18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 35

[cahn]

In the previous post Charles II found AITA:

Look, I, m, believe in live and let live. (And in not going on my travels again. Had enough of that to last a life time.) Why can't everyone else around me be more chill? Instead, my wife refuses to employ my girlfriend, my girlfriend won't budge and accept another office, my brother is set on a course to piss off everyone (he WILL go on his travels again), and my oldest kid shows signs of wanting my job which is just not on, sorry to say. And don't get me started about Mom (thank God she's living abroad). What am I doing wrong? AITA?

Comments

Re: Henri IV and Louis XIII

[mildred_of_midgard]

*headdesk*

Right you are! You'd think I hadn't just read an entire bio of Catherine and how she was always trying to keep Henri at court where she could keep an eye on him/try to convert him to Catholicism/use him as a hostage. That, and her coloring, would have influenced his impression of Medici coloring.

Actually Henri was way nicer about Catherine than about Maria

Indeed, this emerged from my reading as well.

Re: Henri IV and Louis XIII

[selenak]

Maybe it were Sabine Appel's convoluted sentences that put you off the track. :)

Incidentally, speaking of Medici genes coming through, Antonia Fraser always claimed Charles II resembles Lorenzo the Magnificent (despite, may I had, Charles' grandmother Maria de' Medici coming from the younger branch of the Medici, which departed ways from Lorenzo's branch with the brother of Lorenzo's grandfather). Judge for yourself:






She's not entirely wrong.

However, now look at Maria de' Medici, and I don't just mean the Rubens portraits:

Maria as Regent:



And to prove it's not just Rubens, this is Maria as a girl in Florence:



Now, I don't know about you, and maybe everyone who ever painted Maria was explicitly told to use the hair color she wanted rather than the one they saw. But the thing is, her mother was a Habsburg. (Johanna von Österreich.) (Niece of Charles V.) And this is how Johanna looked like:



Conclusion, especially by comparison to Lorenzo and Charles: Maria inherited her looks from the Habsburgs rather than the Medici. Doesn't mean she can't have forwarded the dark Medici looks, she most probably did. And of course Henri was being an asshole with that "black and fat" remark either way, but methinks his idea of Medici looks really must have come from his mother in law rather than his wife. Catherine de' Medici when young Henri knew her:

Re: Henri IV and Louis XIII

[mildred_of_midgard]

Maybe it were Sabine Appel's convoluted sentences that put you off the track. :)

LOL! No, I would like to blame Appel, but I am to blame: I was thinking of Marie's contemporaries, not the previous generation that had died 10 years before. Which is silly, as humans tend to meet people from more than one generation, and Henri IV certainly did.

But! While I have speculated that Marie was one of those people whose hair darkens when they hit puberty and that she missed her blonde days (especially with a husband like that), it occurs to me: Catherine was fat in her later years. With ten pregnancies, what do you expect? And Marie, after a single pregnancy, at the age of 16, was probably not, not yet.

So actually, I reverse my opinion a second time: I now think Henri was thinking of Catherine and that Marie was a blonde after all, as per Rubens. Which is interesting, because you tend to think of dark hair and skin as dominant, but they're both polygenic, non-Mendelian traits, so I suppose a brunette and a blonde could have black-haired, olive-skinned descendants. (Googling suggests it's rare but possible.)

Furthermore, I should report that Schultz strikes a blow on Marie's behalf by saying that Henri IV was unattractive and reeked of garlic, that women found him repulsive, that his mistresses were generally cheating on him with the men they were actually attracted to, and that all the action he got and his reputation as the "vert gallant" were due solely to him being king, the only reason any woman would ever sleep with him.

:D

Re: Henri IV and Louis XIII

[cahn]

...okay, yeah, I see what she means about Lorenzo and Charles :P (Also, wow, Lorenzo does not look very happy in that picture!)

I appreciate all these pictures; aside from Charles, I didn't really have any idea what any of these people looked like :)