Dummett's Game of Tarot, 1980, a few chapters
Posted: 11 Mar 2017, 07:06
It seems to me that Dummett's 1980 book is absolutely basic to all our work, yet not easily obtainable without spending a lot of money, especially for someone new to the field who isn't yet sure if it's their "thing". To remedy that and even the playing field I want to simply post a few chapters. The most urgent are chapter 4, "When and where the tarot pack was invented", and chapter 20, "The order of the tarot trumps" . (To skip chapter 4, use the "find" function on your browser for "chapter 20" and eventually you will get there.) The original is in two columns. I am not going to take the time to change the column width, which also might introduce errors. The chapter starts on p. 65. If any copyright holder of the work protests, I will remove the post.
Addition: As of Nov. 26, 2017, I have added one more chapter, Chapter 21, "The early Italian game".
Addition: As of May 31, 2020. I have added chapter 7, "The Game of Tarot" , and chapter 8, "General features of the game".
CHAPTER 4
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented
It was formerly believed that, in Europe, the
Tarot pack is as old as the regular pack. Indeed,
some have thought that it is older: the assertion is
still to be met with that the regular pack was
originally derived from the Tarot pack by
subtraction. It is clear from our study of the
relations between European and Oriental cards
that this latter belief must be incorrect. The
regular pack came to Europe from the Islamic
world, but the Tarot pack is a European
invention: there is no trace of the existence in
Egypt, Persia, India or China of anything in the
least resembling the Tarot pack.(1) This naturally
leads us to expect the Tarot pack to have
appeared some time later than the introduction
of playing cards into Europe: as a variant on the
ordinary type of playing-card pack, it would
hardly have been devised until the novelty of the
latter had had time to wear off. One ground that
used to be advanced for the contrary hypothesis
was the belief that the word naibi referred to
Tarot cards, while carte, cartule, etc., referred to
cards of the regular pack: but this belief was
conclusively refuted in 1900 by Robert Steele,
who showed that Italian naibi, like Spanish
naipes, was used simply to mean 'playing cards',
Tarot cards being known in fifteenth-century
____________________
1. Once again, an exception should be made for the 'Chad'
cards of Mysore. These were devised by Krishnaraj Odeyar
(1794-1868) after his deposition in 1830 by the British from
the throne of Mysore. Although several of the special forms
of pack he devised are augmented packs, in the sense of
regular packs to which additional cards, not belonging to
any suit, have been added, it is obvious that so late an
addition to the repertoire of Indian playing-card packs has
no historical significance. See Rudolf von Leyden, Chad: the
Playing Cards of My sore (India), privately produced, 1973.
[new column]
Italian as trionfi. (2) More recently, Mr Jan
Bauwens has claimed that a pack of playing
cards recorded in the Register of Duke
Wenceslas of Brabant as having been bought for
the Duke and Duchess was a Tarot pack, on the
ground that it contained 78 cards;(3) but a
reference to the original entry reveals that neither
it nor any of the numerous later similar entries
contains any mention of the number of cards in
the packs bought or played with, nor anything
else to suggest that these were not
straightforward regular packs. (4)
Much more frequently met with as an
argument for an early date for the invention of
the Tarot pack is that relating to a famous
fragment of a fifteenth-century hand-painted
Tarot pack in the Bibliotheque Nationale in
Paris: this comprises seventeen cards, namely the
Jack of Swords, the Fool and all the usual
triumph cards except the Bagatto, the Popess,
the Empress, the Wheel, the Devil and the Star.
The Abbe Menestrier published in 1704 an entry
from the account-book of King Charles VI of
France recording the payment in 1392 of '56 sols
parisis' to the painter Jacquemin Gringonneur
for three packs of playing cards.(5) In 1842, M.C.
_________________
2. Robert Steele, 'A notice of the Ludus Triumphorum and
some early Italian card games', Archaeologia, vol. 57, 1900,
pp. 185-200. J
3. In a booklet accompanying a reproduction of the
Mamluk pack from Istanbul published in 1973 by S.A.R.L.
Aurelia Books, of Louvain and Brussels.
4. The entry is cited in A. Pinchart, Recherches sur les cartes à
jouer et leur fabrication en Belgique, Brussels, 1870.
5. Menestrier, 'Des Principes des sciences et des arts
disposes en forme de jeux', Bibliotheque curieuse et instructive de
divers ouvrages anciens et modernes de litterature et des arts, vol. II,
Trevoux, 1704, p. 174.
66 Part I: History and Mystery
Leber proposed that the cards in the
Bibliotheque Nationale came from one of the
packs painted by Gringonneur; (6) and this opinion
won such wide acceptance that the cards came to
be known as the 'Tarots de Charles VI'. If this
were correct, they would be by far the oldest
surviving Tarot cards; and, not only should we
have to say that the Tarot pack came into
existence within two decades of the arrival of
playing cards in Europe, but France would
appear to have a better claim to have been the
country of their origin than Italy. In fact,
however, there is no shred of evidence to connect
the Bibliotheque Nationale pack with
Gringonneur: Chatto, (7) Merlin (8) and
D'Allemagne (9) all ascribe the cards to Italian
workmanship. W.L. Schreiber is very specific,
assigning them to Ferrara in the third quarter of
the fifteenth century.(10)
Another piece of evidence cited in a great
many books and articles on playing cards was first
presented by Count Leopoldo Cicognara in his
book of 1831:(11) a portrait in Bologna, bearing the
inscription 'Francesco Antelminelli Castracani
Fibbia, Prince of Pisa, Montegiori and Pietra
Santa, and lord of Fusecchio, son of Giovanni, a
native of Castruccio, Duke of Lucca, Pistoia,
Pisa, having fled to Bologna and presented
himself to Bentivogli, was made Generalissimo of
the Bolognese armies, and was the first of this
family, which was called in Bologna "dalle
Fibbie". He married Francesca, daughter of
Giovanni Bentivogli. Inventor of the game of
Tarocchino in Bologna, he had from the XIV
Reformatories the privilege of placing the Fibbia
arms on the Queen of Batons and those of his
wife on the Queen of Coins. Born in the year
1360, he died in the year 1419.' On the strength
of this inscription, Count Cicognara named
Castracani Fibbia as the inventor of the game of
tarocchi. Commenting on this, Carlo Lozzi cited
_____________
6. M.C. Leber, Etudes historiques sur les cartes à jouer',
Memoires de la Societé des Antiquaires de France, new series, vol.
6, 1842, pp. 256-348.
7. William Andrew Chatto, Facts and Speculations on the
Origins and History of Playing Cards, London, 1848.
8. R. Merlin, L'Origine des cartes à jouer: Recherches nouvelles
sur les naibis, les tarots et sur les autres éspèces de cartes, Paris, 1869.
9. Henri-Rene D'Allemagne, Les Cartes à jouer du XIVe au.
XXe siecle, two volumes, Paris, 1906.
10. W.L. Schreiber, Die altesten Spielkarten, Strasbourg 1937,
p. 101.
11. Leopoldo Cicognara, Memorie Spettanti alla Storia della
Calcografia, Prato, 1831.
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with approval an entirely just observation by L.
Zdekauer that the inscription does not attribute__
to Fibbia the invention of the game of tarocchi in
general, but only of that particular variety of it
known as tarocchino and peculiar to Bologna.(12) As
we shall see, the diminutive ending relates to the
use in this variant game of a shortened pack, in
which the 2 to 5 are omitted from every suit. Quite
evidently, such a shortened pack must be derived
from the full 78-card pack, and not the other way
around, so that, if Francescoo Fibbia really had
invented the tarocchino pack some time before his
death in 1419, the ordinary Tarot pack from
which it was derived must have been in existence
for a certain period before that: hence, if the
inscription is to be believed, the Tarot pack must
have been devised by 1400 at the very latest.
Doubt was cast upon the very existence of this
painting by Robert Steele in his article of 1900, (13)
and in this he was followed by Miss Gertrude
Moakley in her book.(14) However, in another
article written in the very next year, Steele
acknowledged its existence, speaking of 'the
famous inscription on the portrait of Castracani
Fibbia (and stating that 'the portrait is now in
the Palazzo Pallavicini in Bologna'.(15) It is not to
Steele's credit that, in this article, he did not
mention and withdraw his accusation against
Count Cicognara. The existence of the portrait
was confirmed by G.B. Cornelli in an article of
1909.(16) It is somewhat surprising that doubt
about a point so relatively easily investigated
should have been allowed to persist for so
long.(17)
In fact, the portrait does exist, and tallies
completely with Count Cicognara's description
of it, including the inscription.. It is, however,
far from being contemporary with its subject;
by its style, it is to be assigned to the seven-
___________________
12. Carlo Lozzi, 'Le Antiche Carte da Giuoco', La
Bibliofilia, vol. 1, 1899-1900, pp. 37-46.
13. R. Steele, op. cit.
14. Gertrude Moakley, The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio
Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza Family, New York, 1966.
15. Robert Steele, 'Early playing cards, their design and
decoration', Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, vol. 49, 1900-
1901, pp. 317-23; see p. 319.
16. G.B. Cornelli, 'II Governo "Misto" in Bologna dal 1507
al 1797 e le Carte da Giaoco del can. Montieri', Atti e
Memorie delta Reale Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Provincie
delta Romagna, series 3, vol. 27, 1909; see p. 3.
17 See M. Dummett, 'A note on Cicognara', Journal of the.
Playing-Card Society, vol. II, no. 1, August 1973, pp. 14-17
(original issue), pp. 23-32 (reissue), and 'More about
Cicognara', ibid,, vol. V, no. 2; November 1976, pp. 26-34.
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 67
teenth century, and probably to the second half
of that century. As recorded by Count Cicognara,
it shows Prince Fibbia holding a pack of tarocco
bolognese cards, some of which are falling to
the floor: among them can be seen the Queen
of Batons, bearing the Fibbia arms, and the
Queen of Coins, bearing the Bentivoglio arms.
The inscription is as quoted by Cicognara;
but it appears that the original inscription was
painted over and a new version painted on top,
the original one having lacked the sentence
ascribing to Prince Fibbia the invention of
tarocchino and recording the privilege granted to
him of placing his arms and those of his wife on
the two Queens. The sentence may have been
added to explain the presence of the playing
cards in the picture.(18)
A tarocco bolognese pack in the British Museum,
_________________
18. The portrait can be seen at the palazzo Fibbia, 14, via
Galliera, Bologna. I am indebted for its location to the kind
help of Signor Giancarlo Roversi, an expert on the history of
the city. The palazzo was formerly known as the palazzo
Felicini-Calzolari; in Sandro Chierichetti, Bologna, Bologna,
n.d., p. I l l , it is stated to have been built in 1497. It was
referred to by Count Cicognara as the 'casa Fibbia', and
was said by Comelli in the article cited above to have passed
from the Fibbia to the Fabbri family, and from them to the
Pallavicini; the casual remark by Steele, cited in the text,
should not mislead anyone into looking for the painting at
the palazzo Pallavicini, 45, via S. Stefano. The owner of the
palazzo Fibbia kindly allowed my friend Signor
Marco Santambrogio, a lecturer in the Philosophy
Department at the University of Bologna, not only to
examine, but also to photograph, the painting; the great
hall in which it hangs is now occupied by the Associazione
Artigiani, who were also most co-operative. I owe- my
information about the painting entirely to the assiduous
work of Signor Santambrogio. In his The Encyclopedia of
Tarot (New York, 1978), p. 33, Stuart R. Kaplan cites my
article 'More about Cicognara', saying that I there describe
the 'rediscovery' of the portrait by Signor Santambrogio.
The quotation marks are Mr Kaplan's, and suggest a direct
quotation from my article, but in fact I did not use the word
'rediscovery', and claimed nothing so portentous on Signor
Santambrogio's behalf. The painting was never lost, but,
ever since Cicognara first described it, has remained
continuously just where he said it was. Robert Steele, in his
article of 1900, and, misled by him, Miss Moakley in 1966
expressed unjust doubts whether it existed; but, since
neither of them, at the time of writing, had actually looked
for it, this hardly counts as the painting's being lost. There
is in the British Museum a complete Tarocco Bolognese
pack by the maker who used the trade-name 'al Mondo'. In
this pack, Moors replace the Papi, so it must be dated after
1725 (see Chapter 16); it exemplifies the standard pattern,
in a single-ended form and without numerals on the trumps,
and is probably to be dated to about 1750. This pack
displays the feature mentioned in the inscription on the
Fibbia portrait: the Queen of Coins holds a shield with the
[new column]
probably dating between 1725 and 1750, bears
out the statement that, in some such packs, the
Queen of Batons bore the Fibbia arms and the
Queen of Coins those of the Bentivoglio family.
The portrait testifies to the existence, in the
seventeenth century, of a local tradition. But,
because of its late date, its evidential value is
slight; in view of the lack of any other evidence
for the existence of the shortened tarocco bolognese
pack before the sixteenth century, the tradition is
unlikely to be sound. As we have seen, it was not
until the sixteenth century that the practice of
playing various card games with shortened packs
came into fashion; it is therefore probable that it
was in that century that the shortened tarocco
pack used in Bologna was first devised. The most
likely explanation is that the reason for putting the
Fibbia arms on one of the cards had been
forgotten, and that the story about Francesco
Fibbia was invented as a hypothesis to account
for it.
We have successively rejected the years 1377
(on the naibi argument), 1379, 1392 and 1419 as
bounds for the date of the invention of the Tarot
pack: one that cannot be shaken is the year 1442.
In that year there is a reference in the Registro del
Mandati for the court of Ferrara to pare uno de carte
da trionfi, and, in the Registro di Guardaroba, one to
the purchase of quattro paia di carticelle da trionfi.^
As was remarked above, the word trionfi, or the
phrase carte da trionfi, is the ordinary fifteenth-
century Italian term for Tarot cards, while, as
in early English sources, the word 'pair' (paro or
paio) was often used to mean 'pack'. Evidently,
then, by 1442, al; least in the d'Este court at
Ferrara, Tarot cards were well known and in
some demand.
That this was also so in Milan may be inferred
from a mural painting known as 'The Tarocchi
Players' in the Casa Borromeo in that city. It
forms one of a set of three, in the International
Gothic style, on the walls of a small ground-floor
room (-now used as an office), showing young
__________________
Bentivoglio arms and the Queen of Batons one with the
Fibbia arms. The pack is 1-37 in F.M. O'Donogiiue,
Catalogue of the Playing Cards bequeathed to the Trustees of the
British Museum by the late Lady Charlotte Schreiber, London,
1901.
19. See G. Bertoni, 'Tarocchi versificati', Poesie leggende
costumanze del medio evo, Modena, 1917, p. 218, fn. 3, and G.
Campori, 'Le carte da gioco dipinte per gli Estensi nel sec.
XV, Atti e Memorie delle Deputazioni di Storia Patria per le
Provincie modenesi eparmensi, vol. 7, 1874, p. 126.
68 Part I: History and Mystery
men and women of the nobility engaged in
various games. There is no agreement over which
artist painted these delightful pictures, but they
are generally dated to the early 1440s. Every
writer on art who mentions these paintings refers
to the one in which we are interested as 'The
Tarocchi Players', so that this identification of its
subject must rest on a very firm tradition. There
is nothing in the paintings as it is now to show
whether the five people depicted are playing a
game with Tarot cards or with a regular pack;
one can see the pattern on the backs of the cards,
but although the faces of two of the cards must
originally have been shown, no details of these
can any longer be seen. It is evident, however,
that the condition of the painting has greatly
deteriorated during the present century. A black-
and-white photograph of it appears in a book of
1926, (20) and shows details that have now
vanished. As far as I can see from this
photograph, the card that has just been played
by the lady in the middle of the group is the 2 of
Coins, while the man on her right is playing the
Ace of Coins; this, of course, does not help us to
decide whether they are playing with Tarot cards
or not. However, it also looks from the
photograph as though the ladies at the two ends
of the group have each put a card face up in front
of them on the table, and that these are picture
cards: if so, all trace of these cards has since
disappeared from the painting. I have not been
able to identify these cards from the photograph;
but it is possible that, when the painting was in a
better state of preservation, one or other of them
could be seen to be a triumph card, the Matto or
a Queen, thus justifying the particularisation of
the game depicted as one played with Tarot
cards; if that were not so, it is difficult to see why
the painting should have acquired its name.
Signor Vito Arienti has informed me that there is
another fifteenth-century painting of players of
tarocchi in a castle in the Val d'Aosta. He may
have been referring to a painting in the castle of
Issogne, showing people playing various games,
including three playing cards, and dating from
1470. From the illustration I have seen, in Giulio
Brochard, Valle d'Aosta, ed. Renato Willien,
Novara, 1968, p. 76 (see also pp. 91-2), it is not
evident that the cards being used are Tarot cards;
in any case, it is too late to have any bearing on the
__________________
20 Raimond van Marie, The Development of the Italian Schools
of Painting, vol. 7, the Hague, 1926, p. 145, fig. 91.
[new column]
date of origin of the game.
A great many playing cards have come down
to us from fifteenth-century Italy. Of these, many
are sumptuous hand-painted cards made for the
nobility. The surviving cards of this kind come
from about twenty different packs: it is difficult
to give a precise figure, since some cards in
different collections may originally have
belonged to the same pack. There are nine such
packs of which more than ten cards survive: the
surviving cards of eight of these nine packs include,
in each case, at least one triumph card and
at least one suit card, so that these eight packs
were certainly Tarot packs. The three most
complete of these packs are attributed, in the
unanimous opinion of present-day art historians,
to the Cremonese painter Bonifacio Bembo,
who was born about 1420 or a little earlier and
died in about 1480. Bembo is known to have
executed several important commissions for
Francesco Sforza, who became Duke of Milan in
1450 and died in 1466, and for his successor
Galeazzo Maria Sforza, who died in 1476. On the
strength of the heraldic emblems and mottoes
appearing on many of the cards of these three
packs, it is evident that they were made for
Francesco Sforza or, in the case of the first two,
for his predecessor Filippo Maria Visconti, who
died in 1447. They are as follows.
(1) The earliest is that usually known as the
Visconti di Modrone pack, from the name of its
former owner; it is now in the Beinecke Library at
Yale University. Sixty-seven cards survive, of which
eleven are triumph cards and fifty-six are suit cards.
In the Batons suit, the numeral cards show arrows
instead of the usual staves, although the court cards
show staves, in the usual form of polished staffs. On
the numeral cards, both the Batons and the Swords
intersect, but the Swords are straight. Because the
composition both of the court cards and of the
triumphs show certain unusual features, they will be
discussed in detail below.
(2) Probably the next in date is that known as the
Brambilla pack, also called after a former owner, now
in the Brera Gallery in Milan. Forty-eight cards
survive, of which only two - the Emperor and the
Wheel of Fortune - are triumphs, the remaining fortysix
being suit cards. Here the numeral cards show
ordinary Batons, while the court cards of that suit
have arrows: Batons and Swords both intersect on the
numeral cards, but the Swords are curved in the usual
Italian manner.
