Fortuna

Antonio Susini (Florence 1558-1624) workshop.
From a model by Jean de Boulogne (Douai 1529-Florence 1608)

Fortuna
Bronze
H 53.6 cm

Condition:
Excellent condition for this type of item, with minor wear and tear due to age and use.

The basic model of Fortuna was initially attributed to Giambologna in 1973 by Katherine Watson and Charles Avery, who unearthed and published corresponding documents in Florence and London regarding a diplomatic gift of ten of his late bronze statuettes: this was offered in 1611-12 by the Grand Duke of Medici to King James I seeking a marriage between his daughter and Henry, Prince of Wales (which, due to the latter's death, never materialized).

Among many other fascinating pieces of information, this confirmed that their court sculptor Giambologna (who had died three or four years earlier) had designed a female figure called, in the Italian term, "Fortuna." It was described in more detail in a later inventory of the possessions of Henry's younger brother and successor, King Charles I, as: "The third item is a woman standing [sic] with her left hand above her head and the other downwards holding a fortune vale [sic, for her veil]..."
In a second inventory, it was even more specifically described as "A woman holding her left hand aloft and her right hand downwards, in them, The Vali of-Fortune rented [i.e., torn]," the last adjective proving that she was holding only the ends of a complete veil.

Documentary evidence (and two posthumous inventories from April 1609) also shows that two of the sculptor's closest and best patrons already owned such examples: Lorenzo Salviati, one of whom made a cast of the statuette to be sent to Prince Henry; and the other in the collection of Benedetto Gondi, another avid collector of Giambologna's personal works: this was paired in his inventory with a cast of the sculptor's Flying Mercury of similar height. This is interesting because Watson and Avery had concluded that Fortune could be intended as a companion piece to the sculptor's better-known Flying Mercury statuette, as the two poses mirror each other and have a conceptual precedent in one of Andrea Alciati's Emblemata, where they symbolize the contrast between industriousness and blind faith.

King Louis XIV later owned two casts from different sources of the same basic model: "A woman lying naked, whose left hand is holding a manner of underwear, which she regards, seven inches high" (no. 68 in the Crown Inventory and now in the Louvre, OA10598); and no. 236, "A woman lying naked and lying, holding in her two hands a manner of underwear, and regarding that of the left hand which is "The figure is raised, with her feet resting on a small oval bronze base."

Most versions of Fortuna hold only the opposite ends of a cloth in the figure's hands, which are usually finished in such a way as to suggest that a full sail has been torn by a gust of wind and carried away. This may have been motivated, in the stage of a preliminary model showing the sail intact, by the difficulty of attaching the separately cast, symbolic rainbow-shaped piece of cloth to the thin hands with sufficient force, which was impractical when it came to mass-producing the popular statuette.

The present bronze is one of the few known variants of Giambologna's "standard model" of Fortuna that includes a complete veil/sail held aloft by the female figure.

The painter Nicolas Poussin in Rome owned "a two-foot-high Fortuna, by Giovanni Bologna, very well preserved, for a collector's cabinet: 15 doubloons" (as described by his brother-in-law and executor). (Jean Dughet, who attempted to sell it in 1678, willed it.) This—if not the sacrosanct two casts of the Sun King—may have provided a channel through which the rare model became known to the expert bronziers [bronzistas] of Paris: perhaps they invented the eye-catching unfurled sail, providing an ambitious and dramatic 'spin' to the Mannerist sculptor's model.

The workmanship of the present bronze, with its distinctively scratched, chased, and opaque punched surface, indeed suggests a 17th-century origin, perhaps from the same workshop as the other versions supporting the entire veil/sail. The technically accomplished casting retains the characteristics and finesse associated with bronzes from the workshops of Giambologna and Susini.