A Brill Calendar: September 2

Few monarchs have been so impressively depicted by a court painter as Marie de Medici (Florence April 26 1573, Cologne July 3 1642).

In a series of 21 spectacular paintings, Peter Paul Rubens created a baroque survey of her life which is at the same time an icon of an age. Painted in 1622-1624, immediately after the building of her new Palais de Luxembourg: the pictures show a queen-mother triumphant. However, fortune was never meant to be beyond change: Mairie died destitute; eleven years after she had been banished from the French Court.

The waning of her star on the firmament of European power didn’t prevent the Dutch Republic and its ‘boom-town’, Amsterdam, to stage elaborate public festivities during the entire first week of September 1638 for this guest of honour; the idiom ‘nouveau riche’ was never more appropriate. It is the year in which three decades of shrewd investing resulted in the solid cultural profit of buildings such as an ultra-modern Protestant Church, the ‘Westerkerk’ and a municipal theatre, the ‘Schouwburg’.

Within five years from now the daughter of Joanna of Austria and of Francesco de Medici, who considered herself more than a match for the political genius of the Cardinal de Richelieu died in the German Rhineland at Cologne: an old woman with all her wealth gone. It is seldom that a shift in European power politics had been so dramatically in the making: a decade after this fanciful extravagance, the Republic of the United Netherlands became a sovereign European State by virtue of the Peace of Westphalia, and Marie a legend in a visual chronicle.