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 69
(3) The most complete of all the early hand-painted
packs is that usually called the Visconti-Sforza pack,
divided between the Pierpont Morgan Library in New
York, the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo and the
private collection of the Colleoni family in the same
city. Of this, as many as seventy-four cards survive
altogether, comprising the Fool, nineteen triumphs
and fifty-four suit cards. All the Batons are of the
usual type, and intersect, as do the Swords, which are,
however, straight, as in the Visconti di Modrone pack.
The subjects on the triumph cards are standard ones,
of which only the Devil and the Tower are missing.
Six of them, however - Temperance, Fortitude, the
Star, the Moon, the Sun and the World - are quite
obviously by a different artist, and are thought to have
been painted some twenty years later, by an unknown
artist of the Ferrarese school.(21) This particular pack,
or individual cards belonging to it, appears to have
served as a model for the painters of more than one
later pack.
The remaining six packs comprising more
than ten surviving cards are as follows.
(4) The most famous early Tarot pack of all is the
so-called Charles VI pack in the Bibliotheque
Nationale in Paris, already mentioned. This
comprises seventeen cards, of which only one, the
Jack of Swords, is a suit card: the rest consist of the
Fool and fifteen triumph cards, making up all the
standard subjects other than the Bagatto, the
Empress, the Popess, the Wheel of Fortune, the Devil
and the Star. The vivid, florid style differs completely
both from that of Bembo and from that' of the
unknown painter of the six later cards in the Visconti-
Sforza set; expert opinion, however, assigns the pack
to the same date and place as the latter, namely to
Ferrara in about 1470.
(5) The most complete set other than the three by
Bembo is one in the Rothschild Collection in the
Louvre, consisting of thirty-one cards. It is generally
accepted that a single card, a Cavalier of Swords, in
the Museo Civico at Bassano also belongs to this
pack, bringing the total to thirty-two. Despite a slight
divergence in the measurements cited for this card
(190 x 90 mm. as against 188 x 90 for the Rothschild
ones), this identification can scarcely be doubted: not
only the general style, but the border design, the
overrunning of the border and the arches in the top
corners all resemble the Rothschild cards, while the
trappings of the horse tally exactly with those of the
Rothschild Cavalier of Batons, and the curious
tortoise-back shield with those on the Rothschild
King and Queen of Batons. In this set, however, only
____________
21 See Ron Decker, 'Two Tarot studies related', part III,
Journal of the Playing-Card Society, vol. IV, no. 1, August 1975,
pp. 46-52.
[Transcriber's note: the measurement of the Bassano card is given as 189x90 in the Nov. 2016 Catalog Giovanni dal Ponte, Galleria Accademia, Florence, where it is part of their exhibition.]
one triumph card survives, the Emperor; the rest are
suit cards. (In his The Encyclopedia of Tarot, New York,
1978, Stuart R. Kaplan suggests that another card,
shown by him at the top right of p. 121, is also a
triumph, the Pope, the Hermit or the World; it is,
however, surely the Jack of Coins, though admittedly
a bearded Jack is a rarity. Some writers have
questioned whether the twenty-three numeral cards,
whose measurements Detlef Hoffmann gives as 186 x
93 mm., belong with the other eight Rothschild cards,
which measure 185 x 90 mm. according to Hoffmann,
and it is true that their borders do not have the wavy
lines found on the court cards and the Emperor. The
measurement criterion would be conclusive, save that
discrepancies between measurements made by
different individuals are exceedingly common.) The
general treatment, though not the individual style, is
highly similar to the Charles VI cards, and the two
packs are probably to be assigned to the same milieu.
The Swords on the numeral cards are curved.
(6) Another pack, considerably smaller in
dimensions than those so far mentioned, appears also
to have originated from Ferrara and to have been
made for the d'Este family who were Dukes of that
city; it is now also in Beinecke Library at Yale. It
consists of sixteen cards, comprising eight court cards,
the Fool and seven triumphs - the Bagatto, the Pope,
Temperance, the Star, the Moon, the Sun and the
World. The d'Este arms appear on the Queens of
Batons and Swords and the Cavalier and Jack of
Batons (the King of that suit has not survived). The
arms of the King of Naples appear on the King and
Cavalier of Swords. The style again differs from any of
the preceding packs, but has more affinity with that of
the Charles VI cards than with those by Bembo.
(7) A pack consisting of fifteen cards is in the
Museo Civico of Catania, housed in the Castello
Ursino. Eleven of them are suit cards, including the 7
and 8 of Swords with curved intersecting Swords: the
remaining four consist of the Hermit, the Chariot, the
World and one whose identity is dubious. This last
shows a naked girl reclining on a stag, wearing a coral
necklace. In her left hand she holds an object which,
since it is painted in gold on a gold background, is
difficult to decipher; in her right hand, which is
suspended above the left one, she holds another
object, also painted gold against the gold background,
which, when I saw the cards, I took to be a fan. Mr
Ronald Decker has, however, suggested to me that
she is pouring from one vase into another, *which
would identify her as Temperance: this is the only
interpretation of this otherwise mysterious figure that
I have come across. The Hermit and World cards
closely resemble those of the Charles VI pack: the
latter shows a female figure standing on a globe
holding an orb in her left hand and swinging a censer
in her right; the corresponding card in the Charles VI
70 Part I: History and Mystery
set differs principally in that the female figure holds a
sceptre in place of a censer. It thus seems reasonable
to assign this pack also to Ferrara.
(8) A set of thirteen cards described and illustrated
in full in an article published in 1954 has since largely
disappeared from public view. They were at one time
all in the possession of Mr Piero Tozzi of New York:
one (Temperance) is now in the Museum of Fine Arts
in Montreal, and another (the Jack of Cups) was in
the F. Cleveland Morgan collection in the same city,
and is stated by Stuart R. Kaplan, op. cit, p. 100, to
have passed into the ownership of Mr Cleveland
Stewart-Patterson, presumably also of Montreal.
According to Kaplan, the remaining eleven were sold
in the early 1960s to a collector in Milan. The cards
were evidently made for some member of the Sforza
family, and all but one are copied, with some
deliberate divergences, from the Visconti-Sforza pack.
Their measurements were given in the article as 170 x
70 mm., but, as pointed out by Mr Ronald Decker,
this can be seen from the full-size reproductions to be
an error: it should be 170 x 87 mm. The set consists of
one card showing only the Visconti/Sforza emblem of
a crowned serpent swallowing a woman, one numeral
card, six court cards and five triumphs - the Pope,
Temperance, the Chariot, the Wheel of Fortune and
the Judgment. The Temperance card has been copied
from the corresponding one in the Visconti-Sforza
pack executed by the later, probably Ferrarese, artist,
so that the cards must date from after the time that
those six cards were painted. On the one numeral
card, the 5 of Swords, the Swords are straight, as in
the Visconti-Sforza pack. On the Wheel card, a point of
divergence from the Visconti-Sforza card is the ladder,
heraldic emblem of the Delia Scala family of Verona,
on the clothing of the topmost figure, who wears ass's
ears, being at the height of his fortunes and about to
experience their collapse.(22)
_____________
22 Miss Moakley, in her book cited in footnote 24, draws
attention to the initials ' A. C.' on the base of the throne of
the King of Swords in the Tozzi set. She thinks that these
initials are intended as those of Antonio Cicognara, a
painter to whom many authorities have credited various
surviving fifteenth-century Italian tarocchi. The attribution is
grounded on a purported quotation from Bordigallo's
Chronicle of Cremona given in Count Leopoldo Cicognara's
book referred to in footnote 11, to the effect that in 1484
Antonio Cicognara painted a Tarot pack for Cardinal
Ascanio Sforza. As observed in more detail in Appendix 2,
the quotation is spurious; Count Cicognara was honest but
gullible. Art historians are afflicted by an avid desire to
attach artists' names to works of art, however flimsy the
evidence for it; and so, until more careful study of styles
yielded the attribution to Bembo, sets (1) to (3), and others
as well, were ascribed to Antonio Cicognara, although no
one appears to have attempted to make the elementary
check of verifying that Bordigallo's Chronicle said what it
was supposed to say; even after the attribution to Bembo
(9) The only one of these nine sets that is, almost
certainly, from a regular pack is one consisting of "
fifteen suit cards, not including any Queen, and all
badly damaged by a fire that occurred in 1904, in the
Biblioteca Nazionak in Turin. On the testimony of
W.L. Schreiber,(23) who does not, however, appear very
well informed about the matter, this set comprised
twenty-four cards before the fire. It is helpfully
reproduced in full in Kaplan's book. Unfortunately,
the composition of the set before the catastrophe does
not seem to have been recorded, save on a list kept at
the library, which Mr Kaplan reproduces and which
has itself been partly consumed by the fire. The list
starts with the Coins suit (Cavallo, Jack, Ace, 3),
followed by the suit of Cups (King, Cavallo, Jack, 3, 4,
9, 10), and then the Batons suit, of which only Ace
and 6 are legible. Of the numerals, only Ace and 3 of
Coins, 4 and 9 of Cups, 6 and 10 of Batons and Ace, 3,
6, 7 and 10 of Swords survive. There is also a Cavallo
of Swords, and three court cards whose suit-sign is
unidentifiable, a Cavallo and two Jacks. From the list,
the Cavallo cannot belong to the Batons suit, but
must be of either Cups or Coins; the Jacks likewise
cannot belong to the Batons suit. Evidently there were
no triumph cards before the fire. The Swords are
curvedl-and intersecting; on the odd-numbered cards,
other than the Ace, there is no straight vertical Sword,
but unequal numbers on the two sides. To judge by
the surviving Cavallo of Swords, the general style of
the courts somewhat resembles that of the Rothschild
cards.(24)
______________
had been generally accepted, the claim was made that
Cicognara had painted the six cards in the Visconti-Sforza
pack that are not by Bembo. Now Miss Moakley was
convinced that the quotation was spurious, and hence that
there was no reason to suppose that Antonio Cicognara ever
painted any Tarot cards at all. Hence she advanced two
alternative hypotheses: that the initials "A. C." had been
added some time after 1831; or that the entire set was a
modern forgery. The second hypothesis is surely unlikely: a
forger would either have made the cards more unlike the
Visconti-Sforza ones, to reduce the suspicion of forgery, or
have made them exact copies, so as to throw doubt on which
was the original, which the copy. Whether Miss Moakley's
first hypothesis is correct, or whether the initials have some
altogether different significance, I cannot say. The
hypothesis that early playing cards might be forged is not,
as such, implausible: for an example of a forged copy of a
card from the Sola-Busca tarocchi, see D. Hoffmann, Die Welt
derSpielkarte, Leipzig, 1972, plate 23(a).
23. Die altesten Spielkarten, Strasbourg, 1937, footnote 10,
p. 102.
24. The Visconti-Sforza pack is the subject of a book by
Miss Gertrude Moakley, The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio
Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza Family, New York, 1966: all the
cards are illustrated and discussed in detail. It is also the
subject of Tarocchi: il mazzo visconteo di Bergamo e New York,
with text ty Italo Calvino and notes by S. Samek Ludovici,
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 71
As already remarked, of these nine packs, eight
contained both triumph cards and suit cards,
though in one case only one triumph card has
survived and in another only one suit card. Of
any fragmentary set not containing any card
distinctive of the Tarot pack, we can never say for
sure that it was not originally part of such a pack;
but, if the pack to which the Turin cards
belonged had been a Tarot pack, the chance that
all of the fourteen surviving cards should have
been among the fifty-two that could equally well
have come from a regular pack is very low
indeed, so that we can reasonably discount this
possibility. Nevertheless, the remaining eight
packs testify to the great popularity of tarocchi
among the fifteenth-century Italian nobility,
though we should bear in mind that the greater
scope given to an artist by the triumph subjects
_____________
Parma, 1969, which also gives illustrations of all the cards.
There is also a reproduction pack issued by the Grafica
Gutenberg, Bergamo; in the United States this is
distributed by U.S. Games Systems, Inc., New York. The
Visconti-Sforza, Visconti di Modrone and Brambilla packs
are illustrated in Emiliano di Parravicino, 'Three packs of
Italian Tarocco cards', Burlington Magazine, vol. Ill, 1903,
pp. 237-52. All three of these packs painted by Bonifacio
Bembo are discussed from an art-historical standpoint in
Pietro Toesca, La pittura e la miniatura nella Lombardia, Milan,
1912 (see pp. 626-7), reprinted Turin, 1966 (see p. 218); in
R. Longhi, 'La restituzione di un trittico d'arte cremonese
circa il 1460', Pinacoteca, vol. I, 1928, pp. 55-87, reprinted in
R. Longhi, Me pinxit, Florence, 1968; Fernanda Wittgens,
'Note ed aggiunte a Bonifacio Bembo', Rivista d'Arte, vol.
XVIII, 1936; and C. Baroni and S. Samek Ludovici, La
pittura lombarda del Quattrocento, Messina and Florence, 1952
(see pp. 91-116). The Visconti di Modrone pack is discussed
by Robert Steele, 'A notice of the Ludus Triumphorum and
some early Italian card games', Archaeologia, vol. 57, 1900,
pp. 185-200, and by Ron and Charlotte Decker, 'The
Visconti-Sforza cards in the Cary Collection', The Journal of
the Playing-Card Society, vol. IV, no. 2, November, 1975, pp.
27-32. Eight cards from it are illustrated in Catherine Perry
Hargrave, A History of Playing Cards, Boston and New York,
1930, reprinted New York, 1966, p. 226. The Brambilla
pack was completely illustrated in a booklet called 48 tarocchi
di Bonifacio Bembo, published by the Istituto Finanziario per
l'Arte, Milan, 1971; some of the captions are incorrect.
These and several other of the hand-painted Tarot packs
discussed in the text are discussed, with several illustrations,
in an excellent article by Robert Klein, 'Les tarots
enlumines du XVe siecle', L'Oeil, no. 145, 1967, pp. 11-17,
51-2. For illustrations of the Rothschild cards, see R. Klein,
op. cit., Detlef Hoffmann, Die Welt der Spielkarte, Leipzig,
1972, plates 17(a) and 20(b), and Leopoldo Cicognara,
Memorie spettanti alia Storia delta Calcografia, Prato, 1831, plate
XI. Many works illustrate and discuss the 'Charles VI'
tarots: see R. Klein, op. cit., an anonymous picture-book,
Antiche carte da tarocchi, Rome, 1961, plates III-V; William
[/size]
[new column]
must have created a strong incentive to a patron,
when ordering an expensive hand-painted set, to
specify a Tarot pack. Equally striking is the
constancy of the subjects used for the triumph
cards; despite the wide variety in their treatment,
we find always the same subjects as those known
from later packs, with the exception of three from
the Visconti di Modrone pack which will be
discussed below, and the possible exception of
the figure on the stag from the Catania pack. Of
the standard twenty-one subjects, the only one
not represented among any of the fifteenthcentury
Italian hand-painted cards surviving to us is the
Devil: but, since this figure appears on the
popular sets of tarocchi, printed by woodblock,
that have come down to us from the end of the
century, this should probably be ascribed to chance.
_____________
Andrew Chatto, Facts and Speculations on the Origin and History
of Playing Cards, London, 1848, p. 187; R. Merlin, L'Origine
des cartes à jouer, Paris, 1869, p. 89; H.-R. D'Allemagne, Les
Cartes à jouer du XIV au XXe siecle, vol. I, Paris, 1906, pp. 11,
13, 15, 181-2 and opposite pp. 12, 172, 414, and vol. II,
opposite pp. 4, 18; W.L. Schreiber, Die altesten Spielkarten,
Strasbourg, 1937, p. 101; and Eberhard Pinder, 'The
history of European playing cards', Graphis, vol. 11, 1955,
pp. 246-7. For the d'Este cards, see H.-R. D'Allemagne, op.
cit., vol. II, opposite pp. 12 and 38. Some cards from the
Catania pack, including the figure on the stag, are
illustrated in D. Hoffmann, op.cit., plate 18(a); see also R.
Klein, op. cit., and Antiche carte da tarocchi, plate I, and Guido
Libertini, II Castello Ursino e le raccolte artistiche e comunali di
Catania, Catania, 1937, pp. 112-13. The catalogue numbers
of the cards are 6425-51. One of the Turin cards is shown in
D. Hoffmann, op. cit., plate 18(b); see also R. Klein, op.
cit., Antiche carte da tarocchi, plate I, and W.LI Schreiber, op.
cit., p. 102. The Tozzi cards are all illustrated and discussed
in M. L. D'Otrange, 'Thirteen Tarot cards from the
Visconti-Sforza set', The Connoisseur, vol. CXXXIII, 1954,
pp. 54-60; see also Gertrude Moakley, op. cit., pp. 33-4, fn.
10, and Ronald Decker, 'Two Tarot studies related', part
III, Journal of the Playing-Card Society, vol. IV, no. 1, August,.
1975, pp. 46-52, particularly p. 50. R. Cavendish, The Tarot,
London, 1975, p. 140, illustrates in colour two Charles
VI cards. Kaplan, op. cit., gives illustrations of all
these set-s, as follows: (1) the Visconti di Modrone
pack, seven triumphs, pp. 88-92, and eleven suit cards,
pp. 92-5, with a colour plate of the Knight of Cups,
plate 9; (2) the Brambilla pack, both triumphs, p. 96,
and ten suit cards, pp. 97-8; (3) the Visconti-Sforza
pack, all the cards, pp. 36, 65-86, 285, with a colour plate of
the Bagatto, plate IV; (4) the Charles VI pack, all the cards,
pp. 112-16, with a colour plate of the Love card,, plate 2; (5)
the Rothschild pack, the one triumph, p. 121, and eight
court cards, including that at Bassano, pp. 120-2; (6) the
d'Este pack, all the cards, pp. 117-18; (7) the Catania pack,
two triumphs, p. 109; (8) the Tozzi pack, all the cards, pp.
100-2; and (9) the Turin pack, all the cards, p. 119.
72 Part I: History and Mystery
Besides these nine packs, there are a number of
others of which fewer cards have survived, as
follows.
(10) A set of five, consisting of four numeral cards
and one triumph, the Emperor, was acquired in 1974
from a Milanese dealer by the Fournier Playing-Card
Museum at Vitoria in Spain. Like the Tozzi cards, the
designs are based very exactly on the corresponding
cards in the Visconti-Sforza pack; the one notable
departure from the Visconti-Sforza designs is the
depiction of a three-tiered tower on the Coin in the
Ace of that suit, a heraldic emblem of the Gonzaga
family, Marquises of Mantua, according to Mr
Decker. The cards have black backs and measure 171 x
87 mm., as close as makes no difference to the
dimensions of the Tozzi cards (a discrepancy of a
millimetre or two in the measurements of different
cards from the same pack, or of the same card
measured by different people, is ndt significant). If the
backs of the Tozzi cards are also black, there is
therefore a possibility that these five cards belong to the
same pack.
