Fortune and Poverty:
Boccaccio’s Seminal Image

LyR Session Essay Delivered May ‘99
by Historian Patricia Franz

Poverty subdues Fortune, demanding respect and redress...

    My point of departure is a late fifteenth century miniature from a large and lavishly produced French manuscript of Boccaccio’s Les cas des malheureux Nobles Hommes et Femmes. The miniature, one of seventy-six in the manuscript and one of the nine major illuminations which open each of the work’s nine books, is variously described as "The Contest between Fortune and Poverty," and "Poverty Kneeling on Fortune." It illustrates a tale which Boccaccio claimed to have heard in Naples while attending a lecture by the noted astrologer Andalone di Negro. As related by Andalone, Poverty was seated by the road one day when Fortune came by and began to laugh at her, mocking her ragged dress and pitiable state. Angered, Poverty leaped on Fortune and pinned her down. The dispute was settled when Fortune agreed to keep Misfortune in check.
    The miniature depicts both the tale and, parenthetically, its telling. The principal scene is that of the physical struggle between the figures of Fortune and Poverty, with Poverty the clear victor. Andalone’s lecture, meanwhile, is neatly portrayed in an inset, and shown as taking place within the walled city.
    In the emblematic nature of its two figures, Fortune and Poverty, this tale may be seen as having universal appeal and applicability. No one, however wealthy and powerful, is secure from the hand of Fortune. Poverty may be one’s lot tomorrow. In this tale of Boccaccio’s, however, that inherent insecurity is briefly overturned and power inverted. Fortune herself is subdued, as Poverty demands acknowledgment, respect and redress.

A dark reading with resonant polarities . . .

    Taken on its own, it is a pretty tale and perhaps even a humane one. This late fifteenth century miniature, however, fosters a rather darker reading. Poverty, an old woman in tattered clothes, is shown overcoming the elegant young figure of Fortune. The physical struggle of the women is set in a rocky and otherwise uninhabited landscape, and stands in sharp contrast to the ordered propriety of the male conclave of the inset and the calm, magisterial authority of the speaker addressing them. The men are visually associated with the civilized security of the city, just as the women are associated with the wilderness lying beyond its walls. And in the conflict between Fortune and Poverty, it is the struggle, not its amicable, if coerced, resolution, which is emphasized.
    In visual terms, this illustration of Boccaccio’s tale sets up a series of resonant polarities: of man and woman, youth and age, wealth and poverty, city and wilderness, reason and irrationality. Their visual juxtaposition suggests a striking message of threat and exclusion. Both Fortune and Poverty have been banished beyond the city walls. Their struggle is framed by images of authority, from the intellectual authority of the male speaker in the inset to the more naked authority represented by the gibbet silhouetted on the horizon.

    Of necessity, the illumination stands as an artifact and reflection of its historical moment, that of late fifteenth century France. By the time of the Renaissance, however, the emblematic figures of Poverty and Fortune had already enjoyed a long and ambiguous tradition in the Christian West. This was particularly true of Fortune, a pagan goddess of immense and tenacious popularity whom Christianity reluctantly accommodated.
    The goddess Fortuna spoke to the insecurity of human life. She could confer wealth, power, health and happiness, and just as easily strip them away. She was a figure to be courted and placated, but never wholly won. Not surprisingly, she was often depicted as having two faces, and chief among her attributes were capriciousness and unreliability. Always, Fortune was conceived as a woman, and while she might be garbed as a queen and wield the powers of one, she nonetheless bore the enduring characterization of mérétrix, whore.
    As unpalatable as this figure was to Christianity, she was doubly so in her challenge to the Christian concept of an omnipotent deity in whom all things are ordered. In an attempt at domestication, the pagan deity Fortuna was reconfigured as God’s handmaiden, the agent of divine justice. The vagaries of chance merely veiled the workings of God’s will. Though this medieval conceit was vigorously promoted, it never wholly succeeded in uprooting Fortuna from the popular imagination.

    The pagan goddess enjoyed a striking rehabilitation during the Renaissance, part of a pre-Christian classical legacy enthusiastically embraced by scholars and princes alike. The Renaissance Fortuna, however, was Fortune with a difference. She now appeared as a worthy adversary, to be countered and subdued in a display of manly virtu -- the word signifying less virtue in any Christian sense than wit, courage, and strength of body and mind. In short, Fortuna became the testing ground of individual worth in a competitive world. That world, of course, was male and elite -- the world of the courtier, whether noble or baseborn, fighting to advance himself through princely favor. Whatever his immediate obstacles, his larger opponent was the whore Fortuna.
    Fortune’s emblematic counterpart, Poverty, fit far more comfortably within the Christian universe. In fact, she was necessary to it. After all, Christ himself had lived a life of voluntary poverty, and had blessed and celebrated the poor around him. Poverty itself was seen as an organic phenomenon, part of the natural order of things. Its existence made possible the exercise of caritas, Christian charity. And so, while poverty might be ameliorated in specific circumstances, it remained a necessary part of the greater spiritual economy, the means by which those cursed with wealth and power might yet hope to aid their own salvation.

