BY THIS STAGE Florence was no longer the main seat of Medici power and influence. When the fourteen-year-old Caterina de’ Medici had married Henri de Valois, the second son of the French king Francis I, at Marseilles in 1533, none would have guessed at her auspicious future. Not even Pope Clement VII, who had sought to foster Medici ambitions by marrying her into a royal family, could have imagined that within thirty years she would be dominating that family, and ruling France. By the time of her death Catherine de Medicis (as she became in France) would have been married to one king of France (Henri II) and given birth to three more (Francis II, Charles IX and Henri III). Such was her personality that for almost thirty years Catherine de Medicis would be the virtual ruler of France. While the Grand Dukes of Tuscany ruled over a comparatively peaceful population of 75,000, Catherine de Medicis was attempting to impose her will on the fifteen million people of France during one of the most turbulent periods of that country’s history.
Having been orphaned within days of her birth, Catherine’s upbringing was entrusted largely to nuns; but this was no tranquil otherworldly life, for all too audibly beyond the walls of the Santa Lucia convent in Florence, the troubled days of the ‘Republic of Christ’ were unfolding. During this period of Medici exile, Catherine herself was a valuable hostage, and as such, she was lucky to survive the siege of Florence.
The fourteen-year-old Catherine who arrived in Marseilles to marry the fourteen-year-old Henri was a quietly self-possessed, rather dull little girl. But her plain exterior masked a considerable intelligence combined with a character of extreme tenacity; and as she grew up she would increasingly exhibit many of the qualities of her exceptional greatgrandfather, Lorenzo the Magnificent, though ironically his almost feminine charm and love of gesture would in Catherine’s case be supplanted by a distinctly masculine desire for control.
After her marriage, Catherine and her husband took up residence at the French court of her father-in-law Francis I. The effect of the Italian Renaissance had arrived here early, largely imported by Francis I himself, and his court was a haven of dazzling sophistication amidst a large, somewhat backward rural country. Leonardo da Vinci had spent his final days at the court of Francis I, dying just fourteen years before Catherine arrived. The king still had great ambitions, and in 1546 decided to pull down his old palace in Paris, so that he could begin erecting in its place a vast new edifice for the housing of his family, his court and his art collection – this would be the Louvre.
Despite living amidst such a recognisably Italianate court society, Catherine’s early years were difficult. In a court filled with nobles, some of whose domains were larger than Tuscany, it was generally considered that Henri de Valois had married beneath his station. Catherine was sniffily dubbed ‘the tradesman’s daughter’, and as she grew into young womanhood she hardly blossomed; according to a contemporary description: ‘She is small and thin; her features are not delicate, and she has bulging eyes, like most of the Medici.’
Matters were not improved when Francis I’s eldest son Francis, Duke of Orléans, died in 1536, and Henri de Valois became heir to the throne. Henri de Valois was a deeply damaged young man, who had never fully recovered from his childhood period as a hostage in Spanish captivity. When his father had been released, he had left his two sons behind in captivity; the abandoned Henri had never forgotten this. After his eventual release he returned to hang about his father’s court, a silent, brooding figure amongst the witty and sophisticated nobles. He made no secret of the profound resentment he felt towards his father, and this malevolent streak dominated his obstinate character; having absorbed little education, Henri remained intellectually backward and displayed none of the facility of speech required for court life and its cultural activities. Indeed, he largely ignored these, appearing to be little interested in anything but violent pursuits such as hunting and jousting.
