Music and love in Sigismondo Fanti’s Triompho di Fortuna (1527)

Abstract

Abstract As he explains at great length in his introduction, Sigismondo Fanti painstakingly calculated and constructed his Triompho di Fortuna with the purpose of enlightening its reader as to their fortunes following on from a given situation in their life. Every step along the somewhat convoluted journey towards discovering one’s fortune is accompanied by richly meaningful imagery. The illustrations not only, in some cases, summarize the text, but also make persistent connections between the playing of the game and broader intellectual, military and artistic culture. Music appears in multiple visual forms throughout the book. Some of the ‘Wheels’ forming part of the journey through the game are given musical characters (‘Wheel of Music’, ‘Wheel of the Lyre’). A very large cycle of portraits appearing alongside some segments of the game includes musicians ranging from mythological figures to Fanti’s contemporaries. And among the tiny woodcut scenes that accompany and characterize the various fortunes at the end of the book are several musical scenes. A substantial proportion of the questions and answers provided by the book concern love, and it is with fortunes concerned with love that musical scenes are most often associated, shading across the topics of sex, romance, decorum and faithfulness. In this article—the first to expose Fanti’s the Triompho di Fortuna as a rich, multidisciplinary source—the connections proposed in the book between different aspects of love and their musical characterization will be discussed and contextualized.