(11) There are four numeral cards, one from each
suit, in the Correr Museum in Venice: the sword on
the Ace of Swords is encircled by a crown and has the
unusual feature of piercing a bleeding heart. The
cards are precisely similar in style to the numeral
cards of the Rothschild set, but, although there is no
overlap between them, they cannot actually be from
the same pack, since the dimensions do not tally (180
x 93 mm. for the Correr cards, 188 x 90 mm. - or,
according to Hoffmann, 186 x 93 mm. - for the
Rothschild ones).
(12) Another set of four cards, bought in Milan
before 1915; is in the Victoria and Albert Museum in
London: it includes two triumph cards - Death and
the Star - and two suit cards - the Jack of Coins and
the Ace of Cups. The Jack of Coins corresponds
almost exactly in design with that in the Visconti-
Sforza pack, and is in a better state of preservation: as
far as I am able to see, judging from this card alone, it
could perfectly well be by Bembo. The other cards,
however, do not in any way resemble the Visconti-
Sforza cards (though it will be recalled that the Star in
the Visconti-Sforza pack as we now have it is not by
Bembo, so that it is conceivable that the Victoria and
Albert Star resembles one by Bembo that is now lost).
Death is shown as a skeleton wielding a scythe and
wearing a cardinal's hat and robe, standing on a
black-and-white chequered floor and with a scroll
coming from his mouth saying 'Son fine'. The Ace of
Cups depicts the Cup as a fountain with a vertical
arrow between the two jets which spring from it; the
stem of the Cup bears the inscription 'nec spe nec
metu', which was the heraldic motto of Isabella
d'Este, and the Cup stands on grass; there are two
putti at its foot, one beaming a shield with the Colleoni
[new column]
arms. (25) The cards measure 167 x 85 mm. I know of no
connection between Isabella d'Este and the Colleoni
family; the cards could plausibly have been painted
for the famous condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni (1400-
1476), who was closely associated with Francesco
Sforza at certain stages of his career; but Isabella
d'Este, marchioness of Mantua, seems a more likely
recipient.
(13) Three isolated cards should probably be
grouped together. One is a Popess in the Fournier
Museo de Naipes at Vitoria. This card was bought at
the" Same "time" and from ' t ie "same~ dealer as the five
cards described under (10), but is slightly, though
visibly, smaller, measuring 170 x 85 mm.; it has a red
back, while the other five have black ones. It is a copy
of the Popess in the Visconti-Sforza pack, though not
an exact copy; the Popess's tiara, on this card,
projects further from her head. The second card is a
King of Cups in the collection of Mr N. Biedak of Los
Angeles, very closely resembling the Tozzi King of
Cups, but seen in right profile, like the Visconti-
Sforza one, not in left profile, like that of the Tozzi set;
according to Mrs Wayland, it measures 170 x 86 mm.
The third card is a Jack of Batons in the collection of
Signora C. Marzoli of Milan, measuring 170 x
85 mmj;s;and closely resembling the corresponding'
Visconti-Sforza card. I do not know the colour of the
backs of these last two cards; if it is red, it seems
probable that all three come from the same pack,
possibly one by the artist responsible for the Tozzi set.
Kaplan (op. cit., p. 103) mistakenly groups the Popess
with the other five Fournier cards.
(14) The Guildhall, London, has two pairs of handpainted
fifteenth-century cards, which are of very perceptibly
different widths, and do not come from the same pack.
The wider of these two pairs (138 x 72 mm.) consists of
the Aces of Cups and of Swords.
_____________
25. As often in heraldry, the device on these arms
represents a pun on the name of the bearer, though in this
case, one unlikely in more modern times: it consists of three
pairs of testicles (coglioni) which, by a euphemism, later
came to be called, and shown as, inverted hearts. The shield
on the Ace of Cups is parted per fess, not, as in all other
examples of these arms known to me, per pale. Kaplan, op.
cit., p. 99, remarks on the presence of a precipice at the very
bottom of the card on the Ace of Cups; it is also visible on
the Jack of Coins, though not present on the Visconti-Sforza
one. As Kaplan observes (pp. 70, 72), such a precipice is a
feature of four of the six cards not by Bembo in the Visconti-
Sforza pack, Temperance, the Star, the Moon and the Sun.
It is, moreover, to be found on three of the Tozzi cards,
Temperance, the Wheel of Fortune and the Jack of Cups.
Kaplan remarks (pp. 60, 106) that such a precipice is to be
found in the painting at the Carthusian monastery near
Pavia of Christ on the way to Calvary by Ambrogio
Bergognone (active from 1481, died 1523), but draws no
conclusion from the fact. Kaplan gives the inscription on the
Death card incorrectly as Sanfine (p. 104), which he takes to
mean 'Without end'; the first word is Son, meaning 'I am'.
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 73
The former shows a strong affinity with the Victoria
and Albert card: the cup is again a fountain with
vertical arrow between two cascades of water, but
stands on a chequered floor. There is a blank scroll
behind the cup; an odd detail is a small anchor in the
top left-hand corner of the card and a small straight
sword in its top right-hand corner, looking for all the
world like suit-signs, which they obviously cannot be.
The Ace of Swords shows a short sword encircled by a
crowned serpent biting its tail; behind the sword is a
scroll with the words 'Vim vi', and above it a sun with
rays and a face, with the letters MIA above the sun.
'Vim vi' is a motto borne by various Italian families,
but I have not been able to discover one for whom
playing cards are likely to have been painted; the
motto is oddly misread by Kaplan (op. cit., p. I l l ) as
'Arm(o)ur'.
(15) The narrower Guildhall pair (141 x 66 mm.)
comprises one triumph card, the World, which is a
very close copy, laterally reversed, of that in the
Visconti-Sforza pack, and an elaborate card that may
dubiously be identified as a Jack of Batons. This
second card, which Kaplan (ibid.) mistakenly groups
with the wider pair (14), shows a crossbowman
shooting at a heron over water; the archer wears a flat
cap, there are trees behind him, and the heron is
standing by some rushes. Over the right shoulder of
the archer, not attached to anything, is a vertical
cudgel, resembling a Baton of the so-called Spanish
type. It is true that on some early Italian cards,
including the d'Este tarocchi at Yale (6), the Batons
can be rather knobbly, but, with the exception to be
mentioned below, there is nothing else at all like this;
besides, in almost all other cases, the court figure
holds his suit-sign in his hand. Moreover, the whole
design seems rather German in style than Italian. The
Guildhall catalogue records both pairs as having been
found in an old chest in Seville.
(16) A pair of cards at the Muzeum Narodowego in
Warsaw, bought in 1946 from the Potocki collection,
are both court cards, the Cavalier of Coins and the
Queen of Cups; the presence of the Queen shows that
they must have come from a Tarot pack. They show
no especial stylistic resemblance to any other of the
cards here listed.
(17) A very fine pair of Jacks, of Swords and Coins,
is at Hanover (Niedersachsisches Landesmuseum):
the style is quite unlike Bembo's, but the Coin held by
the Jack of that suit bears the Visconti-Sforza serpent.
(18) An isolated card, the Jack of Coins, is in the
collection of Signor Francesco Andreoletti of Milan,
and is a copy, though laterally reversed, of the
corresponding card in the Visconti-Sforza pack; its
measurements (140 x 66 mm,) tally closely with those
of the narrower Guildhall pair.
(19) By far the most puzzling of all is the set of nine
cards known as the Goldschmidt cards, again from
[new column]
the name of a former owner, at the Spielkarten
Museum in Leinfelden. One is a 5 of Batons; the
Batons appear in exactly the 'Spanish' form and
arrangement. Another is an Ace of Cups: as in the
wider Guildhall pair and the Victoria and Albert set,
the cup is a fountain, with two cascades of water and a
vertical arrow between them; as on the Guildhall
card, it stands on a chequered floor. The stem of the
cup is encircled by a serpent biting its tail, like that on
the Ace of Swords in the Guildhall pair, although
uncrowned and facing in the opposite direction. A
third card is surely to be identified as the Ace of
Swords, although Detlef Hoffmann has suggested that
it be equated with the Death card of the Tarot pack. It
shows a short sword, very similar to that on the
Guildhall Ace of Swords, to the blade of which is
chained a skull and the hilt of which has a pair of
crossbones superimposed. A fourth card shows a
crowned dolphin: probably this is just a heraldic
device, and the card, like the Tozzi card showing the
Visconti-Sforza serpent, was not meant to be Used in
play. The remaining five cards are a complete
mystery, (a) One shows a falconer, standing on a
chequered floor, with a little dog at his feet, a bird on
his hand and a hoop suspended from his shoulders;
floating above his shoulder is a toothed wheel,
(b) Another shows a sun, with rays and a face, very
like that on the Guildhall Ace of Swords, above a
chequered floor on which stand three metallic objects
bearing respectively, the letters a, m, c (perhaps
heraldically conventionalised mountains, or perhaps
something quite different), (c) A third shows a
bishop, again standing on a chequered floor; above
his shoulder is an anchor, exactly like that on the
Guildhall Ace of Cups, (d) A fourth shows a lady
wearing a crown, holding a model of a castle and
standing on the usual chequered floor, her gown held
by a lady in waiting; W.L. Schreiber takes her to be
an Empress, (e) The final card has no chequered
floor, and shows a lady wearing a crown and kneeling
at a prie-dieu, with a maidservant in attendance;
Schreiber identifies her as a Dogaressa, with what
right I do not know.
(20) In view of the falconer on one of the
Goldschmidt cards, it is worth mentioning also a
single, very large, card (177 x 95 mm.) showing a
falconer, also at the Spielkarten Museum at
Leinfelden. In 1955 Eberhard Pinder established that
this card was a forgery, though he did not publish this
finding. However, the card is so unlike any other
known to survive that it is probable that the forger was
imitating some original that has since disappeared; he
would hardly have gone to the trouble of producing a
forgery bearing no resemblance to any authentic
prototype.(26)
_______________
26 For colour illustrations of eight of the nine Goldschmidt
cards, see D. Hoffmann, op. cit., plate 19; for discussion
of them, see pp. 18 and 67 of the same work, the article by E.
74 Part I: History and Mystery
One of the striking facts is how frequently the
Visconti-Sforza cards were copied, sometimes
only for certain cards in a pack. It is not
especially surprising that the cards of a famous
pack should have served as a model for later
artists; but it is rather notable that it seems
always to have been the Visconti-Sforza pack
which played this role, and not, for example, the
Brambilla or the Visconti di Modrone one. There
might be suspicions of the authenticity of some of
these cards; but such suspicions could not be
founded on the mere fact that Visconti-Sforza
cards have been copied, since there is surely no
basis for suspecting the genuineness either of the
Victoria and Albert cards (12) of of the narrower
Guildhall pair (15). On the whole, I am disposed
to believe that nos. (1) to (19) are all genuine.
It is obvious that the Goldschmidt cards pose a
severe problem. It is not apparent, from the cards
____________
Pinder in Graphis, vol. 11, 1955, p. 243, the same author's
Charta Lusoria, Biberach an der Riss, 1961, p. 89, W.L.
Schreiber, op. cit., p. 100, and R. Klein, op. cit. For a colour
illustration of the single 'Falconer' card, see E. Pinder's
Graphis article, p. 243. Pinder's later judgment that this card
was a forgery was based on a chemical analysis of the paint by
the Doerner Institut in Munich, backed by the stylistic
judgment of Dr Degenhard, of Munich, and others; I owe this
information to Frau Margot Dietrich, of the Leinfelden
Museum. For the Correr cards, see R. Merlin, op. cit., p. 66
and plates 8 and 9. For the Warsaw cards, see
Stanislaw Sawicky, 'Dwie wtoskie karty "tarocchi" w
zbiorach Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie', Roczwik
Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie, vol. II, 1957,
pp. 605-24. A colour illustration of one of the wider pair of
Guildhall cards (the Ace of Swords) is in Roger Tilley,
Playing Cards, London, 1967, p. 9. For a colour illustration of
the Hanover cards, see J»A.S. Morrison, 'Gamblers' printed
art', The Penrose Annual, vol. 53, London, 1959, p 54. Three of
the Victoria & Albert cards are illustrated, two in colour, in
R. Cavendish, op. cit., pp. 126 and 140. All the cards in sets
(10) to (19), but not the Falconer card (no. 20), are
illustrated in Kaplan, op. cit., as follows: (10), p. 103; (11), p.
123; (12), p. 104; (13), pp. 103, 105; (14), p. 111; (15), pp.
104, 111; (16), p. 109; (17), p. 108; (18), p. 105; and (19), p.
110. Mr Decker cites, as a reference for the Gonzaga tower,
The Complete Paintings of Mantegna, ed. N. Garavaglia,
New York, 1967, p. 104. Of the cards in sets (l) to (20), those
I have not personally seen are the ones in Paris, namely the
Charles VI and Rothschild sets (nos. 4 and 5), those at Turin,
Warsaw and Hanover (nos 9, 16 and 17) and those in private
collections (thirteen of the Visconti-Sforza set in the Colleoni
collection in Bergamo, the Marzoli and Biedak cards in set
no. 13, the Tozzi cards, no. 8, and the Andreoletti card, no.
18). For these I have relied on photographs and on
information, including measurements, very kindly supplied
by Dr and Mrs Harold Wayland, of Pasadena, California-,
who many years ago undertook a comprehensive study of
fifteenth-century Italian hand-painted cards, but regrettably
never published the results of their findings; their help,
without which I should not have known of some of these sets,
has been invaluable to me.
[new column]
themselves, that they are Tarot cards at all: not
one of them can be identified with any assuranceas
one of the Tarot triumphs. Hoffmann equates
the falconer (a) with the Bagatto; but the single
'Falconer' card (no. 20) resembles any ordinary
Bagatto even less, and so makes this
identification doubtful. Hoffmann also equates
card (b) with the Sun of the Tarot pack; but
since the very similar sun on the Guildhall Ace of
Swords clearly does not determine the identity of
the card, it may be that, on this Goldschmidt
card, the sun is again decorative, and that the
identifying symbol is the three mysterious objects
standing on the floor. The bishop might be a
replacement for the Pope: on a sheet taken from a
woodblock, mentioned below, a female bishop
evidently substitutes for the Popess. Schreiber
might be right in saying that the lady with the
model castle is an Empress; but none of these
identifications is compelling, and the lady at the
prie-dieu remains completely enigmatic.
There is, nevertheless, a reason for regarding
the Goldschmidt cards as part of some very
unusual Tarot pack. Their iconographical links
are with the wider Guildhall pair; but there is
some reason to suppose that the narrower
Guildhall pair comes from the same pack, which
must, if so, have been a Tarot pack, since one
member of that pair is the World. The
dimensions of the narrower Guildhall pair (141 x
66 mm.) coincide as nearly as may be with
those of the Goldschmidt cards (140 x 66 mm.).
Where the wider Guildhall cards have
unpatterned gold backgrounds, the narrower
ones have gold backgrounds with patterns very
similar to those on the Goldschmidt cards. The
pattern does not seem to be exactly the same on
any two of the Goldschmidt cards, nor does the
pattern on any one of them tally precisely with
that on either of the narrower Guildhall cards;
but the pattern on one is very similar to that on
Goldschmidt card (b) (the card with the sun),
and that on the other has a clear resemblance to
those on Goldschmidt cards (a) and (e) (the
falconer and the lady at the prie-dieu). Both the
narrow Guildhall cards have black borders, just
as do the Goldschmidt cards. The only
iconographical resemblances are the Spanishstyle
Batons on the Goldschmidt 5 of that suit and
the exactly similar one on the Guildhall card
presumably to be identified as the Jack of that
suit, and the caps worn by the latter figure and the
Goldschmidt falconer. These points do not
together make the assignment of the two sets to
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 75
the same original pack more than a plausible
conjecture: but since, in several of the
Goldschmidt cards and in the Guildhall Jack of
Batons, if that is what it is, we have the only
examples from these fifteenth-century handpainted
cards that present difficulties of
identification, with the sole exception of the
Catania figure on the stag, it is a tempting one.
If the Goldschmidt cards do come from a Tarot
pack, then they testify to the existence in the
fifteenth century of a type of such pack
employing the 'Spanish' form of the Latin suitsigns
and deviating greatly from the norm in the
representation of the triumph subjects, and
probably also in the selection of those subjects,
but yet having links with tarocchi of a more usual
kind, as exemplified by the Victoria and Albert
cards and by the Visconti-Sforza pack. The
implications of this possibility will be discussed
in more detail below.
The Goldschmidt cards, and their relation to
the two Guildhall pairs and to the Victoria and
Albert cards, do indeed pose a difficult problem
which is far from being solved. But if we set the
Goldschmidt cards on one side, and, with them,
the single Falconer card, almost all is plain
sailing: the smaller sets, (10) to (18), simply
confirm the impression derived from the nine
packs of which thirteen or more cards have
survived. There are a few problems about where
certain of the cards were painted or at whose
order: but their identity and the composition of
the packs from which they came are for the most
part unproblematic. Making the suggested
assumptions that the Marzoli and Biedak cards
belong with the Fournier Popess, and the
Bassano card with the Rothschild ones, we have
nine sets of from one to eight cards, of which five
come from Tarot packs and the other four could
be from regular packs. Of the five from Tarot
packs, all have some suit cards, and four have one
or more triumphs. Moreover, when it consists of
only four or fewer cards, the chance that a set
which could have come from a regular pack
actually came from a Tarot pack is significant. If
we take the denomination of a surviving card to
be random, there is of course a 2:1 chance that a
single card from a Tarot pack will be a suit card
other than a Queen. The chance that both of two
cards will be suit cards other than Queens is over
44 per cent, and, even with four cards, the chance
that none of them will be distinctive of the Tarot
pack is nearly 19 per cent. But even if we suppose
that every one of our sets from (1) to (18) that
[new column]
could have formed part of a regular pick did in
fact do so, there are, if the suggested
identifications are accepted, only five such sets
altogether as against thirteen from Tarot packs.
It is plain that the great majority of the playingcard
packs painted by hand for the Italian
nobility of the fifteenth century were tarocchi.
The Goldschmidt cards aside, the four more
fragmentary sets which include triumph cards -
the five Fournier ones (10), the four Victoria and
Albert ones (12), the Fournier-Biedak-Marzoli
trio (13) and the narrower Guildhall pair (15) -
confirm our previous impression that the
triumph subjects, though not their
representation, were standardised from an early
date. This is reinforced by the earliest detailed
reference to the Tarot pack, a sermon against
gaming from an anonymous manuscript volume
of sermons by a Dominican friar. The volume
was formerly in the possession of Robert Steele,
and is now at the Museum of Art in Cincinnati.