Being married to such a man was not easy for Catherine, and it now became imperative that she and Henri produce an heir to perpetuate the royal line, but their marriage remained childless. After several years, court gossip began to suggest that a divorce was in the offing, but Francis I assured Catherine that he would not allow this to happen. Throughout this difficult period, Francis I became very much the father she had never known; Catherine imbibed his ideas, becoming in the process a firm believer in the power of the monarchy. For his part, the ageing Francis I admired Catherine; he enjoyed watching her dancing and hunting, and appreciated her energy and intelligence, as well as her slowly blooming confidence. This was doubtless encouraged by the presence of a number of Italian artists at the courts in Paris and Fontainebleau. Cellini himself briefly visited Paris in 1537, and would return for a four-year stay in 1540; in his Autobiography he mentions meeting Catherine on a number of occasions, but is more interested in describing the impression he made on the king. Cellini mentions how ‘the very flower of the French court came to visit me’; and in another chapter he modestly recalls: ‘The King returned to his palace, after bestowing on me too many marks of favour to be here recorded.’ ‘What a miracle of a manf the king exclaimed on seeing Cellini’s work, and so on . . . It was during this period that Cellini produced his justly celebrated gold salt cellar. Catherine too was gradually emboldened by Francis I’s appreciation of Italian culture, which was accorded increasing respect as the Renaissance took hold amidst this privileged realm in France.
Then in 1544, after eleven years of marriage, Catherine finally produced her first child at the age of twenty-five. In all, she would eventually have ten children, with four boys and three girls surviving infancy. Three years after the birth of Catherine’s first child, Francis I died and her husband ascended to the throne of France as Henri II. But by now the awkward twenty-nine-year-old Henri II was more interested in his forty-eight-year-old mistress, Diane de Poitiers; her maturity had cast a spell over the childish Henri, but as she aged and her looks faded, she became increasingly uncertain of her position. As a result she did her best to assert herself over Catherine, even to the extent of organising the education of her children; meanwhile Catherine de Médicis’ self-control was remarkable – uncannily so to many observers. The new queen never lost her dignity, remaining quietly confident of her husband’s feelings for her, despite his defects of character; and in this she appears to have been justified, inasmuch as it is possible to judge such intimate matters.
By now Catherine had begun to introduce her own Italian innovations into life at the French royal court. Perhaps the most radical of these was her effect on French cooking, which brought about such a transformation that Catherine de Medicis is widely credited with the origin of French cuisine as such. Prior to Catherine’s arrival, French cooking had been largely medieval: thick, sickly sauces were used to disguise the taste of tainted meat, heavy dishes included sweet-and-sour elements, and pungent spices were regarded as the ultimate delicacy. When Catherine had arrived in France, she had brought with her a number of Florentine cooks, who were well versed in the nuances of Italian cuisine, which was much lighter and more subtle than its French counterpart; it was also better balanced, as the Renaissance had seen the inclusion of a wide range of healthy vegetables, which were no longer regarded as simply fodder for the poor.
The Italian attitude towards cuisine would transform the French table, even to the extent of affecting those who sat at the table; prior to this period, the French nobility still regarded eating itself as very much a rough and ready affair, with the man of the house admitting women to his table only on special occasions. Italian meals, on the other hand, had always involved the whole family: men, women, children and even servants all sat down at table together. With the advent of Catherine de Medicis, women now became a regular feature at the dining table in the French court. Likewise, the table itself became a sight of some elegance; Cellini’s sumptuous salt cellar, an artistic masterpiece, was symptomatic of the change in table-dressing, and other novelties included fine wine glasses and decanters, rather than beakers or tankards. Before Catherine’s time, the French would cut up their food with a knife, but eat it with their fingers; Catherine introduced the Italian refinement of eating from the prongs of a fork, which was regarded by the French as highly effete (to such an extent that this Italianate extravagance would be dropped soon after Catherine’s time, and forks would not make a comeback at the French table until the late eighteenth century). The range of French cooking was also extended by Catherine with the introduction of such novelties as aspics and sweetbreads; new vegetables were imported from Italy, including artichokes and truffles; also imported were such sensational treats as ice cream, and a blend of whipped egg yolk, sugar and Marsala wine called zabaglione. It is little wonder that in middle age Catherine put on a considerable amount of weight, which even the flattering court portraitists were hard put to disguise (see page 350), However, for many years she managed to preserve her waistline by energetic dancing, which she particularly enjoyed; it was Catherine who also introduced the art of ballet to the French court, importing specialised Italian dancers and ballerinas.
