• The Louvre will restore all 24 paintings in Rubens’s Medici cycle in a major multi-year conservation project.
• The works will be treated on site, with the gallery turned into a workshop for analysis and restoration.
• Backed by a $4.6 million donation, the project aims to reverse damage and reveal new insights into Rubens’s technique.

The Louvre has announced its most ambitious restoration project yet. The Paris museum plans to return all 24 canvases from Peter Paul Rubens‘s Medici cycle back to their original Baroque glory.

The monumental suite was one of the Flemish master’s most prestigious achievements, produced between 1622 and 1625 on commission for the French Crown. Across some 3,150 square feet of painted surface, Rubens dramatized scenes from the life of Marie de Medici, a Tuscan princess who became the Queen of France in 1600. The Medici cycle is considered one of the Louvre’s greatest treasures, being an exemplary piece of court portraiture, full of allegorical detail, that has influenced generations of French painters from Jean-Honoré Fragonard to Eugène Delacroix.

The Medici gallery at the Louvre. Photo: Nicolas Guiraud. © Musée du Louvre.

This October, the cycle’s current home in the Louvre’s Richelieu Wing will be converted into a temporary workshop so that the paintings can be restored on site but behind closed doors. The sheer size of the canvases has necessitated the creation of custom equipment, including vast easels. Conservators will take the opportunity to analyze the paintings’ materials, in the hope of making new discoveries about Rubens’s process.

The landmark restoration project is expected to take at least four years. It has been in the works since 2016, when an initial condition assessment flagged concerns about the state of the paintings. A more in depth analysis in 2020 revealed that their varnish had yellowed from oxidization and that, in places, the paint has even started lifting from the canvas. These issues will be fixed and any damage to the compositions repaired to ensure the long-term preservation and legibility of the works.

Peter Paul Rubens, The Queen’s Disembarkment at Marseille. Photo: Thierry Radelet. © Musée du Louvre.

This mission has been made possible thanks to a donation of €4 million ($4.6 million) from the Friends of the Louvre Society, although the total cost of the project has not been made public. The work will be carried out under the direction of the Louvre’s director of paintings Sébastien Allard.

Rubens was at the height of his international fame when he was chosen to paint the Medici cycle, which he produced in his native Antwerp. The paintings were shipped from Flanders to France to decorate a gallery at the queen’s home, the Luxembourg Palace in Paris.

Three of the paintings are grand portraits of the queen and her parents while 21 more contain scenes that mythologize her life, including her birth, education, marriage, coronation, motherhood, and the period she spent as a regent after her husband died and his successor, their son, remained too young to rule. In 1631, some years after the cycle’s completion, the queen was exiled from Paris by her son. She died in the Spanish Netherlands in 1642.