Page:EB1911 - Volume 10.djvu/748

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FORTUNATUS—FORT WAYNE
727

purse and the hat to his sons Ampedo and Andelosia; but they were jealous of each other, and by their recklessness and folly soon fell on evil days. The moral of the story is obvious: men should desire reason and wisdom before all the treasures of the world. In its full form the history of Fortunatus occupies in Karl Simrock’s Die deutschen Volksbücher, vol. iii., upwards of 158 pages. The scene is continually shifted—from Cyprus to Flanders, from Flanders to London, from London to France; and a large number of secondary characters appear. The style and allusions indicate a comparatively modern date for the authorship; but the nucleus of the legend can be traced back to a much earlier period. The stories of Jonathas and the three jewels in the Gesta Romanorum, of the emperor Frederick and the three precious stones in the Cento Novelle antiche, of the Mazin of Khorassan in the Thousand and one Nights, and the flying scaffold in the Bahar Danush, have all a certain similarity. The earliest known edition of the German text of Fortunatus appeared at Augsburg in 1509, and the modern German investigators are disposed to regard this as the original form. Innumerable versions occur in French, Italian, Dutch and English. The story was dramatized by Hans Sachs in 1553, and by Thomas Dekker in 1600; and the latter’s comedy appeared in a German translation in Englische Komödien und Tragödien, 1620. Ludwig Tieck has utilized the legend in his Phantasus, and Adelbert von Chamisso in his Peter Schlemihl; and Ludwig Uhland left an unfinished narrative poem entitled “Fortunatus and his Sons.”

See Dr Fr. W. V. Schmidt’s Fortunatus und seine Söhne, eine Zauber-Tragödie, von Thomas Decker, mit einem Anhang, &c. (Berlin, 1819); Joseph Johann Görres, Die deutschen Volksbücher (1807).

FORTUNATUS, VENANTIUS HONORIUS CLEMENTIANUS (530–609), bishop of Poitiers, and the chief Latin poet of his time, was born near Ceneda in Treviso in 530. He studied at Milan and Ravenna, with the special object of excelling as a rhetorician and poet, and in 565 he journeyed to France, where he was received with much favour at the court of Sigbert, king of Austrasia, whose marriage with Brunhild he celebrated in an epithalamium. After remaining a year or two at the court of Sigbert he travelled in various parts of France, visiting persons of distinction, and composing short pieces of poetry on any subject that occurred to him. At Poitiers he visited Queen Radegunda, who lived there in retirement, and she induced him to prolong his stay in the city indefinitely. Here he also enjoyed the friendship of the famous Gregory of Tours and other eminent ecclesiastics. He was elected bishop of Poitiers in 599, and died about 609. The later poems of Fortunatus were collected in 11 books, and consist of hymns (including the Vexilla regis prodeunt, Englished by J. M. Neale as “The royal banners forward go”), epitaphs, poetical epistles, and verses in honour of his patroness Radegunda and her sister Agnes, the abbess of a nunnery at Poitiers. He also wrote a large poem in 4 books in honour of St Martin, and several lives of the saints in prose. His prose is stiff and mechanical, but most of his poetry has an easy rhythmical flow.

An edition of the works of Fortunatus was published by C. Brower at Fulda in 1603 (2nd ed., Mainz, 1617). The edition of M. A. Luschi (Rome, 1785) was afterwards reprinted in Migne’s Patrologiae cursus completus, vol. lxxxviii. See the edition by Leo and Krusch (Berlin, 1881–1885). There are French lives by Nisard (1880) and Leroux (1885).