Throughout the reign of Henri II, Catherine played little part in the running of the kingdom, and her skills were exercised in organizing the court. But this difficult task appears to have sharpened her political and social acumen. She listened to her husband’s policy, but said nothing; at home, Henri II was determinedly opposed to the creeping Protestantism that was now spreading through France, as Luther’s ideas began to take hold throughout Europe. (England had declared itself Protestant in the year Catherine arrived in France.) In foreign affairs, Henri II pursued an anti-Spanish policy, a vindictive legacy of his imprisonment in Spain, though at length this policy proved futile and was finally ended by the Peace of Cateau-Cambresis in 1559.
A great tournament was held to celebrate the signing of this treaty, and the forty-year-old king insisted on playing a vigorous role in the jousting. In the course of this, a wooden lance rammed through his helmet, splintering as it entered his skull. The finest physicians in Europe were summoned, including the great Andreas Vesalius, but nothing could be done. Within a few days Henri II was dead.
Catherine’s sickly fifteenth-year-old son ascended the throne as Francis II, but was little more than a nominal ruler, for the power lay in the hands of two noblemen, the Guise brothers. Cardinal Charles Guise looked after foreign affairs, while Francis, Duke of Guise, controlled the army; the Guise brothers were fanatically anti-Protestant and were supported in this by Spain and the papacy.
As Protestantism had spread through Europe, it had begun to attract increasing numbers of the disaffected and down-trodden peasantry; exploited in feudal conditions since the earliest medieval times, this class had found its own spiritual Renaissance in the Reformation of Luther. As such, Protestantism had taken on a distinctly political edge, and this element had become more pronounced when over-taxed shopkeepers and tradesmen began converting to Protestantism as it spread to the cities of France. The Huguenots (as the largely Calvinist French Protestants became known) began to view the Catholic authorities as the enemy; the religious divide now became a political divide, as the Huguenots spoke out against the Crown and the government, although in the event such protests were quickly suppressed.
Matters began to take on a different tenor in 1559, when the Huguenots were joined by disgruntled nobles, who felt themselves stifled by the increasing power of the monarchy and the aristocratic government. The disunited lower classes now had leaders, and the revolt became open; secret congregations in the households of converted tradespeople now became large public meetings in town squares, addressed by Huguenot noblemen.
The Huguenots petitioned Catherine de Médicis, as queen mother, to restrain their persecution by the Guise brothers, which was being enacted in the name of her young son. Catherine began to use her moderating influence, but in 1560 Francis II died and was succeeded by his ten-year-old brother, who became Charles IX. If Catherine’s first son had proved a disappointment, then her second son was even more so; the genetic inheritance from his father, combined with that of Catherine’s father, the syphilitic Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, had proved an inauspicious mix. Like his older brother, Charles IX was physically weak, but on top of this he also suffered from mental instability.
This time Catherine was determined to take charge, and made sure that she was appointed regent; her aim was to preserve peace at all costs. The Protestants now had some legal rights, but in practice these were largely ignored in the increasingly hostile climate that was sweeping the country. Catherine could create laws, but had not the power to enforce them, and in 1562 the country collapsed into civil war. A year later Francis, Duke de Guise, was shot by a spy whilst besieging the Protestants at Orléans; when the spy was tried, he confessed that he had been hired by the Protestant leader Admiral de Coligny.
At the termination of the civil war in 1563, Charles IX was declared of age to rule at the Parlement of Rouen, and for the next two years Catherine conducted the young king on a long tour of France, so that he could show himself to the people and gain their loyalty. But the Guise faction and their extremist Catholic supporters were bent on civil war, which broke out again in 1567 and 1568. Catherine did her best to bring about a reconciliation; she conducted negotiations with the Guise faction, and even invited the dashing Admiral de Coligny to meet the king. It so happened that when Coligny arrived in Paris, Catherine was away attending to her daughter Claude, Duchess of Lorraine, who was ill. Coligny used all his charms on the gauche and impressionable young Charles IX, and they would sit up talking into the early hours in the royal chambers at the Louvre. It appeared that Coligny was attempting to usurp Catherine’s influence over the king, and when word of this reached her, she returned to Paris in a fury, quickly reasserting her power over the weak-willed Charles IX.
