Guided Pathway

The Range of Passions

The previous sequences of ‘applied emblematics’ and ‘applied fortune-telling’ foreshadow that Fortuna will subsequently extend her reach to affect all aspects of the human condition, but in particular to gain influence on affects and emotions. Already the drowning man in awe of Fortuna in the aforementioned emblem hints at this, but especially in the last four images on the plate we see the transformation of the goddess into the range of emotions we still experience today when we feel ‘lucky’ or ‘unlucky’. The first of these is a ca. 1500 fresco from the workshop of Andrea Mantegna (#28), which personifies the tension that Fortuna and Kairos can cause within the individual. It depicts a young man spending his last energy to grasp Kairos by the hair, while he is held back by Poenitentia (“Penitence”). The hidden face of Kairos signifies fate’s unreadability, but unlike earlier, solely schematic allegories, the desperate face of the young man (associated with Virtus), as well as that of Poenitentia show that the Fortuna has stirred them into individual affective moods. The opposite sentiments emanate from Guido Reni’s 1623 “Fortuna” (#29), which is more specifically identified as an allegory about the luck of finding love. Flying in a summer sky above the globe, Eros is full of joy about having caught Fortuna by her flowing curls. In this she has not given up her reign, but seems to have willingly granted an exceptional chance to Eros so that he can fulfill his amorous duties. Such affective states are necessarily coupled with a stable state of society, a condition stressed by Angelo Bronzini’s “Allegory of Fortune” (#30). Again Fortuna takes a sovereign position, located in the center of the painting, about to be crowned by angels, the two-faced Prudence to her right with her globe, Justitia to her left, Kairos and Time at her feet holding her wheel and the celestial spheres. She has not only distributed her insignias, but in exchange has acquired Mercury’s Caduceus wand, signifying that no longer his potential trickery, but her chance, luck and probability will be the governing principles of the modern community and its gods. If Bronzini’s image can be summarized as representing public felicity or public happiness, then the last image of the panel is its complete inversion. Not only because it omits any sight of gods and replaces their company with a single individual in a disordered scene littered with profane items. Cornelis Anthonisz’s “Allegory of Misfortune” or “Allegory of Idleness” (#31) goes even further and suggests that the everyday consequences of bad luck go beyond the broken jugs, wheels, and inkpot surrounding the woman. The woman’s clueless, absent-minded expression conveys the sensation that Fortuna’s governance is even present in the things themselves and that her effect on nature extends beyond the weather into the slippery windings of the eel just about to free itself from the woman’s grip. This proto-Baroque allegory predicts a world in which the order of things can neither be reliably predicted nor physically be grasped by one’s hand.

In early modernity the emotive states of the human itself, from finding love to the feeling of idleness, become the mediator between the micro- and the macrocosm. Given this, the Fortuna panel clearly circumscribes the emotional economy of the early modern persona, which continues into the 20th century, and provides a compelling field in which Warburg’s pathos formulas assume eccentric extremes.