    Thus poverty itself was sanctified in Christian belief, and the poor accorded a spiritual advantage which inverted structures of worldly rank and wealth. In the process, it served to reinforce those structures. Happiness, after all, was something to be sought in the next world, while humility and pious resignation were appropriate to this one. That was a given, hardly worthy of note. Acknowledgment of sanctity fell, not to the long-suffering peasant, but to his more active counterpart, the noble who voluntarily surrendered worldly wealth and power for a life of holiness. Active renunciation, not passive suffering, merited recognition and canonization.
    This spiritual exaltation of poverty, however, rested uncomfortably beside its grinding and often hideous reality. Hunger and want were enduring and very visible features of pre-industrial Europe. The structural existence of poverty was compounded by circumstantial misfortunes of war, crop failure, injury and disease. The church traditionally maintained institutional refuge in the form of almshouses and hospitals. Even these, however, were insufficient to counter the hardships produced by overpopulation, or the more episodic consequences of famine or warfare.

rampant indigent feared, suspected as thieves and deceivers...

    As care for the indigent fell to the limited resources of local parishes and municipalities, assistance to the poor soon became a matter of identification and exclusion. Distinctions were made, for example, between the native poor of a town or locality, deserving of organized alms, and outsiders who were readily seen as a burden without legimitate claim. Further distinctions were made between the deserving poor such as the widow, the orphan, or the permanently disabled, and the undeserving, those who enjoyed health and vigor and who could be expected to find work, even if none existed in reality.
    Beyond these pragmatic categories, however, another darker identity attached itself to the poor, that of thief and deceiver. The beggar who feigned his blindness or his twisted limb was one with the cutpurse whose outstretched hand was nothing more than a cunning diversion. Beggars real and bogus, the hungry, the vagrant and the criminal, the prostitute and the thief -- these were a real and visible presence in the walled medieval town. The predator lived by deceit and concealment, and actual discernment of the officially deserving poor often proved difficult. In consequence, that other distinction between poverty and criminality tended to blur.
    Tenuous as urban life might be, the walled town offered a measure of order and security largely surrendered in the countryside. Here theft and murder on the road were a constant danger. And here the poor could be found wandering from one parish to the next in search of food -- not journeymen set on their appointed travels, not clerics or students, not pilgrims. Uprooted and without affiliation, the itinerant poor might be objects of pity, but they would also be objects of fear and suspicion.

    It is here that the figure of Poverty in the miniature becomes particularly eloquent. She is not Poverty as dreamed by St. Francis, a fair maiden of crystal and precious metals, clothed in rags. She is Poverty in the guise of a toothless old woman. She is neither fair nor dignified, violating the Renaissance equation of beauty and virtue. And, perhaps even worse, she is an active figure. This is not Christian Poverty, humble and resigned. This is Poverty rising up to seek recognition and redress.
    She seeks redress from Fortune, the queenly mérétrix who has mocked her. And, in Boccaccio’s tale, this appears as a happy ending, a proper blow struck for justice. The miniature, however, suggests another disposition. The struggle of the women takes place in the desolate countryside, beyond the city walls. The ordered substantiality of the city, with its spires and towers and prominently placed cathedral, suggests the union of human reason, government and faith, all combining to assure ordered society. And in the heart of that setting, we have the gathered assembly of men respectfully attending yet another authority, one whose learning has given him mastery of the workings of the heavens.

as Gutenberg breaks the Church’s hold on words . . .

    This urban preserve, clearly demarcated by it wall from the surrounding countryside, suggests a confidence in the calm strength of reason, learning, and authority, all visually gendered as male. This confidence would soon be belied. At the time our illumination was painted, the first printed Bible had already issued from the Gutenberg press. A tidal wave of printed works was building, more than 30,000 editions of diverse works by the century’s end. Classical writers, popular works, how-to books and books on the occult, and new treatises issuing challenges and arguing new interpretations, all were about to break upon Europe, swiftly outpacing the ability of authorities to check their proliferation or channel their dissemination. Instability was coming with a vengeance. In 1492, Columbus would make landfall in the Caribbean, believing it the East Indies. In 1517, Martin Luther would post his 95 Theses, sparking not just church reform, but Reformation. The great dynastic wars of the sixteenth century would quickly shade into civil and religious wars which would carry into the seventeenth. And the poor would multiply, their numbers swelled by warfare, rampant inflation, enclosure and dispossession.
    It was the state that would respond, leading the distracted church. As the forces of disorder multiplied, those of order responded in kind, sharpening the machinery of law, censorship and inquisition. And while it is historically irresponsible to read the work of that painted gibbet forward into the next two centuries, it is worth remembering that these were the centuries of the great European witch-hunts. Civil authorities led the way, and foremost among those typed for suspicion were solitary, irascible older women of uncertain means.

© 1999 p h i l o p h o n e m a™

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