Finally, in an effort to seal a reconciliation between the two factions, Catherine arranged for her daughter Marguerite to marry the young Protestant leader of Bourbon royal blood, Henri of Navarre; and in August 1572 the Catholic and Protestant leaders gathered in Paris to witness the marriage. Despite the signs of public rejoicing, with the bells ringing out from Notre Dame and church towers throughout the city, the atmosphere on the streets below remained uneasy, as Paris sweltered in a summer heatwave. The pope had made it known that he opposed the marriage, announcing that there could be no union between Catholics and Protestants; as a result the ceremony itself could not be held in Notre Dame, but took place in the square immediately outside. In the midst of this the Protestant leaders ostentatiously ‘went for a walk’ at the point in the ceremony where Mass was celebrated by the newly wed couple.
Four days later, at the climax of the celebrations on Wednesday 20 August, an assassination attempt was made on Coligny. An arquebus was fired at him from an upper window as he walked along the rue de Bethisy (now the rue de Rivoli), but at the opportune moment Coligny happened to bend down to fasten his shoe and was merely wounded. The house from which the arquebus was fired was found to belong to a retainer of the Guise family; evidently they were seeking to avenge the murder of Francis, Duke of Guise.
Catherine and Charles IX hastened to Coligny’s bedside, and the admiral asked to speak alone with the king. On their way back to the Louvre, Catherine browbeat Charles IX into revealing what Coligny had said in their secret conversation – apparently he had warned the young king not to trust Catherine. By now Paris was in a turmoil: 200 Huguenots occupied the Guise house on the rue de Béthisy, and armed bands of Huguenots roamed the streets. The markets closed and the shops were shuttered as the citizenry took refuge in their homes.
Prompt action was necessary, or the situation in the capital was liable to get out of hand, in all likelihood sparking another civil war throughout the country. Next day Charles IX was shown proof that Coligny had in fact been plotting to attack him, and on learning of the treachery of his new friend he is said to have become unhinged. Whether Charles IX now acted alone, or on the encouragement of his mother, is unclear, but in the early hours of Sunday 24 August, the feast of St Bartholomew, members of the Swiss Royal Guard led by one of the Guise faction broke in on Coligny and stabbed him to death, tossing his body out through the window into the street below. This was a signal for the massacre of the Huguenots by the royal forces, aided by the Catholics of Paris. Huguenots – men, women and children – were dragged from their beds throughout the city and murdered in an orgy of killing that lasted two days, during which as many as 2,500 were killed. As news of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre spread throughout France, similar slaughters took place in Orleans, Rouen, Lyons, Bordeaux and Toulouse; in all, as many as 8,000 may have died. This marked the beginning of a series of wars of religion that would plague France for the next thirty years.
It seems likely that Catherine de Médicis was at least partially responsible for the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Whether she panicked, or saw this as the only course, is uncertain; though there can be little doubt that if she had not struck first, her life, as well as that of the king, would have been gravely endangered. Either way, Catherine de Médicis was certainly blamed for this bloody settling of scores, one of the most infamous acts in French history. And from now on she would be regarded as the leader of Catholic France in its struggle against the Huguenots.
Reports vary as to the effect of this event on Catherine de Médicis herself. According to some, she never fully recovered; now in her fifties, her manipulative temperament took on a harder cynical edge, while her previously stout middle-aged figure became flabby and repulsively fat. Other reports indicate that she remained active, hunting and dancing and talking as wittily as ever – France was irreconcilably divided, even down to the way it saw its ruling queen.
