But artists of other lands continued to regard the _idealistic_ painting of the Italians as a model of what came to be called “the Grand Style.” During the Seventeenth Century Spanish artists imitated it in their religious pictures. But elsewhere it was used chiefly for great works of decoration; as by Rubens in Flanders (Belgium) and Le Brun in France. The former, for example, built up a series of magnificent compositions in honor of Marie de Médicis, the wife of Henry IV of France. They are now in the Louvre in Paris. Le Brun’s vast paintings and tapestries, that decorate the palace of Versailles, were designed to extol the glory in war and peace of Louis XIV, who at the end of his long reign left his country poor and his subjects miserable.