Fate of the Artist
Art requires patience.
Art requires patience.
Hordes of artists stand in the waiting room for fame.
Everyone believes that Fortuna will open her horn of plenty
and muses will adorn his temple with a laurel wreath.
Volumes with the words plaited in garlands,
pictures full of unexpected colors and composition,
silent notes on the staves
Everyone believes that Fortuna will open her horn of plenty
and muses will adorn his temple with a laurel wreath.
Volumes with the words plaited in garlands,
pictures full of unexpected colors and composition,
silent notes on the staves
are waiting for years.
At times
with much fanfare the name of a lucky
winner is announced.
It happens he does not come for the
trophy won.
Everyone around
whispers –“ It is a pity he is not alive”.
Fortuna -- Tadeusz Kuntze
Fortuna (known to the Greeks as Tyche) was the goddess of fortune and fate and the personification of luck. Like her father Jupiter she could be bountiful (Copia) but, veiled and blind, she represented life's capriciousness, the goddess who (as Ovid wrote from exile) "admits by her unsteady wheel her own fickleness; she always has its apex beneath her swaying foot." Her name seems to derive from Vortumna (she who revolves the year). She was associated with the cornucopia (from whence plenty flows), a ship's rudder (steering fate), the ball (symbolizing chance), and the wheel (illustrating that good luck and bad luck are never permanent).In his play "Agamemnon," Lucius Annaeus Seneca (an early advisor of Nerō Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus who was eventually exile by the emperor and then ordered to commit suicide) proclaimed, "O Fortune, who dost bestow the throne’s high boon with mocking hand, in dangerous and doubtful state thou settest the too exalted. Never have sceptres obtained calm peace or certain tenure; care on care weighs them down, and ever do fresh storms vex their souls .... great kingdoms sink of their own weight, and Fortune gives way ‘neath the burden of herself. Sails swollen with favouring breezes fear blasts too strongly theirs; the tower which rears its head to the very clouds is beaten by rainy Auster.... Whatever Fortune has raised on high, she lifts but to bring low. Modest estate has longer life; then happy he whoe’er, content with the common lot, with safe breeze hugs the shore, and, fearing to trust his skiff to the wider sea, with unambitious oar keeps close to land."[tr. Frank Justus Miller] Anicius Manlius Severinus BoëthiusBoethius wrote "The Consolation of Philosophy" while he faced execution, in which he claimed that apparently random fortune is actually part of God's inevitable plan; events, individual decisions, the astral influence were all merely vehicles of Divine Will. His book led to a new iconographic trait, "two-faced Fortune" as well as her association with the Wheel of Fortune, characteristically depicting four stages of life and four human figures, Regnabo (I shall reign), the crowned Regno (I reign), Regnavi (I have reigned), and Sum sine regno (I have no kingdom). In astrology the "Pars Fortuna" represents a mathematical point in the zodiac derived by the longitudinal positions of the Sun, Moon and Ascendant (Rising sign) on the birth chart of an individual, especially beneficial points; in the 11th century Abū Rayḥān Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad Al-Bīrūnī
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