Fig 18 Catherine de Médicis
In 1574 Charles IX died at just twenty-four years of age, and Catherine’s favourite third son now ascended to the throne as Henri III. Catherine had placed little confidence in Charles IX, but she had high hopes for the twenty-three-year-old Henri, despite being well aware of his weaknesses. Henri III kept aloof and made few friends outside his close-knit immediate circle, who were known as the mignons (cuties); in the words of a contemporary: ‘They all dress alike in coats of many colours and they are sprinkled with violet powder and other sweet perfumes.’ Catherine seemed to accept this homosexuality as perhaps inevitable in the weak son of such an overbearing mother. However, Henri III’s pathological extravagance, together with his interest in zealous religious flagellants, appeared to hint at deeper deviancy from the norm. Two days after his coronation, he was married to Louise of Lorraine, with the aim of ensuring a much-needed heir for the house of Valois, although for the time being no heir appeared.
Catherine de Medicis remained virtual ruler of France, but even during these difficult years she still found time to extend her cultural influence over her adopted country. It was she who brought the final legacy of the Italian Renaissance to France: Catherine was responsible for the building of the Tuileries, the great royal palace adjoining the Louvre on the right bank of the Seine. (This would be burned down in the 1871 Commune, leaving only the present Tuileries Gardens in the centre of Paris.) Catherine would also design and build several of the great French chateaux, including the most enchanting of them all, which spans the river at Chenonceaux. This marks the ultimate coming together of the Italian and French styles, being a blend of northern European Gothic and southern Renaissance, shot through with a vision of pure fairyland. (Not for nothing is one of the chateaux along the Loire said to be the setting of the original Sleeping Beauty.) This was Florence north of the Alps, yet it was also the Medici north of the Alps; here the Medici spirit had blossomed. These chateaux were not palaces for the ruler of a city state, but the fairytale extravagances of supreme majesty; in France the Medici had become sovereigns, leaving all notions of democracy far behind, just as they had done in Florence.
Yet the question remained as to how all this could continue, for still Henri III and his unfortunate bride Louise failed to produce an heir. This left the Protestant Henri of Navarre as the heir presumptive, and the fact that he was married to Catherine’s daughter Marguerite now appeared as yet another piece of characteristic Medici foresight. In 1586 Catherine travelled south-west to Cognac to meet Henri of Navarre and secure the succession; at the same time she also made a final attempt at a reconciliation between the Protestants and the Catholics, although this failed. France was descending further and further into chaos and it appeared that nothing could be done to avert this. Bloated and worn out by her efforts, Catherine de Medicis finally died in 1589 at the age of sixty-nine.
As much as anyone, Catherine had ruled France during the fourteen-year reign of her son Charles IX, and for the fifteen years she had lived during the reign of her son Henri III. She had been the dominating presence, though precisely how much she had in fact guided France’s destiny remains open to question. The internecine chaos over which she presided had almost certainly been inevitable, yet it is fair to say that, but for her influence, the country might well have collapsed into chaos earlier and for longer than it did.
During the last years of the fifteenth century, France – in the form of Charles VIII – had brought military might to Italy. By the early decades of the following century, Italian culture had begun to percolate back into France, and would continue to do so throughout the sixteenth century. Catherine de Medicis was to encourage a late flowering of this, leaving permanent cultural monuments ranging from chateaux and the ballet to the founding of a great cuisine. But she also brought elements of the dark underside of the Italian Renaissance; hers was the politics of Machiavelli, for even if she had not read The Prince she had certainly imbibed its message – through her life in Florence, and through her very existence as a Medici. She would have known by heart the stories of her great-grandfather Lorenzo the Magnificent; and like him, during times of travail her rational, calculating humanism had succumbed to the irrationalism that was also reborn with the Renaissance. When all else failed, she fell back on astrology; it is known that on several occasions she consulted the great French seer Nostradamus, who answered her questions with characteristically enigmatic prophecies. On one occasion, a vision in a mirror led him to prophesy that the line of Valois would die out (though precisely when this event would occur was not mentioned). However, when the need for action arose, Catherine chose to rely on the methods of Machiavelli rather than on magic, and as such she remains one of the great figures of French history: respected and reviled by many, loved by few. The little orphan, abandoned amidst the siege of Florence, had not known love: the legendary stories of her ancestors and the sound of the guns surrounding the city were all that she had heard of her family during her impressionable childhood years.