The bulk of the sermon was published by Steele
in his article of 1900, (27) in which he dates the
volume to between 1450 and 1470; in his
subsequent article of 1901,(28) he gives the date,
more cautiously, as between 1450 and 1480. In
this sermon, the preacher lists the twenty-one
triumph cards, together with the Matto, as if
they formed an invariable set: the subjects are
precisely the usual ones, though not in exactly
the. order most familiar to us. The same selection
of triumph subjects is confirmed by many literary
references from the sixteenth century.(29) It is
found, likewise, on certain surviving sheets of
cards, printed from wood blocks and made for
the popular market, dating from the end of the
fifteenth century. For our purpose, the sheets
showing regular packs are not of importance: I
shall list only those four which show tarocchi.
_______________
(21) Three coloured sheets for one such pack are in
the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and show, in
whole or part, twenty of the twenty-one standard
triumph cards.
(22) A sheet for another such pack, showing all
twenty-one triumphs and three Queens, is in the
Rosenwald Collection in the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, and another copy, much less well
preserved, in the Spielkarten Museum in Leinfelden.
The Rosenwald Collection has two other sheets,
probably though not quite certainly from the same
pack, showing suit cards.
__________
27 See footnote 2.
28 See footnote 15.
29 See Chapter 20.
76 Part I: History and Mystery
(23) Yet another sheet, showing six triumph cards,
is in the Rothschild Collection at the Louvre. A
further sheet of six triumph cards, without doubt from
the same pack, is at the Bibliotheque de l'Ecole
Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris.
Together they show the Wheel, the Chariot, the
Hermit, the Hanged Man, Death, the Devil, the
Tower, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, the World and
the Judgment or Angel.
(24) Finally, a sheet showing two numeral cards, a
fragment that is probably the Fool, and, in whole or
part, fifteen triumph cards, is at the Beinecke Library
at Yale, having been part of the Cary Collection.
Among these, there are certainly identifiable the
Bagatto, the Empress, the Emperor, Temperance,
Fortitude, the Wheel, the Chariot, the Devil, the
Tower, the Star, the Moon and the Sun: there are also
fragmentary cards that could be the Pope and Love
cards, and a female Bishop who presumably replaces
the Popess. Several cards resemble the corresponding
ones in the Tarot de Marseille pattern.(30)
A discussion of the probable places of origin of
these various popular Tarot packs will be
postponed until Chapter 20. A detailed analysis
of all the cards in the hand-painted packs (1) to
(19) and on these four sets of sheets will be found
at the end of the present chapter.
There are two late fifteenth-century exceptions
_____________
30. A fragmentary card on one of the Metropolitan
Museum sheets is probably the Moon, but might be the
Star; the other of this pair is missing. Their catalogue
numbers are 26.101.5, 26.101.4 and 31.54.159; a
composite photograph of the last two is reproduced by
Kaplan, op. cit., p. 125. The catalogue number of the
Rosenwald sheet is R 19823; the two other sheets with suit
cards are B 19821-2. See Boris Mandrovsky, 'Early Italian
playing-cards in the Rosenwald Collection, the National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D . C , Journal of the Playing-
Card Society, vol. I, no. 2, November 1972, pp. 1 and 8.
The catalogue number of the Rothschild sheet is 3804.
The cards shown are the Chariot, Death, the Devil, the
Tower, the Star and the Moon. See W.L. Schreiber, op. cit.,
p. 104, where, however, the sheet is. incorrectly stated to
show the Sun instead of the Star. The catalogue number of
the sheet in the Cary Collection is 1-1005. The cards
definitely identifiable are the 7 and 8 of Batons, the Bagatto,
the Emperor, a female bishop presumably representing or
replacing the Popess, Temperance, Fortitude, the Chariot,
the Wheel, the Devil, the Tower, the Star, the Moon and the
Sun. There are also fragments probably to be identified as
the Fool, the Pope and Love. Half of the Rosenwald sheet
with the triumph cards is illustrated in Mandrovsky's article,
and the whole of it by Kaplan, pp. 130-1, in both cases
printed the wrong way round; the Rothschild sheet is
illustrated by Hoffmann, op. cit., plate 14(b), and it and the
Beaux Arts sheet by Kaplan, pp! 128-9. The Cary sheet has
not, so far as I know, previously been reproduced.
[new column]
to the general rule that the triumph subjects are
always the same; these both substitute individual_
classical and Biblical characters for the
generalised figures of the usual Tarot triumphs.
One is the celebrated Sola-Busca tarocchi, a
copper-engraved pack of which several examples
are extant; it was made in Venice by a Ferrarese
artist in 1491, or possibly in 1523.(31) It has the
usual number of cards in each suit, and the suit-
signs are standard; but the numeral cards are
very fancifully executed, the suit-signs not being
displayed in the usual manner, but worked into a
picture containing one or more figures. The court
cards are identified with various historical
characters, whose names are shown on the cards.
There is a Matto, but the twenty-one triumph
cards, which are numbered from I to XXI, again
depict characters of classical and Biblical history,
their names being shown on the cards; there is no
correspondence with the usual subjects.(32) The
other is a pack designed by the poet Matteo
Maria Boiardo (1441-1494). It was to have four
suits, made up of the usual fourteen cards each,
but with the non-standard suit-signs of Whips,
Eyes,""Arrows and Vases; in addition, it was to
have a Fool (Folle) and twenty-one non-standard
triumphs. Again, there was no correspondence
between their subjects, each of which
represented some quality, such as patience,
modesty, etc., and was symbolised by an
appropriate historical character, and the
standard ones.(33) Both these are evidently
_____________
31. One card bears the inscription 'Col permesso del
Senato Veneto nell'anno ab urbe condita MLXX' ('With
the permission of the Senate of Venice in the year 1070 after
the foundation of the city'). A traditional date for the
foundation of the city of Venice is 421, yielding the date
1491 for the cards; but W.L. Schreiber, op. cit., p. 105,
remarks that an alternative date is 453, yielding 1523 for the
cards.
32. D. Hoffmann, op. cit., p. 68, gives Ferrara as the place
of origin of this pack. For discussion and illustrations, see
Arthur Mayger Hind, Early Italian Engraving, London, vol. I,
1938, pp. 241-7, and vol. IV, 1938, plates 370-93. Kaplan,
pp. 126-7, illustrates twenty triumphs and three court cards.
33. Each card was to bear a descriptive tercet composed by
Boiardo; there were also to be two extra cards, bearing
sonnets by him. The resulting poems, consisting of the two
sonnets and the tercets arranged to make five capitoli, one for
each suit and one for the triumphs, were printed separately
in 1523 in a volume published in Venice and containing
poems by various authors. They were reprinted, under the
title 'I Tarocchi', together with a previously unpublished
commentary by Pier Antonio Viti da Urbino (c. 1470-1500),
by Angelo Solerti in Le Poesi Volgari e Latine di M. M. Boiardo,
Bologna 1894, pp. 313-38, with notes on pp. xxxii-xxxv,
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 77
conscious departures from the norm: they in no
way call in question the existence of a norm. The
standard composition of the Tarot pack was
plainly fixed at a very early stage in its history,
despite occasional experiments such as the Sola-
Busca tarocchi and those of Boiardo. Later, as we
shall see, a number of variant forms developed;
but, in fifteenth-century Italy, the number and
identity of the cards of the Tarot pack was
completely determinate.
The important exception to this is the Visconti
di Modrone pack, which we have yet to describe.
It diverges from the norm in two ways, both in
respect of the suit cards and in respect of the
triumphs. Among the sixty-seven surviving cards
are all forty numeral cards save the 3 of Coins.
However, there are six different denominations of
court card, a male and a female one of each rank:
King and Queen, Knight and Dame (or male and
female Cavalier), and Page (or Jack) and Maid.
Although there is no suit in which all six court
cards survive, they are distributed so randomly
______________
and again in A. Zottoli (ed.), Tutte le opere di Matteo Maria
Boiardo, Milan, 1936-7, vol. 2, pp. 702-16, with notes pp. 748-9.
The title 'I Tarocchi' is not Boiardo's; neither he nor Viti uses
the word tarocchi, but, instead, trionfi (sometimes for the
twenty-one triumph cards, sometimes for the pack as a
whole). The suits represent four passions: love (Arrows),
jealousy (Eyes), fear (Whips) and hope (Vases). Each court
card depicts an appropriate Biblical or classical character.
The Fool (called by Viti macto) is called il Mondo (the
World), a reversal of the usual practice by which the World
is the highest triumph card; each of the actual triumph
cards represents some quality, such as patience, modesty,
etc., and is symbolised by an appropriate historical
character; there is no correspondence with the usual
triumph subjects. Viti's commentary is addressed to a lady
of the court of Urbino; he expresses the hope that his
patroness will have a pack made in accordance with the
designs he describes. She must have done so, since Carlo
Lozzi, 'Le Antiche Carte da Giuoco', La Bibliofilia, vol. I,
1900, pp. 37-46 and 181-6, mentions just such a pack,
though missing all the court cards and the Fool, and R.
Merlin, L'Origine des cartesà jouer, Paris, 1869, pp. 94-6 a'nd
plate 28, speaks of another copy, missing five court cards,
seven numeral cards, the Fool and all the triumph cards.
(Merlin naturally does not recognise his pack as a Tarot
pack, and Lozzi fails to connect his with Boiardo's poem.)
The pack illustrated by Merlin was very probably identical
with one sold at Christie's in 1971 to Signor Carlo Alberto
Chiesa of Milan; this was a pack printed from wood blocks,
and also missing the Fool and all the triumph cards, as well as
a few court cards and numeral cards. For more illustrations
and further details, see M. Dummett, 'Notes on a fifteenthcentury
pack of cards from Italy', Journal of the Playing-Card
Society, vol. I, no. 2, February 1973, pp. 1-6. The pack is now
in an anonymous Swiss collection.
[new column]
as to make it impossible to suppose otherwise
than that there were originally all six in each
suit: there survive the King, Queen, Dame arid
Maid of Swords, the Queen, Dame, Page and
Maid of Batons, the King, Knight, Page and
Maid of Cups and the King, Queen, Knight,
Dame and Maid of Coins. Of the eleven surviving
triumph cards, eight represent standard subjects
- the Empress, the Emperor, Love, Fortitude, the
Chariot, Death, Judgment and the World. The
other three cards, however, represent the three
theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity,
subjects which do not, of course, occur in the
ordinary Tarot pack.
The Visconti di Modrone pack is the only
Tarot pack, of any kind, in which the suits include
court cards other than the usual King, Queen,
Cavalier and either Jack or Maid. There must
have been sixty-four suit cards in all: how many
triumphs there were originally, and whether a
Fool was included, it is impossible to say.
Ronald Decker has suggested that there may
originally have been only fourteen triumphs, and
no Fool, so as to make up the usual total of 78
cards;(34) but the total number of cards in the pack
_____________
34. Letter to the Journal of the Playing-Card Society, vol. Ill,
no. 1, August, 1974, pp. 23-4, 48; see also letter by M.
Dummett, ibid., vol. Ill, no. 2, November, 1974, pp. 27-31,
and Ronald Decker, 'Two Tarot studies related', part III,
ibid., vol. IV, no. 1, August, 1975, pp. 46-52 (esp. p. 50). Mr
Decker presumes that the Visconti di Modrone pack had
only 78 cards, like other Tarot packs; since it must have had
64 suit cards, that leaves only 14 triumph cards and no
Fool. There can, on this reasoning, have been no Fool, since
Mr Decker accepts my view that the three, missing Virtues
must originally have been present, and, if we add these to
the eleven surviving triumphs, we already obtain 14, and
there is no roorfl for the Fool. Mr Decker then takes the very
illogical step of arguing that, since there are only 13
(surviving) triumph cards in the Visconti-Sforza pack that
were painted by Bembo, perhaps these, together with the
Fool, were all that the pack originally contained. This is
illogical because in this pack there are only the usual 56 suit
cards, so that he is suggesting an original pack of only 70
cards, whereas the original premiss was that all Tarot packs
had 78 cards. He attempts to rescue his hypothesis by
conjecturing that the Visconti-Sforza pack had originally six
court cards in each suit; but this is obviously very special
pleading. On his hypothesis, there would, besides the suit
cards, have been seven cards in common between the two
packs: the Empress, the Emperor, Love, Justice, the
Chariot, Death and the Judgment. Seven of the triumphs
present in the Visconti di Modrone pack would then have
been removed, namely the World and the six Virtues other
than Justice, when the Visconti-Sforza pack was painted, to
make room for the Fool, the Bagatto, the Popess, the Pope,
the Wheel of Fortune, the Hermit (which originally
78 Part I: History and Mystery
is unlikely to have been seen as a significant
feature. Since four of the stock set of seven
Virtues were included among the triumphs, it
seems probable that the other three were also:
Temperance and Justice, which belong to the
standard list of triumph subjects, and Prudence,
which does not. It is just possible, on the other
hand, that what was held constant was the ratio
between the number of triumphs and the
number of cards in each suit, which, in the 78-
card Tarot pack, is 3:2; if this was also so in the
Visconti di Modrone pack, it would have had
twenty-four triumph cards, in which case it could
have contained all save one of the usual subjects,
making, if the Fool was included, a pack of 89
cards altogether; indeed, if we do not suppose
that it included Prudence, it could have had all of
the usual subjects.
However this may be, the divergence of the
Visconti di Modrone pack from the norm, both
as to the number of suit cards and as to the
subjects, if not the number, of the triumph cards,
strongly suggests that it dates from an early
period when the Tarot pack had not yet assumed
its definitive form. In fact, it is probably the
earliest of all the examples of that pack that have
survived to us. It has usually been thought to
have been made for Filippo Maria Visconti,
which would date it to 1447, the year of his death,
at the latest. All three of the Bembo packs
bear emblems and mottoes of the Visconti family,
but that does not prove that they were made
for Filippo Maria, since Francesco Sforza,
his successor, had in 1441 married his
illegitimate daughter by Agnese del Maino,
Bianca Maria Visconti, and had assumed the
name Visconti-Sforza and, with it, many of the
_______________
represented Time) and the Hanged Man. Later, when the
number of triumphs was increased by eight, this was done
by restoring, from the original set of subjects, the World and
two of the Virtues, Temperance and Fortitude, but not the
other four, and adding the Devil, the Tower, the Star, the
Moon and the Sun. All this makes so little sense, and is so
grossly implausible, that the hypothesis that demands it is
not to be entertained. What is impressive about the
fifteenth-century Tarot packs that have come down to us is
not the variation in subjects, but, on the contrary, their
invariance, given the fact that no pack has survived
complete. Certainly we must allow that, after the Visconti di
Modrone pack was made, four of the seven Virtues were
removed; the advantage of the hypothesis that that pack
contained twenty-four triumph cards (not including the
Fool as a triumph) is that it gives a reason for the removal of
at least three of them when the number was reduced to
twenty-one.
[new column]
Visconti devices. It is indeed, virtually certain
that the Visconti-Sforza pack was made for_
Francesco Sforza. One reason given by Robert
Steele for taking the Visconti di Modrone pack
to have been made for Filippo Maria is
admittedly flimsy. He thought that the Love
card, which shows a man and woman joining
hands before a tent above which flies a winged
and blindfold Cupid, carried a reference to
Filippo Maria's second marriage. Filippo Maria
divorced his iirst wife,_ Beatrice di Tenda, in
Italian style, having her executed for adultery in
1418; in 1428, he married Maria of Savoy,
although the marriage was probably never
consummated. The tent on the Love card is hung
with shields, alternately showing the Visconti
serpent and a white cross on a red ground, which
Steele took to be the arms of Savoy. But, if the
cards were painted by Bembo, an attribution
questioned by no one, they cannot have been
made as early as 1428, and it is unlikely that
there should have been any allusion to this
unfortunate marriage at any later date; Ronald
and Charlotte Decker identify the shield with the
cross" as the arms of the Principality of Pavia, a
title held by all the-Visconti and Sforza dukes.35
The principal reason for thinking that: the cards
were painted for Filippo Maria is, however, that
the numeral cards of the Coins suit, other than
the Ace and 2, show actual coins, the gold florin
of Filippo Maria, bearing the letters 'FI MA' and
made by the imprint of an actual die; the same is
true of all the eleven surviving cards of the Coins
suit in the Brambilla pack, but not of the
Visconti-Sforza pack. The Deckers surmise,
instead, that they were made by means of 'seals
of the sort used to attach wax imprints to official
documents'; (36) this strikes me as rather unlikely,
in view of the fact that both sides of the coin are
shown: it does not seem probable that there were
two distinct seals, corresponding exactly to the
two sides of the coin. The figures on the court
cards of Swords in the Visconti di Modrone pack
bear a gold fruit on their costumes, which the
Deckers identify as a quince, a Sforza emblem;
but this need not imply that the cards were
painted after Filippo Maria's death, since
_________________
35. Ron and Charlotte Decker, 'The Visconti-Sforza cards
in the Cary Collection', Journal of the Playing-Card Society, vol.
IV, no. 2, November 1975, pp. 27-32; see p. 29.
36 Ibid., p. 31. The Deckers wish to prove that the pack
was painted for Francesco Sforza, not for Filippo Maria
Visconti.
[Transcriber's note: In The Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards Dummett says that the coin-imprints on the cards are too large to be from actual coins. Hence they are from dies. On THF Marco shows that the designs on the cards do not in fact correspond to known coins. I wold add that the "rearing-horse" design remained essentially the same since the time of Gian Galeazzo, only the name of the reigning duke being changed.
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 79
Francesco Sforza was in his service, as well as
being married to his daughter. The probability
seems therefore to be that both the Visconti di
Modrone and the Brambilla packs were painted
for Filippo Maria Visconti, the former being the
earlier of the two and dating from the earliest
stage of existence of the Tarot pack.
The Deckers believe that all three Bembo
packs were painted after the death of Filippo
Maria. Stuart Kaplan, on the other hand, takes
the more usual view that the Visconti di
Modrone and Brambilla packs were both
painted for him, but regards the Brambilla pack
as the earlier (op. cit., p. 107). So far as we can
tell, the composition of the suits in the Brambilla
pack was standard (or what came to be
standard); since only two of the triumphs
survive, we cannot be certain about them. If the
composition of the Brambilla pack was in fact
standard, it seems more likely that it is the later
of the two. Hankering still after an identification
of the Visconti di Modrone pack as a wedding
present, which has only tradition, not evidence,
to speak for it (and not, of course, an ancient
tradition), Kaplan makes the novel suggestion
that it was painted for the wedding of Francesco
Sforza with Bianca Maria Visconti in 1441.
