The Coronation of Marie de' Medici in Saint-Denis

This canvas by **Peter Paul Rubens**, painted in 1622 for the cycle devoted to the life of **Marie de' Medici** at the Luxembourg Palace, depicts the **coronation of the queen** in the basilica of Saint-Denis on 13 May 1610 — a lavish ceremony organised on the eve of Henri IV's planned departure for the Jülich-Cleves campaign, intended to confer greater legitimacy on the queen in the event of a regency. No one could then have known that this coronation, celebrated the day before the king's assassination on the rue de la Ferronnerie, would prove providential, making Marie de' Medici the immediately recognised regent for her son Louis XIII. This work, one of twenty-four in the Medici cycle, illustrates the splendour of the ceremony as much as the near-prophetic dimension posterity has retrospectively attributed to it.