The Three Fates

The story painted here comes from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, the epic poem whose final version appeared in Ferrara in 1532. Near its end the knight Astolfo travels to the Moon to recover Orlando's lost wits and comes upon the Fates at work. On the right Clotho spins the white thread of life, on the left Lachesis winds it, and in the middle Atropos lunges to cut it. Behind them stand Death with his scythe and Nature, shown as a Black woman with two pairs of breasts. Ariosto adds that every life has a name stamped on a plate of iron, silver or gold. Time throws the plates into Lethe, the river of forgetting, and only a few are saved by two white swans, standing for poets, who bring them to a nymph, the figure at the far right, to fix on a column of the temple of immortality in the background. The two putti in front are playing with those plates, and on the gold ones the names Alfonso and Lucrezia can be read, perhaps Alfonso d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, and his wife Lucrezia Borgia. In 1889 the owners, a Sienese family, offered the canvas to the royal gallery in Turin as a work by Sodoma, but an expert appointed by the government in Rome disputed the name and the sale never went ahead.