Rubens's France: gender and personification in the Marie de Medicis cycle.

Peter Paul Rubens's cycle of twenty-four monumental paintings representing the life and deeds of the dowager queen Marie de Medicis of France presents one of the best-known and frequently debated allegorical displays in early modern European painting. (1) Faced with an unprecedented commission from a female ruler to glorify what was in effect contemporary history, and to do so without offending the royal son with whom the recently exiled queen mother had just been reconciled in 1620, Rubens devised an extended pictorial drama that interweaves portrayals of the queen and her family with a large cast of mythological and allegorical figures. The story of the queen's accomplishments, trials, and ultimate triumph is accompanied and even overtaken to varying degrees by imaginative figural demonstrations of royal power, exalted emotion, family bonds, and chivalric ideals. Exploiting to the utmost the allusive and malleable potential of pictorial allegory, the artist appears to have used his large and eclectic group of figures to stage several levels of meaning at once, from the factual to the fantastic.

Central to this unfolding visual drama are feminine personifications, which Rubens employed in almost every painting of the cycle either to represent virtues possessed by the queen herself or to serve her in her various roles as queen consort, royal mother, valiant widow, and governing regent. Female mythological characters and even the ladies-in-waiting that surround the queen in the more historically based paintings play a similar supporting role, enhancing or elaborating on the queen's visual presence and character. Marie de Medicis's monarchical status in France was directly dependent on her position first as wife and then as widow of tire late king Henri IV, and as mother of the young king Louis XIII. (2) Rubens's paintings, by contrast, emphasize not so much the queen's ties to these two kings as her mystical association with recurrent female protagonists: Minerva, goddess of war, peace, and wisdom, selves as the queen's companion and protector (Figs. 8, 10); the Virgin Mary, seems to hover behind the queen's own image in several paintings; while the queenly Juno and a host of personifications assist in raising her in Tuscany, bringing her to France, marrying her to King Henri IV, and, after the king's death in 1610, guiding her through her regency and the subsequent battles and reconciliation with her son (Figs. 1, 3, 5, 7, 10, 18). (3) Marie de Medicis's more abstract virtues are also demonstrated by a varied and active group of feminine characters. While some, such as the Three Graces, mark the familiar Renaissance association of a woman with beauty and fecundity, (4) others embody more heroic attributes, such as the muscular quartet of Force, Religion, Justice, and Concord that row the ship of state in The Coming of Age of Louis XIII (Fig. 1). (5)

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Scholars have long debated fire iconographic significance of these personifications and other female players in the allegories of the Medicis cycle; much less attention has been paid, however, to the physical agency of the figures--their limbs, their clothing, their gestures, and the various ways in which they interact with the historical characters in the dramatic scenes. The complex work performed by the feminine personifications in fact extends far beyond their mere presence in a scene, as can be observed in The Coming of Age, a painting that represents the formal transition of power from the queen regent to her thirteen-year-old son Louis XIII. (6) While the queen, stoic in widow's weeds, appears to have just handed over the rudder of the ship to the young king, who stands at the stern, the personifications that surround the royal pair play a more active role in moving the vessel along. Force and her virtuous crew do the rowing; the sail is trimmed by another personification, perhaps Prudence or Temperance; a pair of Fames trumpets in the sky above; and the personification of France, flaming sword in hand, rises heroically from the center, as if to embody physically the steadfastness of the ship's mast. (7) In this, as in the other paintings in the cycle, Rubens made rich use of emblematic imagery, drawn from medals, texts, and royal entries, as recent scholarship has shown; (8) in keeping with the artist's general propensity to animate the symbolic and emblematic aspects of his iconography, the metaphorical "ship of state" becomes a fully operative vessel launched into the open sea. (9) The personifications move even more fluidly between the emblematic and the physical realms and, in their fleshy, dynamic presence, often visually confound the two. The figure of Force, for example, shown heaving the ship out to sea with her extended oar, is identified both through the emblematic shield below her representing a lion grasping a column and through her personal display of bodily force and musculature. Rubens indeed used one of his own ecorche studies of a lunging man in portraying the twisted back and powerful, outstretched arm of his rower (Fig. 2). (10) Tire tousled blond hair, meanwhile, connects Force both to the lion on the shield below and to the queen posed in profile above, as if to confirm literally the personification's dual function as abstract embodiment of virtue and as physical agent in the pictorial drama.