Within three months of the death of Catherine de Medicis, the Catholic League had seized Paris and attempted to depose her son Henri III, on account of his alleged leniency towards the Huguenots. In the course of the siege the king was assassinated by a fanatical priest, and Henri of Navarre succeeded to the throne as Henri IV, with Catherine de Médicis’ daughter Marguerite as his queen. In 1593 Henri IV converted to Catholicism in a desperate attempt to reunite France; seven years later he wished to sever the French royal connection with Catherine de Medicis by divorcing his wife Marguerite, who had failed to produce an heir. Besides needing an heir, Henri IV also required a rich wife to refill the royal coffers, which had become sorely depleted during his conflict against the Catholic League.
On hearing of this, Ferdinando I, Grand Duke of Tuscany (son of Cosimo I) contacted his distant cousin Marguerite; he impressed upon her that the future of the Medici dynasty was at stake, and that this should be placed above her own personal interests. As a result of this consultation Marguerite agreed to divorce Henri IV, but on one condition – that he married her cousin Maria de’ Medici, the niece of Ferdinando I. At the same time Ferdinando I contacted Henry IV, saying that if he agreed to this arrangement, Maria de’ Medici would be supplied with a handsome dowry of 600,000 florins – sufficient to equip an army with which the French monarchy could defend itself. In October 1600 Henri IV married Maria de’ Medici, and in the following year she gave birth to a son, who was christened Louis: the succession was secured.
Maria de’ Medici had been born in Florence in 1573, and by the age of five she had to all intents and purposes become an orphan. Her mother had died, whereupon her father quickly remarried and moved out of the Palazzo Pitti, leaving Maria, together with an older brother and two sisters, in the care of governesses supervised by the palace chamberlain. Within four years her brother and a sister had died, and the other sister had moved out with her new husband. From the age of nine, Maria was brought up amidst the large emptiness of the Palazzo Pitti, with its scores of furnished but largely unoccupied rooms, salons and chambers. (Although the Palazzo Pitti would not be enlarged to its present vastness until 1616, it was already an imposing edifice at this time.) Amidst the desolation of her loneliness, Maria formed a deep attachment to a girl called Leonora Dori, who was the daughter of her wet-nurse. Leonora was three years older than Maria, and was to become the first of several such favourites on whom Maria grew to depend.
Maria herself was a rather stolid, strong-willed child with mousy hair and a snobbish sense of her own lineage; her mother had been a Habsburg, her father a grand duke, and no one was allowed to forget this. When crossed, she displayed a passionate temper, but would quickly seek a reconciliation when this had been directed at one of her favourites. Much like her distant cousin Catherine de Medicis, her Medici predecessor on the French throne, Maria was a forceful personality, but this personality had distinct flaws. Unlike Catherine, she was not intelligent, witty or energetic; indeed, she was often mentally slow and given to bouts of lethargy.
Marie de Médicis (as she now became) had been married to Henri IV by proxy, and she arrived in France, a bride at the rather late age of twenty-seven, to find herself married to a forty-seven-year-old French philanderer. Henri IV was offended by her plainness, and Marie found the king uncouth and malodorous (the Italians had retained the Roman habit of bathing frequently, whereas this custom had lapsed during the Dark Ages in the colder climates north of the Alps). Marie, who was short and stout, was disappointed to discover that her grey-bearded husband was even shorter, though despite his aged appearance Henri IV relished his court nickname of ‘the Green Gallant’, a reference to his evergreen lust.
