The Wheel of Fortune (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), was conceived in 1870 as part of the so-called Troy Tripytch, and was finally completed in its definitive form (as so often with Burne-Jones, there are other, secondary, versions) in 1883, when it was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery.
This drawing dates from the period when Burne-Jones' work was at its most Italianate. He was profoundly influenced by his last two visits to Italy, which took place in 1871 and 1873, focused on Florence and Rome, and it was the artists who flourished in these centres, particularly Botticelli and Michelangelo, who shaped his stylistic development. The Troy Triptych was an ambitious expression of his current love-affair with Italian art, so ambitious in fact that it was never completed in its original form. Conceived as a sort of secular polyptych, it was to tell the story of Troy in a series of paintings set into an elaborate Renaissance-style frame.
Here, the use of hard pencil betrays the influence of Florentine quattrocento drawings, so often executed in silverpoint on a prepared ground, while the profile pose and drapery look back to the so-called teste divine of Michelangelo, Leonardo and others.