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In linking Force with the figure of the queen, Rubens moreover elevates the visual status of the queen to equal that of her son, who is himself paired with the brunette personification of Religion, seated behind Force and turning her head to gaze faithfully at the young monarch. In her recent feminist interpretation of the cycle, the historian Fanny Cosandey observed the symbolic empowerment of Marie's positioning in this painting, with bet band outstretched toward the rudder directly beneath the royal "hand of justice" held by Louis XIII and her body in close proximity to the globe of the realm held by France. (11) The pairing of Marie's body with that of Force similarly lends power to the image of the queen while retaining the appearance of passivity in her own posture. The muscularity of the personification's back and arm, derived from Rubens's study of a male ecorche, connotes yet more subtly the presence of "male" force underlying the swathed and inclined posture of the queen. (12)

Personifications such as Force, human in form but emblematic in status, appear to have offered Rubens the opportunity to develop aspects of physical agency in his female figures that would have been inappropriate in representations of the queen herself, much as Greek and Roman goddesses and personifications differed in kind from portrayals of "actual" women in classical art. By far the most complex of Rubens's developments of female potential in the Medicis cycle, however, appears not in a character of classical derivation but in the national personification of France, a major protagonist whose appearance changes continuously form painting to painting according to the circumstances. While based on the traditional personification of France as a crowned woman draped in a robe patterned with fleurs-de-lis, Rubens's figure departs markedly from its prototype in presenting the character as a helmeted, short-skirted Amazon of extraordinary physical range. Regal and steadfast in The Coming of Age, with the emblems of royalty in her hands and one breast heroically bared, France appears early in the cycle as a courtly confidant of Henri IV, encouraging through intimate hand gestures his admiration of the portrait of the Medici princess (Figs. 3, 4). Subsequently, the personification plays the role of a gallant servant to the queen, striding and bowing to greet her as she disembarks at Marseilles mad then offering her the globe of the realm on the death of her husband (Figs. 5-8). Such chivalry reaches its height when France assumes the mien of an elegant cavalier facilitating the exchange of the French and Spanish princesses on the border (Fig. 9). Immediately thereafter, in a surprising shift of role, the personification is transformed into a fecund Venus receiving the benefits of the queen's just and prosperous governance during file regency (Fig. 10). Even more than the personification of Force in The Coming of Age, the figure of France appears in several of these paintings to incorporate aspects of male physiology and behavior into her body, to the point, at times, of crossing over entirely into the male gender, with a disguised or flattened chest and striding, muscular legs (Figs. 6, 9). In other works, such as The. Felicity of the Regency, in which she plays the role of Venus, the figure appears entirely feminine, displaying fill breasts, swathed legs, and the vertical calm of a classical goddess (Fig. 10). All of Rubens's personifications in the cycle display the alert, humanized animation that distinguished the artist's figural approach in this era; France, however, stretches such animation into a virtual theater of the body inhabited variously by woman, man, and androgyne.

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This essay will examine in detail the protean personification of France, whose varied appearances from painting to painting have gone surprisingly unremarked in the literature on the cycle. Repeated as frequently as the character of Minerva, but usually playing a far more active role in the pictorial dramas, the figure of France offers a unique opportunity to observe the process of personification itself--how Rubens manipulated the distinguishing aspects of the body to communicate particular concepts and aspects of character, often layering several at once. In examining the transformations that France undergoes from painting to painting, particularly in the way the figure is gendered, I shall argue that Rubens's process of personification was profoundly theatrical, in that he used the identifying markers of personification as if they were costumes that could be donned and changed at will. In doing so the artist implicitly highlighted the theatrical basis of personification itself: the Latin term persona, which Gordon Tetsky translates literally as a "thing to sound through," can be interpreted, generally, as "mask," and the term is still used today to designate a theatrical character. (13) Personification thus implies a deliberate adoption of artificial elements to fashion a meaning or identity through the visible surfaces of the body. Like allegory, with which it is often allied, personification can call attention to the process by which meaning is imposed on form, since it overtly displays the signs for its interpretation, however elusive that interpretation might ultimately be. (14) In the case of Rubens's France, this process of fabricating meaning through surfaces appears to be enacted literally, as the bodily "mask" of the character continually shifts from one persona to the next.

