Allegory of Fortune

These panels were never meant to hang on a wall. Around 1490 they decorated a restello, a piece of Venetian furniture that framed a mirror and held combs, the kind of small painted cabinet a comfortable household kept for dressing. That explains both their size and their private, riddling subjects. This one shows Fortune as a winged woman, blindfolded, balancing on two golden spheres and carrying a pair of vessels, every part of her arranged to suggest she could tip at any moment. Blind, winged and never still, she was the figure Venetians held responsible for a fortune won or lost overnight. Some scholars give this particular panel not to Bellini but to his younger follower Andrea Previtali, and the set has long been read as work shared between the two hands.