Early Modern Ms. Fortune

James F. Haley ’50 Memorial Lecture

Kairos, Occasio, and Fortuna are complex facets of the same deity of luck, but at a certain moment in time a troubling, schizophrenic iconography came into being, which cast Lady Luck as a distinctively female force, both a capricious figure controlling the Wheel of Fortune and also as a body that could be either violently seized or wildly adored. This lecture will explore the uneasy sexualization of Fortuna in some early modern images such as an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi in the Metropolitan Museum that bears the descriptive title A Naked Man Holding Fortune by the Hair and Whipping Her. Rather than simply cancelling an image as such, I would like to take the opportunity to reflect upon the ideological work that such images accomplished in their own time and to push us to think about how we can make sense of them as twenty-first-century viewers.