Guided Pathway

Symbolizing the Struggle of the Person

After introducing occasions whereby Fortuna obtained a constant presence in Renaissance reality, the panel returns to focus on individual cases in which artworks invoked Fortuna so that she may use her power upon a particular person’s fate. The Palazzo Rucellai (#9) appears again on a photograph (#18), this time, however, from another perspective, which depicts the so-called ‘imprese’ or ‘device’ of the Rucellai family above a gate. Much of Warburg’s 1907 essay about the Florentine citizen Francesco Sassetti hinges on this very emblem, which displays Fortuna standing upright on a ship, holding a sail, next to a helmet decorated by long, hair-like flowing leaves and the heraldic shield of the Rucellai. The design came from Giovanni Rucellai’s own “Zibaldone,” or commonplace book, as well as from a letter by the great humanist Marsilio Ficino to Rucellai, explaining how to deal with Fortuna in the most beneficial way. Neither fighting, nor avoiding Fortuna is what Ficino recommends; instead, as Warburg, translates, “by adapting to her will” (“unsern Willen dem ihrigen anpassend”, I.1 148) the individual achieves the most fortunate outcome of his affairs. A few years later an engraving (#12) also follows Ficino’s advice, as it calls upon Fortuna on the occasion of the marriage between Rucellai’s son Bernardo and Piero de’ Medici’s daughter Nannina. Besides Rucellai and the aforementioned Caimo (#11), the panel provides three other examples where Renaissance individuals summoned fate through artworks. Instead of Fortuna, another medal (#23) honoring Pier Maria de’ Rossi, shows Kairos/Occasio with her strikingly shaved head and the long forelock, running past someone who has just missed capturing the right moment, all of which is complemented by the epigram “Either [I will] catch you or die” (“Aut te capia aut moriar”). Compared to Fortuna, Kairos here represents a more unpredictable appearance of fate, one that had to be seized at all costs and at the risks dismissed by Ficino. A second medal (#24A, 24B), representing the Kairos scene and the maxim “Whether you want to or not” (“Velis nolisve”), offers a still more radical version of this attack on fate. Finally, in Strigel’s 1515 portrait of the Austrian emperor Maximilian I and his family (#25), Fortuna with sail, rudder, and globe is located in the center of the image, stuck to the cap of Maximilian’s grandson Charles V. Since he was only predestined to be Maximilian’s successor at the time of the painting and his later achievements as emperor were still to come, the panting’s appearance on the panel prove in retrospect that the painting must have indeed affected Fortuna.

This sequence is paradigmatic for a specific, quasi-magical, image-observer relation that Warburg called “applied emblematics” (“angewandte Sinnbildnerei”, I.1 145-46). Such emblems, imprese, or devices are nodes between the particular and the universal; encountering them connects the singular person in the moment of observation with the general course of the world. That is, every time somebody walks through the gate of the Palazzo Rucellai decorated with the Fortuna-imprese, the family’s fortune was believed to be affected and influenced. Images like these thus far exceed the realm of the merely ornamental; instead they combine the mythical with the historical, the Christian with the Pagan, and the personal with the collective, thus manifesting the “struggle of the self-liberating man.”