Time and Fortune dominating the world

Time and Fortune Dominating the World, painted on copper in 1628 and now in the Musée Magnin in Dijon, deploys two of the most potent allegorical figures in European moral philosophy within a single composition. Time — the aged figure with a scythe and hourglass, sometimes winged — and Fortune — typically shown blindfolded, standing on a sphere, holding a wheel or cornucopia — were the twin arbiters of human fate in Renaissance and Baroque moral allegory, representing the forces over which human virtue could triumph or before which it must inevitably submit. Frans Francken the Younger's treatment of 1628 participates in the Stoic revival of the early seventeenth century, when Neostoic philosophy offered a framework for accepting the vanity of worldly success that resonated in a period of religious warfare and social disruption. The Musée Magnin in Dijon, housed in a nineteenth-century mansion, holds an intimate collection of old masters assembled by the siblings Maurice and Jeanne Magnin.

The allegorical subject allowed Francken to design a composition that balanced two dominant figures against a subordinated world below — the globe over which Time and Fortune jointly preside. Copper's smooth surface supported the fine atmospheric painting of sky and clouds necessary for figures shown in elevated, dramatic poses. The metallic ground also allowed the precise rendering of Time's attributes — the hourglass, scythe, and wings — that gave collectors the visual pleasure of recognition.