Considering Rubens's France as a sequential performance of roles, or personae, gives us new insight into the feminist implications of the Medicis cycle. Beginning with Deborah Marrow's groundbreaking study of Marie de Medicis's art patronage in 1982, scholars have given increasing attention to the queen's political self-interest as a fundamental goal of the cycle. (15) As indicated in Rubens's contract, the queen exercised ultimate control over the subjects chosen for the cycle and probably contributed to the establishment of the basic imagery. (16) A surviving document known as the Baluze manuscript, which Jacques Thuillier has argued served as an early plan for the cycle, was most likely drawn up by the queen and her advisers in consultation with the artist shortly before Rubens's commencement of the works in 1622. (17) Although serving only as a textual sketch for the paintings in the cycle, the Baluze manuscript implies specific concern on the queen's part for how her story was to be portrayed through history and allegory. Recent feminist interpretations have accordingly focused on the ways in which the queen is presented in the paintings, with particular attention to the relationship between her image and the various emblems and allegorical figures that surround her. Conclusions divide, however, on the success with which the queen's self-justification may have been realized. Fanny Cosandey has recently interpreted the cycle as a carefully integrated, persuasive display of the queen's sovereignty. (18) Geraldine Johnson, on the other hand, has observed a tension in the cycle between assertions of Marie's authority and allegorical imagery that presents the female body as vulnerable and subject to male control. In Johnson's reading, Rubens's use of female nudity, including the bare breast of the queen that appears at certain significant points in the cycle, conflicts with his imagery of queenly power, as if to confirm pictorially the historical French resistance to female rule. (19)

This study, while taking into account such divergent assessments of the cycle's success as a statement of Marie de Medicis's authority, will shift questions of gender and agency away from the representation of the queen herself to the process by which gender is variously assigned to her key servant, France. Overlooked by Johnson as by most other scholars of the cycle, France counteracts stereotypes of female nudity both through her adoption of "male" physicality and through the very diversity of her successive incarnations. I shall argue, indeed, that Rubens's intense engagement with outward "masks" in fashioning this personification answered the problem of depicting feminine rule by pushing and stretching the means by which the personified female body takes shape. Rubens's figure of France relates in a general sense to the many feminine personifications that appeared in European painting following the publication of the first illustrated edition of Cesare Ripa's Iconologia in 1603, (20) but it departs significantly from the passive prototype generally offered by such figures whereby, to borrow Marina Warner's term, femininity serves as a metaphorical "vessel" for the bearing of meaning. (21) Rubens's France, neither consistently "feminine" nor consigned to a single communicative role, counteracts this tendency in the art of personification to fix meaning in the feminine body. (22) By exposing the very process through which personification lakes place, and by using personification to envision a uniquely versatile and proactive "female" body, Rubens shaped a more successful image of feminine authority in France than he was able to achieve in his portrayals of the queen herself.

Although inspired by the queen's own imaging demands, as I shall argue below, Rubens's France must also be viewed as an outgrowth of early modern understandings of clothing, costume, and fashion, which emphasized the notion of the body as a mask whose significance lies in the subtleties of its visual or material surface. The association between the act of clothing the body and the process of personification in early modern culture indeed deserves more consideration than traditional iconographic studies allow. Like personification, clothing was thought to fashion its wearer by imparting visible bodily order; it at once covered the body and created another, surrogate body that could be interpreted on a social level. In their analysis of Renaissance clothing and memory Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass described the work of clothing in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as a from of material animation, by which the clothes impart an identity, or interpretable "life," to their wearer. At once hidden and reshaped by such animating bodily masks, all people were, in a sense, personifications of their social roles. (23) The physical transformations that Rubens's France undergoes from painting to painting in the Medicis cycle capture this link between clothing and personification: the identity of the personified body is continuously performed through the means--the clothing--of its outward display.

The changeability of France's identity, however, is akin more specifically to fashion and theatrical costume than it is simply to the process of clothing the body. For fashion and theater represent the particular use of clothes to render identity mobile. As Jones and Stallybrass argue, it was during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Europe that the practice of fashion, with its basis in constant change, was coming to replace the more stable characterizations of earlier Renaissance clothing. (24) while lessening the inherent significance of clothing by transferring it to commodity status, fashion also enhanced the potential of using clothes to project desire and fantasy, linking them more closely to imaginative pursuits, (25) As Alexandra Warwick and Dani Cavallaro have argued in their analysis of fashion in our own era, the very changeability, of fashion could prompt reflection on the act of dressing, thus giving the visible surface of the body its own kind of interpretative depth. (26) In fashion's early history, the notion of clothing as inherently changeable existed simultaneously with the belief in a deeper, more enduring identification of the body with clothes. This gave the artifices of outward styling an edge of believability similar to the varied illusions of identity generated in the sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century theater, where, for example, a man dressed as a woman in effect "became" a woman through the material agency of clothing and simulated breasts. (27) Such investment in the transformative power of the mask within the culture of theater and fashion may have facilitated the believability of a visual personification, such as Rubens's France, that likewise relied on its personifying "masks" to play diverse roles in an extended pictorial drama.

