Fortune’s fool
Apr 16, 2020
4 minutes
On his deathbed at his farm outside of Florence in 1527, the politician, diplomat and writer Niccolò Machiavelli is said to have turned to his grieving friends and told them of a dream he had just had. In it, he had seen two groups of people. The first, dejected and poor, were headed to heaven. The second group, richly dressed and discussing political and philosophical matters, were damned to hell. It was a scene Machiavelli would have seen represented on countless reredoses, paintings and frescos during a life seeped in the magnificence of the Italian Renaissance. It was a spectre meant to inspire fear, humility and the
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