Marie de Médicis brought two favourites with her to France: her attendant Leonora Dori was accompanied by a homosexual social-climber called Concino Concini, who had married her in an unscrupulous mutual arrangement to better themselves. Unlike the Medici splendours of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, the royal residence of the Louvre was in a sorry state, and the adjoining Tuileries started by Catherine was still far from complete. The Louvre had been badly ravaged by the civil war, and the royal coffers had been too depleted to afford repairs – with the result that many rooms were deserted, and some sections even remained without roofing. Marie immediately began spending some of her considerable Medici inheritance on refurbishing the royal residence, while Henri IV responded to this by moving in his mistress Henriette, whom he had created Marquise de Verneuil. Shortly after Marie de Medicis produced a royal heir, Henriette also produced a male offspring, and he too was brought up in the Louvre, along with the rest of the king’s gaggle of illegitimate children, who also inhabited the palace. Henriette immediately commenced plotting to have her son declared heir to the throne, but to Marie’s relief this eventually resulted in a charge of treason. A farcical court case ensued, and Henriette was sentenced to death; after a suitable interval, she returned once more to the Louvre, but refrained from any further dynastic ambitions.
Unexpectedly, the leading participants in this hectic royal household developed a genuine familial feeling for one another, with only occasional domestic spats. As Marie began producing more children on a regular basis, Henri IV began to overlook her plainness; indeed, he gallantly informed one and all that if Marie had not been his wife, he would have had her as his mistress. Marie evidently decided to regard this as something of a compliment, and did her best to create a happy home for her errant royal husband; meanwhile, the new Italian cooks whom Marie had brought with her from Florence ensured that all ate well at the royal table.
Like Catherine de Médicis, Marie would also made her contribution to French cuisine. Catherine’s cooks had strongly influenced French cooking, but it was during Marie’s time that modern French cuisine emerged as a recognisable entity, and this only occurred when French chefs had absorbed the rationale that lay behind Italian cooking. The central idea of Italian cuisine was to enhance the flavour of the meat or fish, rather than smother it; sauces were intended to emphasise elements that were already present, drawing them out, thus meat was garnished with a sauce made from its own juices, while fish was cooked in a stock consisting of discarded elements such as the head and tail. Previously French cooks had merely copied Italian recipes; now that they understood the theoretical basis of Italian cooking they quickly began creating their own national cuisine.
The first outstanding chef of this kind was François La Varenne, who trained in the Italian kitchens of Marie de Médicis, and twenty years later would write Le Cuisinier français (The French Chef), the first systematic and comprehensive guide to the preparation of French cuisine. La Varenne is remembered particularly for his innovative use of mushrooms to accentuate the taste of beef and lamb, and it was in the royal kitchens that the classic dish Tournedos Médicis, steak with a Madeira sauce, was invented and named after Marie de Médicis.
In 1610 Henri IV was assassinated on his way to campaign against the Spanish, and Marie became regent for her eight-year-old son Louis XIII. Marie had always disliked her husband’s anti-Spanish policy, and now countermanded this with the aid of her favourite Concino, whom she had raised to the status of Marquis d’Ancre, and who now became her close adviser. In 1614 Louis XIII came of age to reign, but the regent and her adviser chose to ignore this; the immature twelve-year-old was easily browbeaten into acquiescence, and Marie continued to rule France in his name. Power began to encourage her naturally extravagant nature, which had the effect of warping her judgement so that she made a number of ill-advised concessions to enemies amongst the nobility; but she was shielded from her growing unpopularity by her circle of Italian sycophants.
Soon Louis XIII also had a favourite, the manipulative and increasingly powerful Charles d’Albert de Luynes, and together they schemed to wrest power from Marie. In 1618 the Marquis d’Ancre was assassinated and Marie de Medicis was exiled to Blois, where she unsuccessfully attempted to foment rebellion against her son. She now turned to a new adviser, a talented and aristocratic young clergyman named Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, who approached Louis XIII and used his considerable political skills to affect a reconciliation between the king and his mother.
