Le Sorti...intitolate giardino di pensieri
Francesco Marcolini da Forli
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
The evocative woodcut that adorns the frontispiece of this fortune-telling book is prominently signed by the artist Giuseppe Porta (ca. 1520–ca. 1575) from the Garfagnana region of northern Tuscany, who later took the name Salviati in honor of his teacher, the well-known Mannerist painter Francesco Salviati. However, the composition is not original to Porta but closely copies an engraving by Marco Dente, a student of Marcantonio Raimondi who died in the Sack of Rome of 1527. By changing the book opening to show two pages from Marcolini's Le Sorti instead of an image of stars and planets, and by adding a pack of playing cards, the image has shifted from a gathering of scientists to a group of fortune-telling enthusiasts. The three women are probably intended as the three Parcae or Fates, who in ancient mythology spun, measured, and cut the thread of human life. Shown carrying out these actions in an allegorical image on page 21 of the book, the Fates are especially appropriate to the cover of a publication entitled Le Sorti, or The Fates. In this frontispiece, where they are engaged in the pleasurable pursuit of fortune-telling, they seem more relaxed than in the engraving by Dente—the one in the foreground even seems to smile as she shows Marcolini's book to the pensive man beside her.
Drawings and Prints
An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.