of the symbolism. They use emblems as evidence more systemati- series. Such an approach runs the risk of overinterpretation by cally than previous writers, but this approach is not so innovative isolating the so-called emblem from the contexts of different pic- as they claim. It is also necessary to point out that their emphasis tures which may establish separate symbolic meanings for the on personal emblems is one-sided and fails to acknowledge the same object.4 For example, in the The Education of the Princess, importance of Saward's contribution in using sixteenth-and se- Mercury and his Caduceus have been understood from the ear- ventcenth-century numismatic publications as sources of general liest descriptions as signs of Maria's eloquence. Millen and Wolf, currency for interpreting Rubens's symbolic language. 5 however, place the burden of leitmotif on the Caduceus and insist The second major source of new material introduced by Millen it must carry the significance of peace throughout the series. Con- and Wolf comes from documentary accounts of the events depic- 305 ted in poetic and symbolic figures by Rubens.1, The result of this Maria de'Medici's position at the French court in i6zz-i6z5 and procedure, applied rigorously to each painting, is a cumulative the function of such a major work of art which could never be force of contrast between what can be reconstructed of the actual private, but rather, displayed in the reception gallery of a royal events and what is represented in the pictures. For example, the palace, in the context of court society, carried an obviously public Dauphin, the future Louis XIII, was born indoors at Fontaine- and representative meaning." Millen and Wolf still conceive of bleau. The select group of courtiers who witnessed the Queen's the Medici series as the product of a personal drama played out by twenty-two hour labor was augmented after the birth by a crowd the stock characters of nineteenth-century history. Their Louis of two-hundred ushered in by an ecstatic Henry I v. Rubcns set xrlr comcs right out of the pages of The Three Musketeers;child- the scene in a sylvan glade, the mother and child surrounded by ish, weak, manipulated by favorites, and the object of his moth- 12 propitious gods. Von Simson already had demonstrated that a er's veiled scorn. Their Maria de'Medici, as they see her both in medal of I609 celebrating Maria as Cybele, the mother of the Rubens's pictures and in the parallel narratives of actual events gods, provided Rubens with decisive elements of his composi- they set alongside, is equally dependent on hand-me-down for- tion., Millen and Wolf correct the reading of the medal. They mulac. In 7'he Negotiations at AnJ!,oulême,they say, Rubens has trace its motto to Virgil's Aeneid and consult the passage from depicted her, for reasons of politics and policy which they never which the motto was drawn to argue its larger importance for the state, as a self-sacrificing 'mamma italiana,' even though she is theme and setting of the picture; the association likens Maria to seated on a throne crowned by victories and attended by Salus Lavinia of Italian blood, wife of Aeneas, whose child Silvius born Publica, Mercury, and two cardinals. In their accounts of the in the woods would found the dynasty of Roman kings.

Load more