Taken together with his view that the Brambilla
pack is earlier still, this yields a date rather too
soon for such a commission to have been given to
Bembo, whose earliest dateable work is from
1442. As Ronald Decker has observed, the style
of the Visconti di Modrone cards resembles
Bembo's illustrations for a History of Lancelot
dated 1446. If we assume that the Brambilla pack
was the later, we must leave time for Bembo's
receiving from Filippo Maria a second
commission to execute a set of Tarot cards; we
shall therefore probably not be far wrong if we
date the Visconti di Modrone pack to about
1445. We know from the Ferrara account-books
that the Tarot pack (carte da trionfi) was already in
existence by 1442, and was sufficiently familiar to
that court to bear a generic name. On the other
hand, I have argued that the Visconti di
Modrone cards are not likely to have been
painted many years after the first invention of the-
Tarot pack. That event may therefore be
reasonably placed at somewhere around 1440 -
the approximate date, incidentally, assigned to
the painting in the Casa Borromeo.
With the possible exception of the
Goldschmidt cards and of one or both of the
[new column]
two Guildhall pairs, all the early Tarot cards we
possess are Italian; and though, as we shall see, it
cannot be ruled out that the pack was known
elsewhere during the fifteenth century, there is
no conclusive evidence that it was. We can
therefore safely say that it was in Italy,
specifically in northern Italy, that the pack was
invented and first became popular. Furthermore,
it appears initially to have originated and have
been in use in aristocratic circles. The type of
pack of which the few sheets, printed from wood
blocks, listed above are the only remaining
representatives was no doubt, in its time, very
common. As already remarked, cheap mass-
produced playing cards are highly ephemeral,
and survive, when they do, only through some
unusual accident, whereas costly objects made
by an acclaimed artist are preserved: there are in
fact not very many more popular cards, printed
from wood blocks, surviving from fifteenth-
century Italian regular packs than there are
Tarot cards of the same type. We may therefore
safely assume that in the last quarter of the
fifteenth century the Tarot pack attained great
popularity among the lower ranks of society; this
is confirmed by the Steele sermon, the author of
which was probably not preaching to a
congregation drawn only from the nobility, and,
perhaps, by the painting at Issogne.
Nevertheless, the connection with the nobility,
and especially with the courts of Ferrara and
Milan, compels attention. We have seen that at
least two out of three, and probably more, of the
cards hand-painted for the nobility were tarocchi,
a proportion there is no reason to suppose so high
for the popular cards printed from wood blocks.
The three packs by Bonifacio Bembo were all
made for the Milanese court, the Visconti di
Modrone and Brambilla packs probably for
Filippo Maria Visconti and the Visconti-Sforza
one for Francesco Sforza. We have noted that the
Tozzi, Fournier, Biedak and Marzoli cards come
fronxat least two distinct packs, though probably
by the same painter. That painter must have had
access to the Visconti-Sforza cards in order to
make such close copies of them. The card in the
Tozzi set bearing only the Visconti-Sforza
serpent implies that that pack was intended for
the Milanese court. If Ronald Decker is right in
identifying the three-tiered tower on the Fournier
Ace of Coins as a Gonzaga emblem, that
suggests that the five cards of the Fournier set (10)
do not after all come from the same pack as the
80 Part I: History and Mystery
Tozzi cards, and that we therefore have to do
with three distinct copies of the Visconti-Sforza
pack. A possible supposition is that all three were
commissioned from the same artist by Beatrice
d'Este, who married Lodovico il Moro, the last
great Sforza duke, in 1491 and died in childbirth
in 1497: one (the Tozzi set) for her own use, one
(the five Fournier cards) as a present to her sister
Isabella, who married Francesco Gonzaga,
Marquis of Mantua, in 1490, and one (the
Fournier-Biedak-Marzoli trio) for an unknown
recipient. (The Delia Scala emblem on the figure
on the Wheel of Fortune card in the Tozzi set
remains a mystery, since that family had been in
eclipse for a century.) The Victoria and Albert
cards may also come from a pack made for
Isabella d'Este, in view of the inscription of her
motto on the Ace of Cups (though the presence
on that card of the Colleoni shield would then be
mysterious); the artist must surely also have had
access to the Visconti-Sforza cards, in view of the
exact correspondence of the two Jacks of Coins.
The painter of the narrower Guildhall pair and of
the Andreoletti Jack of Coins, whether or not
these are from the same pack, must also have
seen the Visconti-Sforza cards. In view of the
presence of the arms of the King of Naples on two
of the cards, the d'Este pack at Yale was
probably made for Ercole I, the father of Beatrice
and Isabella, who became Duke of Ferrara in
1471 and died in 1505, since he was married to
Eleanora of Aragon, the daughter of Ferdinando
I, King of Naples. We may also with reasonable
confidence assign the Charles VI, Rothschild and
Catania packs to those made for the Ferrara
court. The Ferrara account-books continue to
record orders for Tarot packs, among cards of
other kinds, for example, in 1452, in 1454 and in
1461;(37) and in 1492 Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, the
brother of Beatrice and Isabella, wrote from
Hungary, where he was staying with his aunt,
Beatrice of Aragon, Queen of Hungary, to thank
his mother Eleanora for sending a variety of
things including gilded Tarot cards {triumphi
dorati).(38) We have no way of being sure, but a
plausible guess might be that the Tarot pack
originated in the court of Ferrara, in 1440 or a
few years earlier, and was soon afterwards
adopted by the wealthier court of Milan. In any
case, it seems probable that, for the first two or
_______________
37. See the references under footnote 19.
38. See G. Bertoni, op. cit., footnote 19, p. 218.
[new column]
three decades of its existence, it was restricted to
the nobility, and only after that spread out among a
wider social circle.
Although the Tarot pack originated in the
fifteenth century, it did not originally bear that
name. The word 'Tarot' has become more or less
naturalised as an English word; it is in fact the
French adaptation of the Italian name of these
cards — tarocchi or, in the singular, tarocco. In early
sources the French word is sometimes spelled
tarau (plural taraux),tarault or simply taro. In
every other language but French and English, the
hard c sound of the Italian word has been kept -
Tarock in German (formerly often spelled Tarok
or Taroc), tarokk in Hungarian, taroky in Czech, etc.
Where the word tarocchi comes from, nobody
knows: no plausible etymology for it has ever
been suggested, and this deficiency was already
being commented on by an Italian poet, Lollio,
in 1550. (39) It is not, however, the original name of
the cards: the first use of the word tarocchi known
to me dates from 1516, once again from an
account-book of the Ferrara court.(40) Throughout
the fifteenth century, the word used was always
trionfi, or, in Latin, triumphi - 'triumphs': this
name was still in use in 1500.(41) The word trionfi,
________________
39. 'Invettiva contra il Giuoco del Taroco': 'E quel nome
fantastico, e bizarro/Di Tarocco, senz'ethimologia,/Fa
palese a ciascun, che i ghiribizzi/Gli havesser guasto, e
zorpiato il cervello' ('And that whimsical, bizarre name
"Tarocco", without any etymology, makes plain to each that
fantasies have damaged and befuddled his brain '- 'he' being
the inventor of the game).
40. In 1516 the Registro di Guardaroba of the court of Ferrara
repeatedly records the purchase of two, or four, para de
tarocchi, and similar entries occur in the following year; see
G. Bertoni, op. cit., 1917, pp. 218-19. The word tarocchi also
occurs in Francesco Berni, Capitolo del Giuoco delta Primiera,
Venice, 1526. I know no sixteenth-century use of the word
trionfi to refer to Tarot cards in general, or to the game played
with them, although it continued to be used to refer
specifically to the triumph cards. Nor do I know any
authentic occurrence of the word tarocchi before 1516. For an
almost certainly spurious one, see Appendix 2 to this chapter.
41. The word triumphi occurs in an ordinance from Reggio
nell'Emilia in 1500, forbidding games of chance, including
dice and cards, but specifically excepting 'tables' (i.e.
backgammon), chess and triumphs (hoc tamen statuto non
comprehendentur ludentes ad tabulas et scachos et triumphos cum
cartis); see W.L. Schreiber, op. cit., p. 79, where, however,
the city is mistakenly identified as Reggio di Calabria. Such
exceptions were quite frequent, as at Brescia in 1488, Salo in
1489 and Bergamo in 1491 (see W.L. Schreiber, op. cit., pp.
78-9); in all of these cases the expression used was triumphi
or ludus triumphorum. It thus seems clear that the replacement
of the word trionfi or triumphi by the word tarocchi occurred
some time between 1500 and 1516.
Where and When the Tarot Pack was Invented 81
strictly speaking, refers only to what we have
been_calling the triumph cards, sometimes taken
as including the Fool, sometimes not. By
transference, it was used to apply also to the
game played with the Tarot pack, and sometimes
to the pack itself, including the suit cards; but the
more correct way of referring to the cards of the
Tarot pack, taken together, was as carte da trionfi.
At some time between 1500 and 1516, the new
name, tarocchi, superseded the old one, and was
thereafter invariably used as the way of referring
to these cards in Italian.
An opinion that has gained some support was
first advanced by Robert Steele, namely that the
Tarot pack was formed by uniting the regular
pack with what had previously been an
independent entity, a pack consisting solely of
the Matto and the twenty-one triumphs used on
their own, and that the early references to trionfi
should be taken as alluding, not to the composite
pack known to us as the Tarot pack, but to this
supposed 22-card pack. He based his opinion on
the text of the sermon by the anonymous
Dominican the manuscript of which was at that
time in his possession; indeed, that sermon
formed his only ground for that opinion. The
preacher inveighed, in his sermon, against three
types of game: first dice; then playing cards
{cartulae); and finally triumphs {triumphi). When
he comes to the last of these, he lists the twentyone
triumph cards and the Fool, but makes no
mention of the suit cards. Now, doubtless, if we
knew nothing of the Tarot pack save what we
learn from this sermon, we should have no reason
to think that a set of triumphi consisted of
anything but these twenty-two cards. But the fact
is that there is no other evidence whatever for the
existence of a pack consisting solely of the
triumph cards and the Matto; as we have seen, it
so happens that every fragmentary Tarot pack
that has come down to us includes at least one
suit card. The remarks of the Dominican friar
provide a very flimsy basis for contradicting the
assumption so compellingly suggested by the
actual cards that have survived, namely that the
triumph cards of the Tarot pack from the first
formed only part of a composite or augmented
pack, one containing, in addition to them, the
four suits of the regular pack. The preacher was
not, after all, trying to introduce his congregation
to vices with which they were previously
unacquainted: he was trying to wean them from
[new column]
what he regarded as vices to which they were
already addicted. He therefore did not need
carefully to inform them of the precise
composition of a trionfi pack, something they
already knew very well: he was trying, by
rhetorical devices, to convince them of his view
that all these things - dice, regular playing cards
and triumphs - were instruments of the devil; the
list of triumph cards evidently served as a
memorandum for expatiating on this topic. What
more natural than that, having left the subject of
regular playing cards, he should, when he turned
to denounce triumphs, mention only the cards
peculiar to the trionfi pack? We may agree that it
was primarily to these additional cards that the
name triumphi applied, without in the least
inferring that they ever formed by themselves an
independent pack.(42)
Miss Moakley is inclined to the same view as
Steele, but adds a further complication: she
thinks that there were also packs, consisting
solely of picture cards, but different in number
and subjects from the triumphs of the Tarot
pack, and likewise known as trionfi. On her view,
the term trionfi originally applied to cards of any
pack of a certain generic type, one consisting of
cards depicting mythological figures, personified
abstractions and the like, and only later came to
have specific application to a composite pack
formed by uniting a particular such series to the
regular four-suited pack. That there were, during
the fifteenth century, various packs answering to
this general description, Miss Moakley
undoubtedly establishes. It does not appear,
however, that they were, at any time, of
widespread use; none of them gained a hold on
general taste or remained more than an isolated
curiosity. Nor can it be shown that they were in
existence at an earlier date than the composite
Tarot pack. What is most to the point, however,
is that there is no reason to think that the word
___________________
42 Stuart Kaplan, op. cit., pp. 26, 349, offers a piece of
spurious evidence for the Steele thesis, stating that St
Anthony, Bishop of Florence, in a Treatise of Theology written
in 1457 'refers to playing cards and tarot, thus suggesting
that the trumps or trionfi were considered a separate game
from playing cards, which comprised court cards and
numeral or pip cards'. He presumably intends to refer to the
Summa Theologica of St Antoninus, Archbishop of Florence;
Pars 2 (Nuremberg, 1447), chap. 23, of this work does indeed
contain several mentions of playing cards, under the
alternative names of cartae or naibi, and their suit-signs (e.g.
§ viii, 'Unde in cartis sive naibis sunt figure non solum
baculorum, denariorum, cupparum, sed et gladiorum'). No
mention of triumphi is, however, to be found.
82 Part I: History and Mystery
trionfi was ever used for any kind of playing cards
other than Tarot cards. If Miss Moakley were
right, the references to carte da trionfi in the
account-books of the Ferrara court, from 1442
onwards, might relate, not to Tarot packs, but to
others of this more general type; but such a
generalised use of the term cannot be
substantiated.
The most interesting of the special packs
which Miss Moakley claims as examples of trionfi
in the alleged more general sense, and one to
which she draws particular attention, is a set of
sixteen picture cards commissioned by Filippo
Maria Visconti from the painter Michelino da
Besozzo (fl. 1394-1442) - a painter, incidentally,
to whom the murals of games players in the Casa
Borromeo have been attributed by some. This set
was sent in 1449 by a Venetian, Jacopo Antonio
Marcello, as a present to Queen Isabella, wife of
King Rene I, Duke of Lorraine. It was divided
into four groups of four, representing Virtue,
Virginity, Riches and Pleasure; each card
depicted a suitable classical divinity. The pack
has not survived, but the letter to Queen Isabella,
written in Latin, describing the pack and saying
that Michelino painted it, has.(43) The letter
applies the word ludus (game) to the set, showing
that it was really meant to be used to play some
kind of game; but there is no use of the word
triumphi in reference to the cards.
[Transcriber's note: here Dummett is mistaken. See ]
A celebrated but problematic passage in the
life of Filippo Maria Visconti, written in Latin by
Pier Candido Dezembrio (1399-1477), runs as
follows: 'He was accustomed from his youth to
play games, of various kinds ... and particularly
that type of game in which images are painted,
which delighted him to such an extent that he
paid 1500 gold pieces for a whole pack (ludum) of
them, made in the first place by Marziano da
Tortona, his secretary, who executed with the
utmost diligence images of gods, and placed
under them with wonderful skill figures of
animals and birds.' (44) There are many oddities
about this passage. In the first place, as W.L.
43. See Chapter 3, footnote 2.
44. The passage runs: Variis autem ludendi modis ab
adolescentia usus est ... plerunque eo ludi genere, qui ex imaginibus
depictis fit, in quo precipue oblectatus est adeo, ut integrum eorum
mille, et quingentis aureis emerit, auctore pel in primis Martiano
Terdonensi ejus Sectretario, qui Deorum imagines, subjectasque his
animalium figuras, et avium miro ingenio, summaque industria
perfecit. Dezembrio's life is reprinted in L.A. Muratori,
Rerum italicarum scriptores, vol. XX, Milan, 1731, and the
passage will be found in col. 1013.
[new column]
Schreiber remarked,(45) playing cards were
perfectly well known when Dezembrio .. was_
writing, and it is quite obscure why he should
choose to describe them as for readers who had
never heard of them before. In the second place,
even for someone as rich as Filippo Maria
Visconti, the price for a single pack seems
staggeringly high. In the third place, as remarked
by Campori,(46) Marziano is not known to have
been a painter, and a funeral oration for him
makes no mention of his having been one.(47)
However, if the information given by Dezembrio
is at all correct, the pack described was
presumably not a Tarot pack, which does not
normally contain images of gods or pictures of
animals and birds. Hence this was probably a
pack of the kind Miss Moakley is concerned
with; but there is not in Dezembrio's text any use
of the word triumphi. The word does, indeed,
occur in what Campori cites as a contemporary
translation into Italian of Dezembrio's life of
Visconti, written by someone using the
pseudonym Polismagna, the manuscript of
which is said by Campori to be preserved in the
d'Este library; but it may quite well be that the
translator, like others' after him, was puzzled by
the passage, and assumed that it must refer to
some kind of Tarot pack.(48)
Another documentary source cited by Miss
Moakley is an inventory of the workshop of the
engraver Francesco Rosselli made in 1528.(49) This
inventory lists plates for printing a number of
remarkable games: the giuocho del trionfo del
petrarcha; the giuco d'apostoli chol nostro singnore; the
giuoco di sete virtu; and the gioucho di pianeti cho loro
fregi (the game of the triumph of Petrarch; the
game of Apostles with our Lord; the game of
______________
45. W.L. Schreiber, op. cit., p. 100.
46. G. Campori, 'Le Carte da Giuoco dipinte per gli
Estensi nel Secolo XV, Atti e Memorie delle RR. Deputazioni di
Storia Patria per le provincie modenesi e parmensi, vol. 3, Modena,
1874, p. 125, fn. 4.
47. The funeral oration is printed in Tiraboschi, Storia della
letteratura italiana, vol. 6, p. 1196.
48. See G. Campori, op. cit., p. 125, fn. 3. The translation
runs: Alcuna volta zugava a le carte de triumphi. Et di questo giocho
molto si delectoe per modo che comparoe uno paro di carte da triumphi
compite mille et cinque cento ducati. Di questo maximamente auctore et
casone Martinno da Terdona suo secretario, il quale cum meraviglioso
inzegno et somma industria compite questo giocho de carte cum le
figure et imagine de li dei et cum le figure de li animali et de li ocelli
che gli sum sottoposti.
49. See. A.M. Hind, Early Italian Engraving, part I, vol. I,
London, 1938, pp. 10, 11, 305-8. The spellings are given as
in Hind.
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 83
seven virtues; and the game of planets with their
borders). These must, again, have been games
with picture cards of special kinds; but they are
not labelled, generically, trionfi. The name of the
first game relates to the poem by Petrarch called
I Trionfi, and cannot, therefore, fairly be cited in
support of a general thesis.
None of the special packs so far mentioned has
survived: the only one of this kind that has come
down to us from this period is the celebrated
copper-engraved set, which exists in two
versions, known as the tarocchi di Mantegna, about
which it is invariably, and correctly, observed
that they are neither tarocchi nor by Mantegna.
