Analysis of Dosso Dossi's Allegory of Fortune

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It’s not everyday that “a very important example of Italian High Renaissance painting,” by one of the masters of his day shows up at an auction house in New York City, strapped to the roof of a Jeep, uncovered, with holes in it. However, in January of nineteen eighty-nine at Christie’s auction house on Park Avenue, that’s exactly what happened. The anonymous seller reportedly acquired the painting for one thousand dollars at a warehouse clearance of unclaimed property in upstate New York. Lost for a century, Dosso Dossi’s roughly six by seven foot masterpiece, Allegory of Fortune was last seen in the Litta collection in the nineteenth Century. The piece sold there at auction to London dealer Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox Ltd. for more than four million dollars. (MacMinn) The painting’s theme seems to be that “fortune” or prosperity in one’s life is short lived and conditional only on chance or luck. The naked female on the right is clutching a cornucopia of fruits and decorative foliage representing the prosperous times that we go through in life. Dossi geniusly represents the necessary balance between prosperity and pain, as this girl with a bounty almost as big as her seems to be precariously perched on a large bubble suggesting how quickly and easily our good fortune can be literally taken out from under us. The bubble is clearly warping under her weight and appears to be at it’s limit and close to popping, even further reinforcing Dossi’s message of our quickly fleeting welfare. This could also be a commentary on human nature’s tendency to pursue short-lived, impermanent pleasures instead of endeavors with a more solid foundation. Situated under the woman is a drapery rippling in the wind, yet another symbol of how fast our fortune can change, with the change of the wind. Perhaps the cloth had been covering her naked form, but due to her current posture
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