Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- Introduction
- 1 Samson and Dilemma: Rubens Confronts the Woman on Top
- 2 Making Assumptions: Marian Tropes after Italy
- 3 Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia
- 4 Peace Embraces Plenty: Queering Female Virtue at Whitehall
- 5 All That Depends on Color: Feminizing Rubens in the Seventeenth Century
- Epilogue
- About the Author
- Index
3 - Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- Introduction
- 1 Samson and Dilemma: Rubens Confronts the Woman on Top
- 2 Making Assumptions: Marian Tropes after Italy
- 3 Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia
- 4 Peace Embraces Plenty: Queering Female Virtue at Whitehall
- 5 All That Depends on Color: Feminizing Rubens in the Seventeenth Century
- Epilogue
- About the Author
- Index
Summary
Abstract
A diptych of sorts, this chapter's two sections provide what may be the first comparative approach to Rubens's most inventive and important, though dramatically different, large-scale programs for female patrons: the relatively secular and mythologically inflected Medici cycle, today in the Louvre, and the lavish ex-voto known as the Eucharist tapestries, housed in Madrid's royal Poor Clare convent. The commissions were executed consecutively in the mid-1620s for Maria de’ Medici, queen mother of France and Isabel Clara Eugenia, governor general of the Spanish Netherlands. Two of the Thirty Years War's best-known and embattled female rulers, both women endeavored to portray themselves as divinely appointed sovereign widows, receiving strikingly different artistic and conceptual responses from Rubens.
Keywords: Rubens; gender; Maria de’ Medici; Isabel Clara Eugenia; Eucharist; tapestry; Poor Clares
PART 1 RECYCLING SOVEREIGNTY—MARIA DE’ MEDICI
Hence the ruler ought to have moral virtue in perfection, for his function, taken absolutely, demands a master artificer, and rational principle is such an artificer; the subjects, on the other hand, require only that measure of virtue that is proper to them. Clearly, then, the moral virtue belongs to all of them; but the temperance of a man and of a woman, or the courage and justice of a man and of a woman, are not, as Socrates maintained, the same; the courage of a man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying.
‒ Aristotle, Politics 1.13, 1267aDuring the first ten years after his return from Italy Rubens was largely occupied with imagining and executing devotional paintings, secular allegories, and massive altarpieces. But the focus of his artistic production shifted in the following decade. For much of the 1620s Rubens busied himself with two major pictorial programs commissioned by Catholic Europe's two illustrious sovereign widows: Maria de’ Medici (1573–1642), queen mother of France and the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia (1566–1633), regent and later governor-general of the Spanish Netherlands. Although the learned Spanish infanta, who had long assisted her father, Philip II, in the oversight of his vast empire, was perhaps the better educated of the two, both women were instilled from an early age with a sophisticated understanding of the arts.
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- Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens , pp. 119 - 176Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020