Das Rad der Fortuna

Burne-Jones worked on this tall canvas on and off for about eight years, finishing it in 1883 and showing it at the Grosvenor Gallery in London, the fashionable home of the Aesthetic movement where his dreamlike pictures drew crowds. A giant, impassive goddess of Fortune turns her wheel, and bound to it are three naked men who rise and fall as it moves: a slave, a crowned king, and a poet. The idea is medieval, but the muscular bodies come straight from his study of Michelangelo in Italy. The painting was bought that same year by Arthur Balfour, a young politician who would later become British prime minister, and it hung in his house before eventually reaching the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.