They are thought to date from about 1465, and
were made by an unknown artist of the Ferrarese
school. Many have doubted that this set was used
for a game at all, on the ground that existing prints
are on paper too flimsy to be used for play; but it is
quite likely that it was originally intended for a
game of some kind. The set consists of fifty
picture cards, divided into five groups of ten
each, representing respectively social ranks,
Muses, sciences, virtues and the celestial spheres:
the cards are individually numbered, and each,
group is distinguished by a letter. Once again,
there is no evidence that they were ever referred
to as trionfi, although at a later date the term
tarocchi was attached to them by a vague
analogy.(50)
The fact is that games of this kind represent a
persistent, and natural, inclination to invent new
games to be played with packs of playing cards
having a structure entirely different from that of
the regular playing-card pack or from an
augmented form such as the Tarot pack, an
inclination already manifest in the fifteenth
century and freely indulged in by games
______________
50. Miss Moakley also suggests that some engravings
ascribed to Nicoletto da Modena, illustrated in A.M. Hind,
op. cit., vol. VI, 1948, plates 640-7, form part of a pack of
cards; but this cannot be so, since they differ considerably in
size. The literature on the tarocchi di Mantegna is vast: for
illustrations, see A.M. Hind, op. cit., vol. IV, 1938, plates
320-69; for a survey of the literature, see D. Hoffmann, op.
cit., p. 67. For arguments in favour of regarding them as
playing cards, see Fritz Saxl, 'Verzeichniss astrologischen
und mythologischen illustrierten Handscrhiften des
Lateinischen Mittelalters in JR.6mischen Bibliotheken',
Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademieder Wissenschaften, pp.
101, 222, and Heinrich Brockhaus, 'Ein Edler Geduldspiel
"Die Lietung der Welt oder die Himmelsleiter" und die
sogenannte Taroks di Mantegna vom Jahre 1459-60', in
Miscellanea di Storia dell Arte in onore Igino Benvenuto Supino,
1933, p. 397.
[new column]
manufacturers to-day. There was a particular
vogue for such games in Italy, which lasted
through the seventeenth century, as two such
packs designed by Mitelli bear witness. In most
cases, however, the games invented to play with
packs of this kind have no strong attraction to
outweigh the disadvantage of having to buy a
special pack of cards to play them; often they
merely imitate the features of traditional games
played with the regular pack. As a result, the
packs designed for use in such games prove
ephemeral and leave no progeny. The only
exception to this is the Cuccu pack, an Italian
invention of the seventeenth century which not
only exists to this day but spread to other parts of
Europe, where it gave rise to the Hexenkarte of
Germany, no longer extant, and the Gnav pack of
Denmark and Norway and the Killekort of
Sweden, both still well known in those countries.
This was, and is, used to play a simple and
enjoyable game which, in a simplified form,
adapted to the regular pack, is known to British
children under such names as Ranter Go Round
and Catch the Ace. But, of course, this has
nothing to do with the Tarot pack, and no-one
ever thought of calling these cards trionfi or tarocchi.
There is thus no reason to suppose that the
Tarot triumphs ever formed a separate pack by
themselves; and there is still less reason to think
that they were ever regarded as just one species of
a large genus known, as a whole, as trionfi. It is
evident that the Tarot pack became immensely
popular within a short time after its invention;
but the only reasonable hypothesis is that it was
from the start a composite pack, containing the
four suits of the regular pack alongside the
additional cards to which the name trionfi
properly applies, and that, in connection with
playing cards, the word trionfi, as used in the
fifteenth century, applied only to the Tarot
triumphs or, by extension, to Tarot cards as a
whole.
There can be no doubt that it was in Italy that
the Tarot pack was invented, and there that,
throughout the fifteenth century, it was chiefly
popular; but the question when it first became
known in any other country does not admit 6f so
ready an answer. It was certainly in France that
it first became known outside its country of
origin; but it is difficult to be precise at what date
it was first known there. The earliest certain
reference to it there comes from Rabelais in 1534;
he includes it, under the spelling tarau, in his long
84 Part I: History and Mystery
list of the games played by Gargantua; tarots are
again referred to in the posthumous Fifth Book of
1564.*51) The earliest surviving Tarot pack known
to have been made outside Italy is one made by
Catelin Geoffroy in Lyons in 1557.(52) But we have
seen that the term tarocchi did not come into use
in Italy until after 1500, and we should therefore
assume the same to be true of the term tarots in
France: if there were any reference to the Tarot
pack from fifteenth-century France, we should
expect it to be by means of some such word as
triumphes. And indeed we find, once more from an
account book, that in 1496 Rene II, Duke of
Lorraine, is reported as having played at
triumphe;(51) the earliest recorded use of the word in
French as the name of a card game dates from as
early as 1482.(54) Unfortunately, we cannot be
certain that these references are to games played
with the Tarot pack. In Italy, after the adoption
of the new term tarocchi, or perhaps
simultaneously with it, the term trionfi was
transferred to a game played with the regular
pack; this new use of the word trionfi goes back at
least to 1526.(55) In France also there was a very
ancient game, played with the regular pack, and
known as Triumphe, which is also mentioned by
Rabelais. If we conceive of the Tarot pack as not
having been introduced into France until after
the adoption of the name tarocchi, that is, at the
beginning of the sixteenth century, so that the
cards were never known there otherwise than as
tarots, then we could interpret these late fifteenth-
century references to triumphe or triomphe as
alluding only to the game known from Rabelais's
time to the present day under that name. But this
supposition, although possible, is unlikely. It
implies that the use of the name 'Triumphe' tor a
card game in France is unconnected with the
______________
51. F. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, book I, ch. 22 and
bookV.ch. 23.
52. Seventeen cards from this pack are illustrated in Detlef
Hoffmann, op. cit., plates 15(b) and 36(a), nine of them in
colour. Nine are illustrated by Kaplan, op. cit., p. 132. The
pack is in the Museum fur Kunsthandwerk, Frankfurt am
Main, catalogue number K 1.
53. See H.-R. D'Allemagne, op. cit., vol. II, p. 212. The
references occur in the account-books of the court of
Lorraine for the year 1495-6, and run respectively:
Au Roy, le 29 avril pour jouer au triumphe a Vezelise
deux francs.
Encore audit seigneur roy le 1e mai pour jouer audit
triumphe a Vezelise deux florins d'or.
54. See F. Godefroy, Dictionnaire de I'ancienne langue francaise,
Complement, s.v. 'triomphe'. See also Chapter 9, fn. 2.
55. In Francesco Berni, Capitolo del Giuoco della Primiera.
[new column]
contemporary use in Italy of the word trionfi for
Tarot cards and the games played with them,
that it was mere coincidence that two such
similar names were used for different things. On
this theory, the transference of the term trionfi to a
game played with the regular pack might have
occurred in imitation of the name of the French
game also so played, necessitating the
introduction of a new word for Tarot cards. This
is possible; but it is not probable. For reasons
that will-not-be-set out in full until Chapter
7, it is much more likely that no coincidence
was involved: that the name trionfi was
transferred from the Tarot cards to a game
played with the regular pack precisely because
that game was in part adapted from that which
the Tarot pack was used to play, and that the
game played in France under the name
Triumphe, like other games with similar names
in other countries, originated from, the
dissemination of the same idea. If this is so, then
the game known to this day as Triumphe cannot
have come into existence until after the term
trionfi had ceased to be used specifically for Tarot
cards; and the fifteenth-century uses of the word
triumphe or triomphe must be taken as referring to a
game played with the Tarot pack, whose
introduction into France must therefore be dated
to at least about 1480. It fits well with this
hypothesis that the later reference concerns the
court of Lorraine, to which we^ have noted a
pack of playing cards made for the Milanese
court being sent as a present some forty-odd
years earlier.
Of the various hand-painted Tarot cards of the
fifteenth century, the only ones of which we
could not be certain that they came from Italy
were the Goldschmidt cards and the two
Guildhall pairs, though they had connections
both with the Victoria and Albert cards and the
Visconti-Sforza pack. Opinions about the
provenance of the Goldschmidt cards have been
very various. W.L. Schreiber assigned them to
Venice, on the strength of his identification of the
kneeling lady as a Dogaressa. Eberhard Pinder
thought they were made in the Upper Rhine
region by an Italian artist. Now the Victoria and
Albert cards are surely Italian, if only because of
the Italian inscription on the Death card; and it
is plain that the painters of the Goldschmidt
cards and of the wider Guildhall pair were
familiar with the convention used in the Victoria
and Albert pack for the representation of the Ace
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 85
of Cups. Furthermore, if the narrower Guildhall
pair really is part of the same original pack as the
Goldschmidt cards, the artist must have known
the Visconti-Sforza pack, including the later
cards not by Bembo. There is therefore good
reason for thinking that an Italian artist, or at
least one acquainted with Italian cards, was
responsible for this pack. Nevertheless, Detlef
Hoffmann is surely right in fastening upon the
appearance of the Batons in their so-called
Spanish form as the most significant clue. Batons
on Italian cards of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries may vary somewhat in shape: but they
invariably intersect, and, like the Swords (which
do not always intersect), they invariably extend
the whole length of the card. They are never
found disposed, as in Spanish-suited packs and
as on the 5 of Batons in the Goldschmidt set,
upright and in the manner of the pips on a
French-suited card, in separate rows. It seems
unthinkable that this pack can have been made
for use in fifteenth-century Italy.
From the fact that the two Guildhall pairs
were discovered in a chest in Seville one might be
tempted to believe that the Goldschmidt cards
represent an otherwise unknown phenomenon -
Spanish Tarot cards. But this would surely be a
mistake. As has already been remarked, that
variant of the Latin suit-system which was in the
course of the sixteenth century adopted as the
national suit-system of Spain was not in origin
Spanish, but French. What little we know of late
fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Spanish
cards suggests that at that time cards made in
Spain employed the Latin suit-system in
something very much more like what was to
become its Portuguese variant, with straight but
intersecting Swords and knobbly but intersecting
Batons, though doubtless French-made
'Spanish'-suited cards were imported in
considerable numbers. It is possible, therefore,
that the Goldschmidt cards represent a type of
Tarot pack used in some noble house of fifteenth-
century France, though there is no need to locate
them more narrowly in Provence, as Hoffmann
does. They differ too much from anything else
that has come down to us, however, for this to be
more than a conjecture. Only a single Tarot pack
survives to us from sixteenth-century France,
that by Catelin Geoffroy already referred to; and
this is no guide to the way the suit-signs
appeared on early French Tarot packs, since it
uses completely non-standard suit-signs. The
[new column]
subjects on the triumph cards are, however,
standard, and show no relationship with
the enigmatic figures on the Goldschmidt
cards. The next earliest French Tarot pack
we have is one made in the early seventeenth
century; and on this the Swords and Batons are
neither of the usual Italian shape, nor of the
Spanish one; they do, however, for the most
part intersect with one another. In all
later French Latin-suited Tarot packs, the
Italian suit-system is used. It thus appears that, if
the Goldschmidt cards really were made for use
in France, they have left no progeny and may
have been an isolated experiment; but the data
are too sparse to ground a firm opinion. It could,
indeed, be argued from the fact that the Tarot
pack was later associated so firmly with the
Italian version of the Latin suit-system that it
cannot have been introduced into France until a
time when that suit-system was no longer very
familiar, or, at least, no longer seemed quite
ordinary, on the ground that otherwise the suitsigns
would have undergone the same
modification to their 'Spanish' form that was
imposed on regular Latin-suited packs in France.
Such an argument would rest upon the
assumption that we have made that originally the
'Italian' suit-system was everywhere in use. But,
even if this assumption and the foregoing
argument are correct, this does not threaten our
conjecture that the triumphe played by Duke Rene
II and the triumphe mentioned in 1482 were games
played with the Tarot pack, or even that the
Goldschmidt cards represent the type of pack
that may have been used. The 'Spanish' variation
on the Latin suit-system was in existence by
about 1460, but it may have been invented
earlier; and the Goldschmidt cards might
represent an early phase when the Tarot pack
was known only in a few aristocratic circles.
In all Tarot packs made outside Italy, the
triumph cards bear Roman or Arabic numerals
to indicate their position in the sequence; and,
in all non-Italian Latin-suited Tarot packs after
1700, except in the Revolutionary period, and in
some seventeenth-century ones, they also
have their names inscribed in full at the bottom
of the card (save for the Death card, whose name
is usually missing). The same practice was
usually observed for the court cards as well, and
often for the Aces. Italian Tarot cards made
before the eighteenth century do not carry verbal
inscriptions (save for a few non-standard packs,
86 Part I: History and Mystery
and some occasional mottoes); and even the
practice of putting numerals on the triumph cards
seems to have come in only gradually. On the
sheet in the Rosenwald Collection in Washington,
the numbering stops at XII, the top nine cards
being left unnumbered; on the sheets at the
Metropolitan Museum, New York, the triumph
cards are numbered from I to XX, only the top
card, the World, being left unnumbered; but, on
the sheet in the Cary Collection, and on those in
the Rothschild Collection and at the Ecole des
Beaux Arts, the triumph cards bear no numerals.
There is an incomplete pack in the Bibliotheque
Municipale at Rouen from the early sixteenth
century, whose triumph cards bear numerals;
although a classicised pack, the figures can
easily be equated with the usual subjects, unlike
in the Sola-Busca tarocchi.(56) Count Leopoldo
Cicognara knew a complete example of a very
similar, though not identical, pack, and
illustrated six cards from it in his book of 1831; (57)
in his pack, there were no numerals on the
triumph cards. The triumphs of the Sola-Busca
pack itself do bear numerals. Numerals do not
seem to have been an original feature of any
of the hand-painted packs: there are numerals
on three of the triumph cards at the Castello
__________
56. The pack is part of the Leber Collection, catalogue
number 1351-XIV. Four cards are illustrated in colour in D.
Hoffmann, op. cit., plate 23(b), and nine by Kaplan, op.
cit., p. 133. Thirty cards survive, including the Fool and
seven triumph cards. The latter are to be identified with the
usual subjects as follows: Imperator Assiriorum,
unnumbered (the numeral is presumably covered up by the
turned-over edge) - the Emperor; Pontifex Pontificum, 5 -
the Pope; Victoriae Premium. 7 - the Chariot; Omnium
Dominatrix, 10 - the Wheel of Fortune;. Rerum Edax
(Saturn), 11 - the Hermit (or Time); Perditorum Raptor
(Pluto), 14-the Devil; Inclitum Sydus, 16-the Star.
57 See L. Cicognara, op. cit., pp. 163-6 and plate XIV; the
cards are also shown in D. Hoffmann, op. cit., fig. 6. The
cards illustrated by Cicognara are the Aces of the four suits,
Cupid = Love, and Apollo = the Sun. Contrary to what is
said by D. Hoffmann, op. cit., p. 68, the pack described by
Cicognara was not the same as that at Rouen, though very
similar. The Rouen set includes the Aces of Batons, Coins
and Swords, and these differ considerably in design from
those .shown by Cicognara. Also, Cicognara describes the
Fool of his pack in detail, and it is quite different from that
at Rouen: Cicognara's Fool was a drunkard lying bn his
back, supporting, with his legs in the air, a jar marked
'Muscatello'; that at Rouen shows a man armed to the
teeth, and dressed in armour, but with genitals exposed and
urinating, and bears the inscription 'Velim fundam dari
mihi'. The Cicognara pack is ascribed by A.M. Hind, op.
cit., vol. V, London,' 1948, pp. 139-40, to Nicoletto da
Modena.
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Ursino in Catania (not on the unidentified
one showing the figure on a stag), but these
have obviously been added much later; There
are also numerals on the triumph cards of the
'Charles VI' set, which are also later additions,
although, in their case, they may have
been added in the fifteenth century. Otherwise
the hand-painted triumph cards are all
unnumbered. It should not be thought, however,
that the lack of numerals in these packs is
evidence that the triumph cards did not
originally form an ordered sequence. The sermon
quoted by Steele lists them in a definite sequence,
even giving their numbers, a sequence that is
confirmed by some literary sources of the
sixteenth century. It is not that the cards did not
have an order, but just that those who used them
were expected to remember this order without
recourse to enumeration, just as they would
know the order of the court cards of any suit
without any further aid. It might seem that to
keep in mind the order of twenty-one distinct
cards is too difficult a feat for people to have been
expected to perform; but this supposition can, as
it happens, be decisively refuted. The particular
form of Tarot pack still used in Bologna, which
has changed comparatively little since the
sixteenth century, save for becoming double-
headed (it was one of the earliest standard
patterns to do so), did not, until the mid-
eighteenth century, bear numerals on any of the
triumph cards at all. Yet, in the game played
with this pack (which has also changed very
little, at least since the eighteenth century, and,
probably, since long before that), the triumph
cards have a definite ranking. Eighteenth-
century descriptions of this game list the triumph
cards by name, and never refer to them by
number, and were probably written for players
using packs without numerals on the cards. In
any case, there is a clear demonstration that the
same ranking applied before it was the practice
to put numerals on the triumph cards. Before
that time, a celebrated geographical Bolognese
Tarot pack was designed by Canon Luigi
Montieri in 1725: the main body of each triumph
card (including the Fool) carried geographical
information, and that of each suit card showed
coats of arms. (There was a great vogue in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for such
instructional packs, particularly geographical
and heraldic ones; both regular packs and Tarot
packs were designed for this purpose.) In
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 87
Montieri's pack, the usual symbol giving the
denomination-of each card was confined to a
small panel at the top. In each such panel on the
triumph cards is a single letter; when the
triumphs are arranged in descending order, with
the Fool at the end, these letters spell C LUIGI
MONTIERI INVENTOR, a clear indication
that, at that time, the triumphs ranked in the
same order as that which they have had from the
mid-eighteenth century until now.(58) Another
famous Bolognese Tarot pack was made (in 1664,
according to C. P. Hargrave) for the Bentivogli
family by the engraver Gioseppe Maria Mitelli
(1634-1718); the engravings were also issued in
book form, with ten cards to a page, and the
triumph cards are again arranged, in descending
order, in the usual sequence.(59) It is thus apparent
that, long before the Bolognese triumphs bore
numerals, they were arranged in a determinate
order, and that, from the early sixteenth until the
mid-eighteenth century, players were expected to
remember this order. What Bolognese players
could do up to the eighteenth century, others
could do in the fifteenth. There is therefore no
obstacle to supposing that the triumph cards
formed, from the outset, a sequence with a definite
order.
Why, then, were these cards called 'triumphs'?
Many have tried to explain the word from the use
of the twenty-one triumph cards in play, namely
as 'triumphing' over the other cards; and we
cannot say for sure that this explanation is
incorrect. A brilliant suggestion of Miss
Moakley's is, however, more attractive. This is
that the name has nothing to do with the use of
the cards, but only with what is shown on them,
the series of triumph cards representing a sort of
triumphal procession. As documented by
_________________
58. The Montieri cards are illustrated in Playing Cards of
Various Ages and Countries Selected from the Collection of Lady
Charlotte Schreiber, vol. Ill, London, 1895, plates 74-9, with
notes pp. 13-15. There is also a reproduction pack issued by
the Edizioni del Solleone in Lissone in 1973, edited by
Signor Vito Arienti and illustrated by Kaplan, op. cit., p.
147.
