Fortuna
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Fortuna, sometimes anglicized as Fortune, is the goddess of luck or fortune in Roman religion. She came to represent life's capriciousness, and was a goddess of fate. In antiquity she was also known b
Fortuna, inv. 2244 Braccio Nuovo, Museo Chiaramonti Vatican Museums DSC00920
Fortuna governs the circle of the four stages of life, the Wheel of Fortune, in a manuscript of Carmina Burana
The humiliation of Emperor Valerian by king Shapur I of Persia (260) passed into European cultural memory as an instance of the reversals of Fortuna. In Hans Holbein's pen-and-ink drawing (1521), the universal lesson is brought home by its contemporary setting.
Fortuna lightly balances the orb of sovereignty between thumb and finger in a Dutch painting of ca 1530 (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg)
Wheel of Fortune (medieval)
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In medieval and ancient philosophy, the Wheel of Fortune or Rota Fortunae is a symbol of the capricious nature of Fate. The wheel belongs to the goddess Fortuna who spins it at random, changing the po
Fortuna
…Αὐτοματία, "she who does what she will"). Her Greek equivalent is Tyche. Fortuna was often depicted with a gubernaculum (ship's rudder), a ball or wheel of fortune (first mentioned by Cicero) and a horn of plenty. She could be represented as veiled and blind, as in modern depictions of Lady Justice, except that…
From an edition of Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum Illustrium showing Lady Fortune spinning her wheel
Illustration by Jean Miélot to Christine de Pizan's Epitre d'Othéa; Les Sept Sacrements de l'Eglise, c. 1455 at Waddesdon Manor
Mural by Albertus Pictor in Härkeberga Church, Sweden (1480s)
Medieval mural in Kvistofta Church, Sweden