Fortune: All is But Fortune: Difference between revisions
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==Exhibition Highlights== | ==Exhibition Highlights== | ||
===Classical Origins=== | ===Classical Origins=== | ||
'''"By the grumbling of men Fortune is made a goddess."''' | |||
The word fortuna is from the Latin fors, or luck, derived from the root of the verb ferre (to bring), so that the meaning is that which is brought and Fortuna is the one who brings it. The figure depicted in Roman art is Fortuna Gubernans, the helmsman, or Fortuna Stabilis, with the appropriate attributes of rudder or wheel shown at rest. The Roman goddess brought bona fortuna , external goods such as wealth, health, power, progeny, and physical beauty, all things that are vulnerable to good and bad fortune. | |||
[http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/b2cbf5 Fortune] as the Romans imagined her can be seen here. The medals at the top of the image depict the goddess in various classical manifestations. But of course Fortuna is not easily controlled. Hence the position of the Stoics that the way to endure life's ups and downs is simply to accept them by realizing that although we cannot control our fortune, we can control our response to it. | |||
One response, which fed directly into Christianity, was that of contemptu mundi (contempt of the world), based on the view that life in the world of time is only a temporary condition and that the eternal afterlife is what really matters. The most famous and influential exponent of this idea was Boethius who, in his [http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=153424 ''Consolation of Philosophy''] , summarized the Christian belief that human life is ruled not by Fortune but by Providence. | |||
===Consolations of Christianity=== | ===Consolations of Christianity=== | ||
===Fortune, Occasion, Nemesis=== | ===Fortune, Occasion, Nemesis=== | ||
===Fortune Favors Fools=== | ===Fortune Favors Fools=== | ||
Revision as of 12:29, 6 September 2014
Fortune: All is But Fortune, part of the Exhibitions at the Folger opened January 18, 2000 and closed on June 10 of the same year. A central element of many of the plays, poems, and prose works of the early modern period, Fortune represents the feeling that we have limited power to control both the momentous and the every day happenings of our lives.
Good Fortune, Bad Fortune: which will it be? who will rise? who will fall? These are timeless questions about love, politics, war--about life. But the answers are uncertain, and often the successful fail, the good suffer, the bad win.
That the ways of Fortune are uncertain and unpredictable has not stopped human beings from wanting to know the future. For as long as religions have advocated endurance and the acceptance of what comes, there have been astrology, palmistry, and other forms of fortune-telling. Today predicting the future is big business, as any glance at a newsstand or telephone book will confirm, but we have merely inherited practices with their origins in pagan antiquity. As we look toward a new century and a new millennium our awareness of the revolutions of time, pictured in the turning of Fortune's wheel, is especially acute, and centuries after she was born Fortune is still the goddess of the changing world we experience every day.
The phrase "all is but fortune" (The Tempest 5.1) expresses both the hope and the resignation that characterizes the Renaissance attitude to fortune illustrated and examined in this exhibition.
Exhibition Highlights
Classical Origins
"By the grumbling of men Fortune is made a goddess."
The word fortuna is from the Latin fors, or luck, derived from the root of the verb ferre (to bring), so that the meaning is that which is brought and Fortuna is the one who brings it. The figure depicted in Roman art is Fortuna Gubernans, the helmsman, or Fortuna Stabilis, with the appropriate attributes of rudder or wheel shown at rest. The Roman goddess brought bona fortuna , external goods such as wealth, health, power, progeny, and physical beauty, all things that are vulnerable to good and bad fortune.
Fortune as the Romans imagined her can be seen here. The medals at the top of the image depict the goddess in various classical manifestations. But of course Fortuna is not easily controlled. Hence the position of the Stoics that the way to endure life's ups and downs is simply to accept them by realizing that although we cannot control our fortune, we can control our response to it.
One response, which fed directly into Christianity, was that of contemptu mundi (contempt of the world), based on the view that life in the world of time is only a temporary condition and that the eternal afterlife is what really matters. The most famous and influential exponent of this idea was Boethius who, in his Consolation of Philosophy , summarized the Christian belief that human life is ruled not by Fortune but by Providence.