Rubens's sensitivity to clothing and the meanings it could convey is amply demonstrated in his correspondence, which contains numerous references to minute points of significance and decorum in historical and allegorical clothing. (28) In the figure of France his attention to costume emerges as an overt theme, exemplified above all in two distinct personae that the figure adopts: the goddess Venus in The Felicity of the Regency and the noble cavalier in The Exchange of Princesses (Figs. 10, 9). In the case of the Venus role, as I shall demonstrate below, the personification's gesture of gathering silken fabric around her lower body transforms a convention of classical drapery into an active demonstration of fertility, while echoing the sensuous draping of women's lower bodies in contemporary fashion. More specifically attuned to fashionable trends is Rubens's use of the noble cavalier: as the preeminent vehicle of fashion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the European court nobleman, especially in France, substituted for his ancient feudal power a "mask" of lordship conveyed through the minutiae of surface display. "Bodily culture," as Anna Bryson has argued, became in this context the principal means of distinguishing character; Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Counter of 1598 and its many subsequent imitations emphasized the outward performance of the courtier as the indicator of his inner worth. (29) Particularly during the period of the European wars from the later sixteenth through the first half of the seventeenth centuries, such performance became closely identified with the cavalier, a persona that would dominate fashionable culture in France from the 1920s through the 1640s. (30) Rubens's reinvention of such courtly performance for France gave the personification a contemporary layer of meaning that was doubtlessly meant to speak specifically to the French queen and her court. (31) It also underscores the association of the personification with the process itself of fashioning the body: the cavalier role in effect summarizes this pictorial character's investment in the persuasive effects of appearance--even to the point of temporarily transforming this "woman" into a "man."

Throughout his career Rubens displayed a profound interest in the capacities of gender to impart significance to his allegories, both political and personal, as demonstrated in recent studies by Svetlana Alpers, Lisa Rosenthal, and other scholars. (32) In the case of France, such alertness to gender on the part of the artist combined with the much larger question of masculine and feminine royal protocol posed by Marie de Medicis herself. Female monarchical power in France, although obviated through ongoing legal statutes that forbade women to occupy the throne, was nevertheless always perceived as a potential threat, in part because of fallibilities in the laws themselves. (33) In governing as regent for her son through the first half of the 1610s, (34) and certainly in commissioning the cycle of paintings from Rubens in the early 1620s, Marie de Medicis herself could be viewed as attempting to change the face, if not the substance, of an imperviously male French monarchy. (35) What was the French realm, after all, it led by a woman rather than a man? Such a question finds a probing, visual exploration--if not a final resolution--in Rubens's theatrical personification of France.

The Royal Confidant

The first appearance France makes in the series of paintings as they were probably hung in the long west gallery of the Luxembourg Palace (36) is as a close companion to King Henri IV in The Presentation of the Portrait of Marie de Medicis to Henri IV. Standing just to the right of the monarch, one hand resting lightly on his shoulder and the other pressed to her upper chest, France shares the king's admiration of the young Medici princess and presumably encourages him to follow through on the prospective marriage (Figs. 3, 4). Monarch and personification match one another in height and physical bulk, and a sense of closeness, even intimacy, between the two is suggested by the proximity of the heads, by France's gentle touch on Henri's shoulder, and by the overlapping choreography of the feet. Their visual coupling parallels that of the cloud-borne Jupiter and Juno, who survey the scene from the upper left with knees touching and hands affectionately overlapping. That Rubens envisioned such parallel coupling as a basic structural feature of the painting is suggested by his preparatory oil sketch, in which the two groups are prominently indicated in diagonal alignment and matching colors (Fig. 11). The friendly palling of king and country indeed appears to have been Rubens's particular invention, for in the Baluze manuscript France is mentioned only as requesting the marriage from Jupiter and Juno and, even more abstractly, as the recipient of the "long peace" that the royal wedding will bring. (37) Her full-bodied participation in the action of the painting offers, by contrast, a striking example of Rubens's animation of his personifications to give them a sense of humanity over and above their demonstrative functions. Perhaps alluding to the metaphor of the mutual love between king and people, France also supplies a hint as to how the king will be …