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

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.