The Louvre Museum in Paris displays the cycle of twenty-four large-scale paintings by Peter Paul Rubens of scenes from the life of Marie de’ Medici, one of the most influential and controversial figures in French royal history. Originally commissioned by Marie for her Luxembourg palace, the cycle is now displayed in the Louvre’s Galerie Medicis.

In one of the large paintings, Marie is shown arriving from Italy and meeting her husband by proxy, Henry IV. Other paintings depict the rest of her life, among them her birth, education, disembarkation at Marseilles (Fig. 1), and coronation at St. Denis.

This controversial Queen of France was in fact born 1575 in Florence. She was the daughter of Francesco I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Johanna of Austria, a Habsburg princess who had fallen down the stairs during her eighth pregnancy, giving birth to a son and dying immediately.

Henry had divorced his first wife, Margaret de Valois, in 1599, at the end of the religious wars, and had converted to Catholicism, saying that Paris was worth a Mass. By marrying Marie in 1600, he obtained a large dowry that enabled him to stabilize the French treasury. Her upbringing at the sophisticated Medici court had also exposed Henry to Renaissance art, culture, and the intricate world of European politics.

The relationship between Marie and Henry IV was often strained. He despised her Florentine advisers and favorites. Marie resented Henry’s numerous infidelities and mistresses. Yet in 1601 Marie gave birth to the future King Louis XIII, and in the following years, between 1602 and 1609, she bore five more children, three daughters, and two boys.

In those days pregnancy was a hazardous affair that had a high mortality, even among the upper classes and aristocracy. Marie was attended in her difficult labor by teams of physicians, midwives, apothecaries, and court officials working alongside religious figures who offered spiritual support. She possessed a robust physical constitution and overcame various ailments throughout her reign, including digestive disorders and episodes of depression or anxiety. Her medical attendants relied heavily on the classical humoral theory of balancing the four bodily humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Treatments likely included bloodletting, purging, herbal remedies, waters from therapeutic springs, and dietary modifications designed to restore humoral balance.

Henry IV was assassinated in 1610, one day after Marie was crowned queen. She immediately sent away his mistresses, dismissed his competent councilors and surrounded herself with corrupt Italians. She reversed Henry’s anti-Spanish policy, spent enormous amounts of money, and tried to remain regent by keeping Louis XIII out of power even though he had come of age. In 1619 she was overthrown and exiled to the Castle of Blois, from where she dramatically escaped by lowering herself down on a rope ladder. She had Richelieu, then her counselor, arrange a series of compromises and was partially reinstated, but after falling out with him was tried for treason and exiled from France. She lived for some time in England and Amsterdam, then in one of Rubens’ houses in Cologne, and died destitute in 1642.