59. Two of the Mitelli cards are illustrated in C. P.
Hargrave, op. cit., opp. p. 232; see also opp. p. 99 in 1966
edition; twenty-four are shown in Kaplan, op. cit., p. 54.
The book version was issued as Giuoco di Carte con nuova forma
di Tarocchini; Intaglio in Rome di Gioseppe Maria Mitelli, and
was reprinted in 1970 by Huber und Herpel of Offenbach
am Main as Gioseppe Maria Mitelli, B]ologneser Tarockspiel
des 17. Jahrhunderts. C.P. Hargrave, A History of Playing Cards,
New York, 1930, 1966, p. 232, confidently cites the date
1664, but gives no authority for doing so.
[new column]
Burckhardt and Miss Moakley, a favourite
entertainment in the courts of Renaissance Italy
was the staging of just such triumphal processions,
with floats bearing figures either derived
from classical mythology or representing
abstractions such as Love, Death, etc.: a
transformation of the utterly serious triumph of a
Roman general or Emperor into an elegant allegorical
entertainment. A frequent ingredient
in such Renaissance triumphs was the idea
underlying Petrarch's poem I Trionfi, in
which each successive personified abstraction
triumphs over, that is, vanquishes, the last;
thus, in the poem, love triumphs over gods
and men, chastity over love, death over
chastity, fame over death, time over fame
and eternity over time. The case would be
clinched if it were possible to explain the subjects
of the triumph cards of the Tarot pack as forming
a triumphal procession of this sort; but in
spite of Miss Moakley's determined efforts,
supplemented subsequently by those of Mr
Ronald Decker, such an explanation, while
plausible in principle, is difficult to make
convincing in detail. Nevertheless, in default of a
better explanation, we may accept it as likely,
though by no means certain, that it was this
association of ideas which prompted the use of
the name 'triumphs' for the additional cards of
the Tarot pack.
Appendix 1:
A Problematic Set of Tarocchi
After I had finished this book, and was engaged on
final revision, I received a copy, kindly sent me by the
author, of Stuart R. Kaplan's The Encyclopedia of Tarot
(New York, 1978), already referred to. The most
valuable feature of the book is the extensive series of
illustrations of all the sets of fifteenth-century Italian
hand-painted c'ards, and of many other Tarot packs
surviving from before the eighteenth century. I have
inserted references to Kaplan's illustrations of the
packs discussed in this chapter in the footnotes. I have
some disagreements with Kaplan's judgments; to
some of these I have drawn attention in the text or the
footnotes of this chapter. There is, however, one set of
hand-painted Tarot cards illustrated by Kaplan of
which I was quite unaware, discussion of which I
thought it best to relegate to this appendix.
The set in question comprises twenty-three cards;
Kaplan states (p. 106) that the last known owner of
the set, before the Second World War, was a British
dealer named Rosenthal, and says (p. 99) that in 1939
Part I: History and Mystery
it was offered to a leading American collector, who
refused it because he doubted its authenticity. Kaplan
supplies illustrations of all the cards (p. 99);
unfortunately, these are rather minute, so that it is
difficult to see details even with a magnifying glass. Of
the twenty-three cards, eleven closely resemble the
corresponding Visconti-Sforza ones: the Emperor,
Justice, the Cavalier, Jack, 5 and 4 of Swords, the
Queen and Jack of Batons, the King of Cups, and the
King and Jack of Coins. Four resemble the Visconti-
Sforza cards in general style, but differ in detail: the 5
of Batons, the 5 of Cups, and the 5 and 3 of Coins.
The former two differ in the arrangement of the suitsigns,
the latter two in the disposition of the scrolls
inscribed a bon droit, which is the form of the Visconti
motto consistently used in this set (the spelling is
always droyt on the Bembo cards, as on the Tozzi 5 of
Swords, though it is droit on the Fournier 2 of Coins).
Two cards, the Star and the Ace of Cups, are very
similar to the Victoria and Albert ones. The Star is
almost precisely the same, but the Ace of Cups shows
some differences: the Colleoni arms are not parted,
there is an inscription I cannot read on the upper
scroll, the cliff noted by Kaplan is missing, and,
though the stem of the 'cup' or fountain is still
inscribed nec spe nec metu, the inscription occupies two
lines instead of four. Another card in the Rosenthal
set shows only the Visconti/Sforza serpent, exactly
like the Tozzi card. The remaining five cards are: (i) a
Falconer card, very closely resembling no. (20), save
for the design on the cape; (ii) a card showing a sun
with rays and a face, as on the Goldschmidt and wider
Guildhall cards, over a castle, with a wheel and a fleur
de lys above the castle on either side, and, at the
bottom, a scroll inscribed Fortezza (a word which may
mean either 'fortress' or 'fortitude'); (iii) an Ace of
Swords, showing a dagger dripping blood, and, at the
bottom, part of a sun with an inscription I cannot
read, and two scrolls higher up on the card, marked a
bon droit and, apparently, REPUB; (iv) a Cavalier of
Batons, like the Visconti-Sforza one but laterally
reversed, and with a three-turreted castle in the top
left-hand corner, encircled by an inscription I cannot
read, and an unidentifiable object in the top righthand
corner; and (v) an Ace of Coins, showing a
cardinal in the Coin, and, according to Kaplan, an
inscription, not visible in the illustration.
It is very hard to draw conclusions about this
extraordinary set from Kaplan's diminutive
illustrations, taken from a photograph in his
possession; they deserve publication in colour and in
full size (though Mr Kaplan does not know their
measurements). The salient reason for supposing the
suspicions of the American collector who refused to
buy them to be justified is the figure of the cardinal on
the Ace of Coins; it looks very much like an attempt to
establish the set as really being, at last, from the pack
supposedly painted for Ascanio Sforza. However, the
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 89
style of this Ace of Coins seems totally unlike that of
the rest of the set; it is possible, therefore, that it is a
forged addition to an otherwise genuine set. A more
subtle reason for doubt lies in the form of the Colleoni
arms on the Ace of Cups; here the device takes the
later form of three inverted hearts, not of three pairs of
coglioni (testicles), as on the Victoria and Albert card
and other contemporary presentations of these arms,
for instance in the Colleoni chapel at Bergamo (see
footnote 25). This strongly suggests that the
Rosenthal cards could not have been painted in the
fifteenth century.
If the set should nevertheless prove to be genuine
(perhaps with the exception of the Ace of Coins), it
would establish the most interesting links between
other surviving sets of fifteenth-century Tarot cards.
First, it would supply an original for the Falconer card
(no. 20), and from a Tarot pack, though whether it
represented the Bagatto, or even the Fool, or some
distinct alternative triumph subject, would remain
obscure; this would increase the probability that the
Goldschmidt cards are also genuinely from a Tarot
pack. Secondly, it would establish the sun with a face
as a device employed on various Milanese Tarot
cards, and thus would make it less likely that the
Goldschmidt cards or the wider Guildhall pair had a
non-Italian origin; the significance of this sun would
remain problematic. Thirdly, it would provide further
examples of the practice of placing small emblems in
the upper corners of cards, a practice that would still
be baffling.
Whether genuine or forged, the set poses some new
puzzles of its own. What is the significance of the
inscription REPUB on the Ace of Swords? On the
death of Filippo Maria Visconti in 1447, the citizens
of Milan, tired of their Dukes, as well they might be,
declared a republic; in 1450, however, Francesco
Sforza captured the city and proclaimed himself
Duke. Can this card be meant to contain an allusion
to the bloody suppression of the short-lived republic?
The card inscribed Fortezza cannot, in view of the
inscription, represent the Sun; if the card is genuine,
this provides corroboration of the view that the sun on
the Guildhall card we took to be the Ace of Swords
and on the unidentified Goldschmidt card is not, in
either case, the feature of the card determining its
identity. The Fortezza card, if spurious, may be meant
to represent the Tower; but, if genuine, it can hardly
do so, because that card, although it went under
various names and had many representations, is never
called la Fortezza, or even la Torre, in early Italian
sources. It is much more likely to represent Fortitude,
by a kind of visual pun, even though this subject is
normally represented by a personification; la Fortezza
is the name invariably given to this subject in the early
sources, as against the name la Forza (Strength)
usually employed in the later Tarot de Marseille-
derived packs. It is hard to avoid being impressed by
[new column]
this card. Unlike most of those in the set, it is not a
close copy of some other existing card. If we suppose it
a forgery, then to suppose it intended to represent the
Tower is to attribute a very crude mistake to the
forger. If we regard it as representing Fortitude, on
the other hand, it becomes, an ingenious and
unexpected representation of its subject, and
presupposes enough knowledge of the literary sources
on the part of any forger responsible for it for him to
be aware that the regular word used for the Fortitude
card in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was
Fortezza. These considerations seem to me to weigh in
favour of the authenticity of the set; and, if the
Fortezza card is genuine, the lady with the model
castle in the Goldschmidt set may be another deviant
version of Fortitude.
It thus becomes a matter of some importance for
the study of fifteenth-century hand-painted tarocchi to
determine whether any or all of the Rosenthal cards
are genuine, and, as a first step, where they are. Mr
Albi Rosenthal, of Oxford and London, who is
presumably the British dealer referred to by Kaplan,
has informed me that in the 1920s his father sold some
hand-painted Italian tarocchi to Herr von Hardt of
Switzerland, but does not know where the von Hardt
collection is now. He has also told me that at a later
date some fifteenth-century hand-painted tarocchi were
shown to him at his Curzon Street office in London,
but that these were definitely found to be forgeries.
Which of these two sets, if either, is that designated
'the Rosenthal cards' by Kaplan is unclear. It is to be
hoped that the cards themselves, or at least some
more detailed illustrations of them, become available
for examination; in the meantime, we owe a
considerable debt to Mr Kaplan for bringing the set to
public attention.
Appendix 2:
The Tarocchi of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza
In Count Leopoldo Cicognara, Memorie spettanti alia
Storia delta Caliografia, Prato, 1831, p. 16, there is
quoted an alleged excerpt from the Chronicle of
Cremona by Domenico Bordigallo. The excerpt is in
Italian, and states that in the year 1484 the excellent
painter Antonio Cicognara (of the same family as the
Count) painted uno magnifico mazzo de carte dette de'
Tarocchi, da me veduto (a magnificent pack of the cards
called tarocchi, seen by me) for Cardinal Ascanio
Sforza. Count Cicognara says that this passage was
communicated to him by Mgr Antonio Dragoni from
the schede (notes) of Giacomo Torresino, an
eighteenth-century Cremonese antiquarian. On the
strength of this passage, numerous art historians have
ascribed various hand-painted Tarot cards of the
fifteenth century to Antonio Cicognara, including the
[new column]
six cards of the Visconti-Sforza pack that are not by
Bembo; but the passage is almost certainly spurious.
Any historical document connected with Dragoni is
under the gravest suspicion, since he was either a
forger or the dupe of forgers, although he was
primarily concerned with documents relating to the
Dark Ages, of which he made, or manufactured, a
large collection. Torresino did indeed compose notes
on local history, using a page for each year, and
entering quotations relating to that year from various
sources; but this work, at any rate in the form in
which it survives in the Biblioteca Statale at Cremona,
stops before 1484. Bordigallo's Chronicle was written
in Latin, and has never been published; the
manuscript was located by Signor Marco
Santambrogio, of the University of Bologna, in the
Biblioteca Treccani in Milan, where, with the kind
assistance of Signora Carla Treccani degli Alfieri, he
examined it; he found that, while the entry for 1484
does contain a reference to Ascanio Sforza, namely to
record that it was in that year that he was created a
Cardinal, it mentions neither Antonio Cicognara nor
tarocchi. It is conceivable that the quotation was in
some later section of Torresino's notes that has since
been lost, but from some other source, or that it is in
Bordigallo's Chronicle, but under a later year
(Ascanio Sforza died in 1505); but the probability is
that it is quite inauthentic. In any case, the use of
the modern word mazzo for 'pack' was, so far as I am
aware, unknown in fifteenth-century Italian, which
uses paro or gioco instead; so, even if the Italian given
by Count Cicognara is a translation of some genuine
Latin original, the word tarocchi is not likely to have
occurred in that original. See M. Dummett, 'A Note
on Cicognara', Journal of the Playing-Card Society, vol. II,
no. 1, August 1973, pp. 14-17 (original issue), pp. 23-
32 (reissue), and 'More about Cicognara', ibid., vol.
V, no. 2, pp. 26-34. These two articles are cited by
Stuart R. Kaplan in his annotated bibliography (The
Encyclopedia of Tarot, New York, 1978, p. 356), but he
mentions only their discussion of the Fibbia portrait,
not of the Bordigallo Chronicle. Mr Kaplan does,
however, state categorically (pp. 33, 351) that the
Chronicle contains no reference either to tarocchi or to
Antonio Cicognara. Though I consider this quite
probable, I cannot vouch for it, since Signor
Santambrogio had time to examine only the section
dealing with the year 1484, and I have not yet seen the
manuscript myself. From the absence of
acknowledgment to myself or to Signor
Santambrogio, the reader might naturally suppose
that Mr Kaplan was speaking on his own authority
and had examined the Chronicle in more detail than
Santambrogio had done; but this seems unlikely in
view of his mistaken assertion (p. 33) that it was in
1484 that Bordigallo wrote his Chronicle, since
anyone who had seen it would have observed that the
entries go beyond that year. From his curious
90 Part I: History and Mystery
statement (p. 374) that Torresino's notes contain
Bordigalio's Chronicle, it is equally unlikely that he
has seen them. Mr Kaplan expresses the belief (pp.
100, 107) that the initials ' A. C.' on the Tozzi King of
Swords may stand, not for 'Antonio Cicognara', but
for 'Ascanio Cardinale'; this seems somewhat
illogical, since Count Cicognara's purported
quotation from Bordigallo is the only positive
evidence either that Antonio Cicognara painted any
tarocchi or that any were painted for Ascanio Sforza,
and Mr Kaplan agrees that the quotation is spurious.
His assertion of its inauthenticity occurs during a list"
(pp. 31-3) of spurious sources, and is repeated in the
bibliography; in the section discussing the authorship
[new column]
and dates of the hand-painted packs (pp. 106-7), he
cites the purported Bordigallo quotation in full
without, indeed, endorsing it, but without repudiating
it either; only the most alert reader is likely to
remember the earlier declaration of disbelief in it. Of
course, it is perfectly plausible that Ascanio Sforza
should have had some tarocchi made for him. But, ever
since 1831, the names of Antonio Cicognara and of
Ascanio Sforza have been endlessly cited, in books,
articles and museum catalogues, in connection with
tarocchi, and it is in my view best to make no further
reference to those two individuals until some genuine
evidence of such a connection becomes available.
[There follows two tables summarizing the surviving cards in the decks 1-12, 14, 19, 22, and 24 of this chapter.]
Addition: As of Nov. 26, 2017, I have added one more chapter, Chapter 21, "The early Italian game".
Addition: As of May 31, 2020. I have added chapter 7, "The Game of Tarot" , and chapter 8, "General features of the game".
CHAPTER 4
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented
It was formerly believed that, in Europe, the
Tarot pack is as old as the regular pack. Indeed,
some have thought that it is older: the assertion is
still to be met with that the regular pack was
originally derived from the Tarot pack by
subtraction. It is clear from our study of the
relations between European and Oriental cards
that this latter belief must be incorrect. The
regular pack came to Europe from the Islamic
world, but the Tarot pack is a European
invention: there is no trace of the existence in
Egypt, Persia, India or China of anything in the
least resembling the Tarot pack.(1) This naturally
leads us to expect the Tarot pack to have
appeared some time later than the introduction
of playing cards into Europe: as a variant on the
ordinary type of playing-card pack, it would
hardly have been devised until the novelty of the
latter had had time to wear off. One ground that
used to be advanced for the contrary hypothesis
was the belief that the word naibi referred to
Tarot cards, while carte, cartule, etc., referred to
cards of the regular pack: but this belief was
conclusively refuted in 1900 by Robert Steele,
who showed that Italian naibi, like Spanish
naipes, was used simply to mean 'playing cards',
Tarot cards being known in fifteenth-century
____________________
1. Once again, an exception should be made for the 'Chad'
cards of Mysore. These were devised by Krishnaraj Odeyar
(1794-1868) after his deposition in 1830 by the British from
the throne of Mysore. Although several of the special forms
of pack he devised are augmented packs, in the sense of
regular packs to which additional cards, not belonging to
any suit, have been added, it is obvious that so late an
addition to the repertoire of Indian playing-card packs has
no historical significance. See Rudolf von Leyden, Chad: the
Playing Cards of My sore (India), privately produced, 1973.
[new column]
Italian as trionfi. (2) More recently, Mr Jan
Bauwens has claimed that a pack of playing
cards recorded in the Register of Duke
Wenceslas of Brabant as having been bought for
the Duke and Duchess was a Tarot pack, on the
ground that it contained 78 cards;(3) but a
reference to the original entry reveals that neither
it nor any of the numerous later similar entries
contains any mention of the number of cards in
the packs bought or played with, nor anything
else to suggest that these were not
straightforward regular packs. (4)
Much more frequently met with as an
argument for an early date for the invention of
the Tarot pack is that relating to a famous
fragment of a fifteenth-century hand-painted
Tarot pack in the Bibliotheque Nationale in
Paris: this comprises seventeen cards, namely the
Jack of Swords, the Fool and all the usual
triumph cards except the Bagatto, the Popess,
the Empress, the Wheel, the Devil and the Star.
The Abbe Menestrier published in 1704 an entry
from the account-book of King Charles VI of
France recording the payment in 1392 of '56 sols
parisis' to the painter Jacquemin Gringonneur
for three packs of playing cards.(5) In 1842, M.C.
_________________
2. Robert Steele, 'A notice of the Ludus Triumphorum and
some early Italian card games', Archaeologia, vol. 57, 1900,
pp. 185-200. J
3. In a booklet accompanying a reproduction of the
Mamluk pack from Istanbul published in 1973 by S.A.R.L.
Aurelia Books, of Louvain and Brussels.
4. The entry is cited in A. Pinchart, Recherches sur les cartes à
jouer et leur fabrication en Belgique, Brussels, 1870.
5. Menestrier, 'Des Principes des sciences et des arts
disposes en forme de jeux', Bibliotheque curieuse et instructive de
divers ouvrages anciens et modernes de litterature et des arts, vol. II,
Trevoux, 1704, p. 174.
