Boccaccio with Fortune and her Wheel, from De Casibus Virorum Illustrium.

The Wheel of Fortune is one of the great themes of Western literature and its tragedies in particular. De Casibus Virorum Illustrium provides moral stories of falls of famous men. This ms. is a 1409 translation into French, by Laurent de Premierfait, secretary to Jean, Duc de Berry. It was also translated into English by Lydgate, and leads to the themes, structures and ideologies of such Elizabethan narratives as The Mirror for Magistrates and Shakespeare's history plays, such as Richard III. This picture shows Boccaccio pointing to the goddess Fortune who stands beside a wheel upon which her victims rise and fall. This image is erratically matched in Henry V by the Welsh captain:

FLUELLEN.
By your patience, Aunchient Pistol. Fortune is painted
blind, with a muffler afore his eyes, to signify to you that
Fortune is blind; and she is painted also with a wheel, to
signify to you, which is the moral of it, that she is turning,
and inconstant, and mutability, and variation; and her foot,
look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone, which rolls, and
rolls, and rolls. In good truth, the poet makes a most excellent
description of it. Fortune is an excellent moral. (III.vi.30-8)

Boccaccio De Casibus Virorum Illustrium Paris: 1467 MSS Hunter 371-372 (V.1.8-9). Courtesy of the University of Glasgow.