Marine Fortune

Antwerp's merchants lived on cargoes sent by sea, and they knew how fickle luck on the water could be. The Roman poet Horace had addressed Fortune as mistress of the sea, and that is the Fortune Frans Francken painted here, around 1615 to 1620. She balances on a globe set on a stone pedestal and holds up a sail swollen by the wind, because at sea luck shifts as fast as the weather. From her hand fall good things and bad alike onto the crowd below. Some reach up to catch them, others have already sunk to the ground, and behind them fires burn under a stormy sky. By 1709 the panel belonged to Louis XIV and hung at his château of Marly. It later spent 156 years at the palace of Compiègne and came back to the Louvre in 1977.