Guided Pathway

Fortunate Thoughts

The Fortuna on Maximilian’s portrait is not only an emblem for the general fate of Charles V and his descendents, but Fortuna has her part in a few other aspects that Warburg studied, often using Maximilian as an example: political iconology, cultural transferences between northern and southern Europe, and the interpretation of historical events. The last, namely, the belief that historical events, however improbable, are guided by Fortuna, occurs again in Leonardo’s ca. 1515 drawing (#21) of a wolf sailing toward an eagle that stands on a globe and wears a crown with the royal French fleur-de-lis. Many possible interpretations exist, but the panel is interested in the fact that all of them are based on Leonardo dismantling the iconology of Fortuna into an allegorical tableau, thereby reassigning her attributes to the wolf and the eagle. Effectively, both become agents of Fortuna’s prophecy, as Leonardo transforms the image onto a diagrammatic plane where history can be foreseen, i.e., Fortuna can be worshipped by interpreting the allegory. Explicit fortune-telling practices are evoked with the title page of Lorenzo Spirito’s 1482 “Libro delle Sorti” (“Book of Lots”/”Book of Fortune”) (#19). In such mantic artworks Warburg contemplated another form of representation besides astrology in which images genuinely function as connectors between personal fate and the cosmos. The Atlas’s panel 23a is fully dedicated to this matter and includes the first page of the fortune-telling game of the same book, which has Fortuna on her wheel in the center. The starting point of the game displayed here (#19) explains the use of Spirito’s book, namely “to give pleasure to the strained mind” (“Per dare spasso al fannata mente”) by avoiding wrongdoing and detecting the desires of the soul. Through her image and her activities Fortuna is responsible for all kinds of mantic practice. To the right a printed page from Sigismondo Fanti’s 1526 fortune-telling book “Triompho di Fortuna” shows 4 of 12 different Fortunae that bear the names of mythic winds (#20) and represent the goddesses’ force and diverse effects. The panel then leaves this ludic worshipping behind and moves toward its purely  mental counterpart as it is evoked by Kairos/Occasio in the mark of the Basel printer Andreas Cratander, here in its 1528-32 version (#27). Like Holbein’s sketch of Fortuna pouring coins into the fool’s lap on the margin’s of Erasmus’s “Praise of Folly” (#2), Cratander’s humanist bookmark is not primarily decorative, but recalls that reading and other labors of the mind are ways of revering Fortuna, as they can bring wealth even to the fool. Creating such dialectics of understanding and misreading are the main interest of the emblem form, which originates from the above mentioned imprese, as well as from printer marks like Cratander’s and during this period began to solidify as a genre. This connection between Fortuna and interpretation recurs in the Fortuna emblem from Theodor de Bry’s 1593 emblem-book (#17). The goddess splits the world into two halves, on her left ships filled with mercantile goods and happy seafarers float towards the sun, but on her right catastrophe strikes a city in the background, leaving behind only a sinking ship and a shipwrecked victim who lifts his hands to her in awe. The subscriptio reads “Who has Fortuna as a mother, has injustice as a stepmother” (“His fortuna parens illis iniusta noverca est”).

In all of the above cases, belief in Fortuna leads to fixed practices that either create rules for fortune-telling itself, or create awareness of the presence of Fortune in all areas of life that require comprehension. In contrast to the model of the mind that Descartes will soon offer, one that stresses the self’s power to vanquish all doubt, this panel shows how in the late Renaissance the ability to alter all contingencies in fact remains heavily under Fortuna’s sway.