The apartments reserved for queens - reigning queens, queen regents and dowager queens - in royal palaces were considerably enlarged in the late 16th and 17th centuries. And while much of the art that adorned these spaces disappeared, it flourished during the same period. And yet, despite the apparent constraints of the Salic law, the queens of France occupied an important place in the government of the time.
In a gallery at Fontainebleau called the "Galerie de la reine", when it was completed in 1606 (dismantled by Napoleon and now known as the "Galerie de Diane"), the ideals of the new Bourbon dynasty were represented for the first time on a monumental scale. The decoration departed from previous norms in a fundamental way, insofar as in the new gallery Henri IV had personally supported - and even undertaken - the creation of a direct, visible, even political link between himself and his wife Marie de Médicis. The gallery communicates, visually and metaphorically, that queens were essential partners in the monarchy's political program of state-building. The power of the queen, as conceived by Henri IV, is linked to the Christian concept of marriage, indissolubly united by the bonds of love. The image of the royal dyad that Henri authorized to represent the new Bourbon dynasty suggests that the dynasty benefited from a politically important contribution for the time: a definitive return to the bosom of the Catholic Church. The "Galerie de la reine" at Fontainebleau is confirmation that Henri IV had set a precedent for the birth of an ideology of joint complementarity and authority during his reign.
