California Italian Studies

Allegories of Fortune proliferated in 16th century Italy as a means for cultural producers to confront their personal vulnerability in the face of pervasive political change. These works were overwhelmingly literary, but I argue that they have a counterpart in a ca. 1525 painting by the Mantuan court painter Lorenzo Leonbruno. Leonbruno, who was himself a victim of political intrigue at the court of Federico Gonzaga, painted a Calumny of Apelles within an allegory of Fortune that makes use of specifically north Italian literary and visual sources. In this work, Leonbruno claims a spatial and temporal self-mastery that reflects ideas, developed in the works of Boiardo, Machiavelli, and Fregoso, of the necessity of linking time and experience in the struggle with Fortune. Ultimately, he seizes on not only the imagery but the allegorical structure of Antonio Fregoso's 1519 Dialogo di Fortuna to allow himself the one subject position immune to Fortune -- that of the goddess herself.