FORTUNE, ROBERT (1813–1880), Scottish botanist and traveller, was born at Kelloe in Berwickshire on the 16th of September 1813. He was employed in the botanical garden at Edinburgh, and afterwards in the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden at Chiswick, and upon the termination of the Chinese War in 1842 was sent out by the Society to collect plants in China. His travels resulted in the introduction to Europe of many beautiful flowers; but another journey, undertaken in 1848 on behalf of the East India Company, had much more important consequences, occasioning the successful introduction into India of the tea-plant. In subsequent journeys he visited Formosa and Japan, described the culture of the silkworm and the manufacture of rice paper, and introduced many trees, shrubs and flowers now generally cultivated in Europe. The incidents of his travels were related in a succession of interesting books. He died in London on the 13th of April 1880.

FORTUNY, MARIANO JOSE MARIA BERNARDO (1838–1874), Spanish painter, was born at Reus on the 11th of June 1838. His parents, who were in poor circumstances, sent him for education to the primary school of his native town, where he received some instruction in the rudiments of art. When he was twelve years old his parents died and he came under the care of his grandfather, who, though a joiner by trade, had made a collection of wax figures, with which he was travelling from town to town. In the working of this show the boy took an active part, modelling and painting many of the figures; and two years later, when he reached Barcelona, the cleverness of his handiwork made so much impression on some people in authority there that they induced the municipality to make him an allowance of forty-two francs monthly, so that he might be enabled to go through a systematic course of study. He entered the Academy of Barcelona and worked there for four years under Claudio Lorenzale, and in March 1857 he gained a scholarship that entitled him to complete his studies in Rome. Then followed a period of more than two years, during which he laboured steadily at copies of the old pictures to which he had access at Rome. To this period an end was put by the outbreak of the war between Spain and the emperor of Morocco, as Fortuny was sent by the authorities of Barcelona to paint the most striking incidents of the campaign. The expedition lasted for about six months only, but it made upon him an impression that was powerful enough to affect the whole course of his subsequent development, and to implant permanently in his mind a preference for the glitter and brilliancy of African colour. He returned to Spain in the summer of 1860, and was commissioned by the city of Barcelona to paint a large picture of the capture of the camps of Muley-el-Abbas and Muley-el-Hamed by the Spanish army. After making a large number of studies he went back to Rome, and began the composition on a canvas fifteen metres long; but though it occupied much of his time during the next few years, he never finished it. He busied himself instead with a wonderful series of pictures, mostly of no great size, in which he showed an astonishing command over vivacities of technique and modulations of colour. He visited Paris in 1868 and shortly afterwards married the daughter of Federico Madrazo, the director of the royal museum at Madrid. Another visit to Paris in 1870 was followed by a two years’ stay at Granada, but then he returned to Rome, where he died somewhat suddenly on the 21st of November 1874 from an attack of malarial fever, contracted while painting in the open air at Naples and Portici in the summer of 1874.

The work which Fortuny accomplished during his short life is distinguished by a superlative facility of execution and a marvellous cleverness in the arrangement of brilliant hues, but the qualities of his art are those that are attainable by a master of technical resource rather than by a deep thinker. His insight into subtleties of illumination was extraordinary, his dexterity was remarkable in the extreme, and as a colourist he was vivacious to the point of extravagance. At the same time in such pictures as “La Vicaria” and “Choosing a Model,” and in some of his Moorish subjects, like “The Snake Charmers” and “Moors playing with a Vulture,” he showed himself to be endowed with a sensitive appreciation of shades of character and a thorough understanding of the peculiarities of a national type. His love of detail was instinctive, and he chose motives that gave him the fullest opportunity of displaying his readiness as a craftsman.

See Davillier, Fortuny, sa vie, son œuvre, sa correspondance, &c. (Paris, 1876); C. Yriarte, Fortuny (Artistes célèbres series) (Paris, 1889).  (A. L. B.) 


FORT WAYNE, a city and the county-seat of Allen county, Indiana, U.S.A., 102 m. N.E. of Indianapolis, at the point where the St Joseph and St Mary’s rivers join to form the Maumee river. Pop. (1880) 26,880; (1890) 35,393; (1900) 45,115, of whom 6791 were foreign-born; (1910, census) 63,933. It is served by the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton, the Fort Wayne,