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The lost wheel map of Ambrogio Lorenzetti
Art Bulletin, The, June, 1996 by Marcia Kupfer
The motif of Fortune's Wheel did not have to be explicitly represented for Lorenzetti's revolving map to evoke the vanity of earthly achievement. Maria Monica Donato has shown that as a latent concept, the Wheel gave thematic structure to a multifaceted, eclectic allegory painted in the second half of the fourteenth century at Asciano, a dependency of Siena, in what was probably the residence of the podesta.(102) Though not in fact depicted, Fortune's Wheel articulated an apologue from the popular legend Barlaam and Josaphat, the exemplary tale of a young prince (Josaphat) inspired by a hermit (Barlaam) to embrace an ascetic life. While the central medallion epitomized Barlaam's parable of a worldly youth chased by death, an outer ring of eight smaller medallions contained paradigms from biblical and ancient history on the ignoble end of the powerful. Yet the Asciano rota of Barlaam did not retain the hierarchic composition of Fortune's Wheel in which top signifies dominance, albeit transitory. Beginning at the lowest point of the circle (i.e., at "six o'clock"), the medallions follow in clockwise sequence more or less according to the alphabetical order of the protagonists whose fall is illustrated.(103) Top and bottom in the Asciano rota are not equated with superiority or inferiority, but the thematic implications of Fortune's Wheel are nonetheless at stake in the function and meaning of the scheme.
Similarly, in the Lorenzetti, the cartographic image and the internal hierarchy of the Wheel of Fortune did not necessarily coincide. Whereas the latter is predicated on an intrinsically fixed position of honor, a portolan-type map privileges no direction, leaving correct orientation instead up to the eye of beholder. Thus, the Mappamondo may well have inverted the top-dominant equation of Fortune's Wheel, if, as suggested above, whatever rotated into place at eye level closer to the floor were the right way around, while material at the top of the disk were upside down. But compositional inversion would not have negated the temporal allegory produced by the object's representation of the world as an actually rotating wheel.
From the standpoint of ordinary earthly experience, the turning world is synonymous with instability, rise and fall, gain and loss, victory and defeat. The world on Lorenzetti's map is the realm of Fortune's game - with respect to its human spectators. From Wisdom's transcendent perspective, however, earthly cycles are part of a fixed pattern. Turning and returning, the wheel also exemplifies the viewpoint of the Virgin and the infant God who behold the world from across the hall. Qualified by its engagement with the Maesta, Lorenzetti's wheel map represents the world's turning as subject to universal law, hence rational. What we on earth perceive as flux and random accident is, in reality, the divinely ordered design of Creation.
The equestrian figure is drawn into this argument. Granted, the revolving map and the horseman permanently fixed at its summit are two discrete images; they are nonetheless juxtaposed in a configuration that paradoxically suggests motion and stability. The ups and downs of worldly power are subsumed into the repetition of victory, portrayed as inevitable; the battle scenes on the north wall merely extend the demonstration. Lorenzetti's Mappamondo thus becomes a rhetorical vehicle for proclaiming Siena's regional hegemony a perpetual manifestation of God's providential scheme. Within its larger pictorial setting, Lorenzetti's wheel map constructs an allegory not about the vicissitudes of Fortune, which is an earthly illusion, but rather about God's wisdom, according to which all things, including Siena's preeminence, have their place and purpose. Lorenzetti exploited the wheel's double valence(104) - its power simultaneously to signify volubility and sameness - on behalf of the commune. Superseding the fresco of the "New Town," the Mappamondo replaced reference to a specific act of surrender, bound to be (if not already) forgotten, with a declaration that remains eternally valid: Siena's victory achieves cosmic status. The wheel map as allegory articulates a general proposition that historia serves merely to reconfirm. The commission thereby introduced an explanatory framework into which surrounding narrative scenes, regardless of their date, could be integrated.(105)