Louis XIII was soon in conflict with the Huguenots, together with their foreign allies, and when his adviser de Luynes was killed in battle, Richelieu took his place. By this stage the ongoing struggle between Catholics and Protestants had begun to stir up all manner of dynastic and territorial conflicts further afield, and Europe was plunged into the vicious and destructive Thirty Years War, with armies clashing from Russia to France, from Austria to the Baltic. Richelieu used his skills as best he could to protect France, yet was only marginally successful; in 1622 Louis XIII ensured that Richelieu was made a cardinal, in recognition of his services. Marie de Médicis bitterly resented Richelieu’s ‘treachery’ to her, as she saw it; not only had he deserted her for her son, but he was also reversing her pro-Spanish pro-Catholic policy, in favour of tactical alliances with Protestant powers.
Thwarted in other fields, Marie de Medicis now diverted her energies to cultural matters, and in this field her influence would be almost as pervasive as that of Catherine de Medicis. As early as 1615 Marie had commissioned the finest French architect Salomon de Brosse to build the Luxembourg Palace on the left bank of the Seine. This was intended to be a replica of the Palazzo Pitti, and Marie even sent to Florence for plans of the Pitti; de Brosse graciously accepted these, and then continued with his own design. Marie would also commission works by a number of artists, including the young French painter Nicolas Poussin, though her favourite artist was undoubtedly the Dutch Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, whom she invited to Paris in 1622.
By now the High Renaissance in art had given way to the extravagances of Baroque, where brilliance of surface technique carried art beyond the structural understanding that had once united it with science. Art had outgrown its scientific phase, just as science was beginning to emerge from being a mere ‘art’; a century after the death of Leonardo, the existence of a Renaissance man whose genius both spanned and integrated the arts and sciences was no longer conceivable. In Leonardo’s studio, his assistants had frequently hung about unemployed, whilst the master ground his own newly discovered combinations of pigments, or secretively filled his coded notebooks with art-science. By contrast, Rubens’s studio was a hive of collective activity, with industrious assistants, ‘collaborators’ and apprentices all working away under the master’s direction; here was the division of labour and co-operative effort required to produce the vast canvases that made Rubens’s studio a thriving industry and its master a millionaire. Rubens too was multi-talented, and was in many ways the Baroque evolution of the Renaissance man; but his talents spilled out into diplomacy and scholarship, rather than the discoveries of science, and it was his extravagance of character rather than his intellect that informed his work. The baroque Renaissance man blossomed as an impresario expressing the fullness of his nature, rather than as an explorer of the secrets of nature. As we shall soon see, this investigative strain of Renaissance endeavour would require its own distinct quality of genius for it to be fully developed.
Rubens was set to work by Marie de Médicis to decorate two large galleries of the almost complete Luxembourg Palace, and for this he produced more than twenty vast canvases depicting the main events of her long career, all suitably glorified into mythological or legendary context. Rubens’s ability to depict large fleshy women as objects of ethereal beauty was ideally suited to the requirements of Marie de Médicis, and the artist flatteringly fulfilled his duty to his royal patron (see colour plates); despite such weighty requirements, these paintings would be amongst Rubens’s finest works.
In 1629 Richelieu persuaded Louis XIII to invade Italy, a move that antagonised the Catholic Habsburg powers (Austria and Spain); as a result, Marie demanded that Louis XIII dismiss Richelieu, at the same time urging her second son Gaston, Duke of Orléans, to rebel against the king. Faced with such opposition from within his family, Louis XIII at first dithered, and then plumped for Richelieu. In 1631 Marie de Médicis was banished, and fled to the Spanish Netherlands, where she lived in increasingly lonely exile. Rubens, who was probably her only real friend, died in 1640. After this she travelled to England, where one of her daughters had married Charles I, but quickly discovered that no one wanted her here, and was forced to return to the Netherlands. Wherever she went she was an embarassment; even her presence in the Spanish Netherlands became ill regarded in Spain, as its king sought to amend matters with the French king. In 1642 Marie finally died at Cologne in Germany, alone and unloved, at the age of sixty-nine. Her extravagances of personality had left her bankrupt, both financially and spiritually, and Medici power outside Italy was dissipated, though her children would ensure that Medici blood now passed into all the major royal houses of Europe.