Louvre launches major Rubens restoration to revive Medici cycle

The Louvre Museum in Paris has announced its most ambitious restoration project to date: returning all 24 canvases of Peter Paul Rubens’s Medici cycle to their original Baroque splendor.

Painted between 1622 and 1625 for the French Crown, the cycle depicts the life of Marie de Medici, the Tuscan princess who became Queen of France in 1600, Artnet reports. 

Spanning some 3,150 square feet, the works include three grand portraits of the queen and her parents, alongside 21 scenes mythologising her birth, education, marriage, coronation, motherhood, and regency. The cycle has influenced generations of French painters, from Jean-Honoré Fragonard to Eugène Delacroix.

Starting this October, the Richelieu Wing will be transformed into a temporary workshop, allowing conservators to restore the massive canvases on site behind closed doors. Custom equipment, including oversized easels, has been created to handle the works. Conservators will also analyze the paintings’ materials to gain new insights into Rubens’s techniques.

The restoration, expected to take at least four years, follows studies that revealed yellowed varnish and areas where paint was lifting. The project is funded in part by a €4 million ($4.6 million) donation from the Friends of the Louvre Society. Sébastien Allard, the museum’s director of paintings, will oversee the work.

Rubens, at the peak of his international fame, completed the cycle in Antwerp before shipping it to France to decorate Marie de Medici’s Luxembourg Palace gallery. The queen was later exiled from Paris and died in 1642 in the Spanish Netherlands.

By Sabina Mammadli