66 Part I: History and Mystery
Leber proposed that the cards in the
Bibliotheque Nationale came from one of the
packs painted by Gringonneur; (6) and this opinion
won such wide acceptance that the cards came to
be known as the 'Tarots de Charles VI'. If this
were correct, they would be by far the oldest
surviving Tarot cards; and, not only should we
have to say that the Tarot pack came into
existence within two decades of the arrival of
playing cards in Europe, but France would
appear to have a better claim to have been the
country of their origin than Italy. In fact,
however, there is no shred of evidence to connect
the Bibliotheque Nationale pack with
Gringonneur: Chatto, (7) Merlin (8) and
D'Allemagne (9) all ascribe the cards to Italian
workmanship. W.L. Schreiber is very specific,
assigning them to Ferrara in the third quarter of
the fifteenth century.(10)
Another piece of evidence cited in a great
many books and articles on playing cards was first
presented by Count Leopoldo Cicognara in his
book of 1831:(11) a portrait in Bologna, bearing the
inscription 'Francesco Antelminelli Castracani
Fibbia, Prince of Pisa, Montegiori and Pietra
Santa, and lord of Fusecchio, son of Giovanni, a
native of Castruccio, Duke of Lucca, Pistoia,
Pisa, having fled to Bologna and presented
himself to Bentivogli, was made Generalissimo of
the Bolognese armies, and was the first of this
family, which was called in Bologna "dalle
Fibbie". He married Francesca, daughter of
Giovanni Bentivogli. Inventor of the game of
Tarocchino in Bologna, he had from the XIV
Reformatories the privilege of placing the Fibbia
arms on the Queen of Batons and those of his
wife on the Queen of Coins. Born in the year
1360, he died in the year 1419.' On the strength
of this inscription, Count Cicognara named
Castracani Fibbia as the inventor of the game of
tarocchi. Commenting on this, Carlo Lozzi cited
_____________
6. M.C. Leber, Etudes historiques sur les cartes à jouer',
Memoires de la Societé des Antiquaires de France, new series, vol.
6, 1842, pp. 256-348.
7. William Andrew Chatto, Facts and Speculations on the
Origins and History of Playing Cards, London, 1848.
8. R. Merlin, L'Origine des cartes à jouer: Recherches nouvelles
sur les naibis, les tarots et sur les autres éspèces de cartes, Paris, 1869.
9. Henri-Rene D'Allemagne, Les Cartes à jouer du XIVe au.
XXe siecle, two volumes, Paris, 1906.
10. W.L. Schreiber, Die altesten Spielkarten, Strasbourg 1937,
p. 101.
11. Leopoldo Cicognara, Memorie Spettanti alla Storia della
Calcografia, Prato, 1831.
[new column]
with approval an entirely just observation by L.
Zdekauer that the inscription does not attribute__
to Fibbia the invention of the game of tarocchi in
general, but only of that particular variety of it
known as tarocchino and peculiar to Bologna.(12) As
we shall see, the diminutive ending relates to the
use in this variant game of a shortened pack, in
which the 2 to 5 are omitted from every suit. Quite
evidently, such a shortened pack must be derived
from the full 78-card pack, and not the other way
around, so that, if Francescoo Fibbia really had
invented the tarocchino pack some time before his
death in 1419, the ordinary Tarot pack from
which it was derived must have been in existence
for a certain period before that: hence, if the
inscription is to be believed, the Tarot pack must
have been devised by 1400 at the very latest.
Doubt was cast upon the very existence of this
painting by Robert Steele in his article of 1900, (13)
and in this he was followed by Miss Gertrude
Moakley in her book.(14) However, in another
article written in the very next year, Steele
acknowledged its existence, speaking of 'the
famous inscription on the portrait of Castracani
Fibbia (and stating that 'the portrait is now in
the Palazzo Pallavicini in Bologna'.(15) It is not to
Steele's credit that, in this article, he did not
mention and withdraw his accusation against
Count Cicognara. The existence of the portrait
was confirmed by G.B. Cornelli in an article of
1909.(16) It is somewhat surprising that doubt
about a point so relatively easily investigated
should have been allowed to persist for so
long.(17)
In fact, the portrait does exist, and tallies
completely with Count Cicognara's description
of it, including the inscription.. It is, however,
far from being contemporary with its subject;
by its style, it is to be assigned to the seven-
___________________
12. Carlo Lozzi, 'Le Antiche Carte da Giuoco', La
Bibliofilia, vol. 1, 1899-1900, pp. 37-46.
13. R. Steele, op. cit.
14. Gertrude Moakley, The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio
Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza Family, New York, 1966.
15. Robert Steele, 'Early playing cards, their design and
decoration', Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, vol. 49, 1900-
1901, pp. 317-23; see p. 319.
16. G.B. Cornelli, 'II Governo "Misto" in Bologna dal 1507
al 1797 e le Carte da Giaoco del can. Montieri', Atti e
Memorie delta Reale Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Provincie
delta Romagna, series 3, vol. 27, 1909; see p. 3.
17 See M. Dummett, 'A note on Cicognara', Journal of the.
Playing-Card Society, vol. II, no. 1, August 1973, pp. 14-17
(original issue), pp. 23-32 (reissue), and 'More about
Cicognara', ibid,, vol. V, no. 2; November 1976, pp. 26-34.
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 67
teenth century, and probably to the second half
of that century. As recorded by Count Cicognara,
it shows Prince Fibbia holding a pack of tarocco
bolognese cards, some of which are falling to
the floor: among them can be seen the Queen
of Batons, bearing the Fibbia arms, and the
Queen of Coins, bearing the Bentivoglio arms.
The inscription is as quoted by Cicognara;
but it appears that the original inscription was
painted over and a new version painted on top,
the original one having lacked the sentence
ascribing to Prince Fibbia the invention of
tarocchino and recording the privilege granted to
him of placing his arms and those of his wife on
the two Queens. The sentence may have been
added to explain the presence of the playing
cards in the picture.(18)
A tarocco bolognese pack in the British Museum,
_________________
18. The portrait can be seen at the palazzo Fibbia, 14, via
Galliera, Bologna. I am indebted for its location to the kind
help of Signor Giancarlo Roversi, an expert on the history of
the city. The palazzo was formerly known as the palazzo
Felicini-Calzolari; in Sandro Chierichetti, Bologna, Bologna,
n.d., p. I l l , it is stated to have been built in 1497. It was
referred to by Count Cicognara as the 'casa Fibbia', and
was said by Comelli in the article cited above to have passed
from the Fibbia to the Fabbri family, and from them to the
Pallavicini; the casual remark by Steele, cited in the text,
should not mislead anyone into looking for the painting at
the palazzo Pallavicini, 45, via S. Stefano. The owner of the
palazzo Fibbia kindly allowed my friend Signor
Marco Santambrogio, a lecturer in the Philosophy
Department at the University of Bologna, not only to
examine, but also to photograph, the painting; the great
hall in which it hangs is now occupied by the Associazione
Artigiani, who were also most co-operative. I owe- my
information about the painting entirely to the assiduous
work of Signor Santambrogio. In his The Encyclopedia of
Tarot (New York, 1978), p. 33, Stuart R. Kaplan cites my
article 'More about Cicognara', saying that I there describe
the 'rediscovery' of the portrait by Signor Santambrogio.
The quotation marks are Mr Kaplan's, and suggest a direct
quotation from my article, but in fact I did not use the word
'rediscovery', and claimed nothing so portentous on Signor
Santambrogio's behalf. The painting was never lost, but,
ever since Cicognara first described it, has remained
continuously just where he said it was. Robert Steele, in his
article of 1900, and, misled by him, Miss Moakley in 1966
expressed unjust doubts whether it existed; but, since
neither of them, at the time of writing, had actually looked
for it, this hardly counts as the painting's being lost. There
is in the British Museum a complete Tarocco Bolognese
pack by the maker who used the trade-name 'al Mondo'. In
this pack, Moors replace the Papi, so it must be dated after
1725 (see Chapter 16); it exemplifies the standard pattern,
in a single-ended form and without numerals on the trumps,
and is probably to be dated to about 1750. This pack
displays the feature mentioned in the inscription on the
Fibbia portrait: the Queen of Coins holds a shield with the
[new column]
probably dating between 1725 and 1750, bears
out the statement that, in some such packs, the
Queen of Batons bore the Fibbia arms and the
Queen of Coins those of the Bentivoglio family.
The portrait testifies to the existence, in the
seventeenth century, of a local tradition. But,
because of its late date, its evidential value is
slight; in view of the lack of any other evidence
for the existence of the shortened tarocco bolognese
pack before the sixteenth century, the tradition is
unlikely to be sound. As we have seen, it was not
until the sixteenth century that the practice of
playing various card games with shortened packs
came into fashion; it is therefore probable that it
was in that century that the shortened tarocco
pack used in Bologna was first devised. The most
likely explanation is that the reason for putting the
Fibbia arms on one of the cards had been
forgotten, and that the story about Francesco
Fibbia was invented as a hypothesis to account
for it.
We have successively rejected the years 1377
(on the naibi argument), 1379, 1392 and 1419 as
bounds for the date of the invention of the Tarot
pack: one that cannot be shaken is the year 1442.
In that year there is a reference in the Registro del
Mandati for the court of Ferrara to pare uno de carte
da trionfi, and, in the Registro di Guardaroba, one to
the purchase of quattro paia di carticelle da trionfi.^
As was remarked above, the word trionfi, or the
phrase carte da trionfi, is the ordinary fifteenth-
century Italian term for Tarot cards, while, as
in early English sources, the word 'pair' (paro or
paio) was often used to mean 'pack'. Evidently,
then, by 1442, al; least in the d'Este court at
Ferrara, Tarot cards were well known and in
some demand.
That this was also so in Milan may be inferred
from a mural painting known as 'The Tarocchi
Players' in the Casa Borromeo in that city. It
forms one of a set of three, in the International
Gothic style, on the walls of a small ground-floor
room (-now used as an office), showing young
__________________
Bentivoglio arms and the Queen of Batons one with the
Fibbia arms. The pack is 1-37 in F.M. O'Donogiiue,
Catalogue of the Playing Cards bequeathed to the Trustees of the
British Museum by the late Lady Charlotte Schreiber, London,
1901.
19. See G. Bertoni, 'Tarocchi versificati', Poesie leggende
costumanze del medio evo, Modena, 1917, p. 218, fn. 3, and G.
Campori, 'Le carte da gioco dipinte per gli Estensi nel sec.
XV, Atti e Memorie delle Deputazioni di Storia Patria per le
Provincie modenesi eparmensi, vol. 7, 1874, p. 126.
68 Part I: History and Mystery
men and women of the nobility engaged in
various games. There is no agreement over which
artist painted these delightful pictures, but they
are generally dated to the early 1440s. Every
writer on art who mentions these paintings refers
to the one in which we are interested as 'The
Tarocchi Players', so that this identification of its
subject must rest on a very firm tradition. There
is nothing in the paintings as it is now to show
whether the five people depicted are playing a
game with Tarot cards or with a regular pack;
one can see the pattern on the backs of the cards,
but although the faces of two of the cards must
originally have been shown, no details of these
can any longer be seen. It is evident, however,
that the condition of the painting has greatly
deteriorated during the present century. A black-
and-white photograph of it appears in a book of
1926, (20) and shows details that have now
vanished. As far as I can see from this
photograph, the card that has just been played
by the lady in the middle of the group is the 2 of
Coins, while the man on her right is playing the
Ace of Coins; this, of course, does not help us to
decide whether they are playing with Tarot cards
or not. However, it also looks from the
photograph as though the ladies at the two ends
of the group have each put a card face up in front
of them on the table, and that these are picture
cards: if so, all trace of these cards has since
disappeared from the painting. I have not been
able to identify these cards from the photograph;
but it is possible that, when the painting was in a
better state of preservation, one or other of them
could be seen to be a triumph card, the Matto or
a Queen, thus justifying the particularisation of
the game depicted as one played with Tarot
cards; if that were not so, it is difficult to see why
the painting should have acquired its name.
Signor Vito Arienti has informed me that there is
another fifteenth-century painting of players of
tarocchi in a castle in the Val d'Aosta. He may
have been referring to a painting in the castle of
Issogne, showing people playing various games,
including three playing cards, and dating from
1470. From the illustration I have seen, in Giulio
Brochard, Valle d'Aosta, ed. Renato Willien,
Novara, 1968, p. 76 (see also pp. 91-2), it is not
evident that the cards being used are Tarot cards;
in any case, it is too late to have any bearing on the
__________________
20 Raimond van Marie, The Development of the Italian Schools
of Painting, vol. 7, the Hague, 1926, p. 145, fig. 91.
[new column]
date of origin of the game.
A great many playing cards have come down
to us from fifteenth-century Italy. Of these, many
are sumptuous hand-painted cards made for the
nobility. The surviving cards of this kind come
from about twenty different packs: it is difficult
to give a precise figure, since some cards in
different collections may originally have
belonged to the same pack. There are nine such
packs of which more than ten cards survive: the
surviving cards of eight of these nine packs include,
in each case, at least one triumph card and
at least one suit card, so that these eight packs
were certainly Tarot packs. The three most
complete of these packs are attributed, in the
unanimous opinion of present-day art historians,
to the Cremonese painter Bonifacio Bembo,
who was born about 1420 or a little earlier and
died in about 1480. Bembo is known to have
executed several important commissions for
Francesco Sforza, who became Duke of Milan in
1450 and died in 1466, and for his successor
Galeazzo Maria Sforza, who died in 1476. On the
strength of the heraldic emblems and mottoes
appearing on many of the cards of these three
packs, it is evident that they were made for
Francesco Sforza or, in the case of the first two,
for his predecessor Filippo Maria Visconti, who
died in 1447. They are as follows.
(1) The earliest is that usually known as the
Visconti di Modrone pack, from the name of its
former owner; it is now in the Beinecke Library at
Yale University. Sixty-seven cards survive, of which
eleven are triumph cards and fifty-six are suit cards.
In the Batons suit, the numeral cards show arrows
instead of the usual staves, although the court cards
show staves, in the usual form of polished staffs. On
the numeral cards, both the Batons and the Swords
intersect, but the Swords are straight. Because the
composition both of the court cards and of the
triumphs show certain unusual features, they will be
discussed in detail below.
(2) Probably the next in date is that known as the
Brambilla pack, also called after a former owner, now
in the Brera Gallery in Milan. Forty-eight cards
survive, of which only two - the Emperor and the
Wheel of Fortune - are triumphs, the remaining fortysix
being suit cards. Here the numeral cards show
ordinary Batons, while the court cards of that suit
have arrows: Batons and Swords both intersect on the
numeral cards, but the Swords are curved in the usual
Italian manner.
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 69
(3) The most complete of all the early hand-painted
packs is that usually called the Visconti-Sforza pack,
divided between the Pierpont Morgan Library in New
York, the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo and the
private collection of the Colleoni family in the same
city. Of this, as many as seventy-four cards survive
altogether, comprising the Fool, nineteen triumphs
and fifty-four suit cards. All the Batons are of the
usual type, and intersect, as do the Swords, which are,
however, straight, as in the Visconti di Modrone pack.
The subjects on the triumph cards are standard ones,
of which only the Devil and the Tower are missing.
Six of them, however - Temperance, Fortitude, the
Star, the Moon, the Sun and the World - are quite
obviously by a different artist, and are thought to have
been painted some twenty years later, by an unknown
artist of the Ferrarese school.(21) This particular pack,
or individual cards belonging to it, appears to have
served as a model for the painters of more than one
later pack.
The remaining six packs comprising more
than ten surviving cards are as follows.
(4) The most famous early Tarot pack of all is the
so-called Charles VI pack in the Bibliotheque
Nationale in Paris, already mentioned. This
comprises seventeen cards, of which only one, the
Jack of Swords, is a suit card: the rest consist of the
Fool and fifteen triumph cards, making up all the
standard subjects other than the Bagatto, the
Empress, the Popess, the Wheel of Fortune, the Devil
and the Star. The vivid, florid style differs completely
both from that of Bembo and from that' of the
unknown painter of the six later cards in the Visconti-
Sforza set; expert opinion, however, assigns the pack
to the same date and place as the latter, namely to
Ferrara in about 1470.
(5) The most complete set other than the three by
Bembo is one in the Rothschild Collection in the
Louvre, consisting of thirty-one cards. It is generally
accepted that a single card, a Cavalier of Swords, in
the Museo Civico at Bassano also belongs to this
pack, bringing the total to thirty-two. Despite a slight
divergence in the measurements cited for this card
(190 x 90 mm. as against 188 x 90 for the Rothschild
ones), this identification can scarcely be doubted: not
only the general style, but the border design, the
overrunning of the border and the arches in the top
corners all resemble the Rothschild cards, while the
trappings of the horse tally exactly with those of the
Rothschild Cavalier of Batons, and the curious
tortoise-back shield with those on the Rothschild
King and Queen of Batons. In this set, however, only
____________
21 See Ron Decker, 'Two Tarot studies related', part III,
Journal of the Playing-Card Society, vol. IV, no. 1, August 1975,
pp. 46-52.
[Transcriber's note: the measurement of the Bassano card is given as 189x90 in the Nov. 2016 Catalog Giovanni dal Ponte, Galleria Accademia, Florence, where it is part of their exhibition.]
one triumph card survives, the Emperor; the rest are
suit cards. (In his The Encyclopedia of Tarot, New York,
1978, Stuart R. Kaplan suggests that another card,
shown by him at the top right of p. 121, is also a
triumph, the Pope, the Hermit or the World; it is,
however, surely the Jack of Coins, though admittedly
a bearded Jack is a rarity. Some writers have
questioned whether the twenty-three numeral cards,
whose measurements Detlef Hoffmann gives as 186 x
93 mm., belong with the other eight Rothschild cards,
which measure 185 x 90 mm. according to Hoffmann,
and it is true that their borders do not have the wavy
lines found on the court cards and the Emperor. The
measurement criterion would be conclusive, save that
discrepancies between measurements made by
different individuals are exceedingly common.) The
general treatment, though not the individual style, is
highly similar to the Charles VI cards, and the two
packs are probably to be assigned to the same milieu.
The Swords on the numeral cards are curved.
(6) Another pack, considerably smaller in
dimensions than those so far mentioned, appears also
to have originated from Ferrara and to have been
made for the d'Este family who were Dukes of that
city; it is now also in Beinecke Library at Yale. It
consists of sixteen cards, comprising eight court cards,
the Fool and seven triumphs - the Bagatto, the Pope,
Temperance, the Star, the Moon, the Sun and the
World. The d'Este arms appear on the Queens of
Batons and Swords and the Cavalier and Jack of
Batons (the King of that suit has not survived). The
arms of the King of Naples appear on the King and
Cavalier of Swords. The style again differs from any of
the preceding packs, but has more affinity with that of
the Charles VI cards than with those by Bembo.
(7) A pack consisting of fifteen cards is in the
Museo Civico of Catania, housed in the Castello
Ursino. Eleven of them are suit cards, including the 7
and 8 of Swords with curved intersecting Swords: the
remaining four consist of the Hermit, the Chariot, the
World and one whose identity is dubious. This last
shows a naked girl reclining on a stag, wearing a coral
necklace. In her left hand she holds an object which,
since it is painted in gold on a gold background, is
difficult to decipher; in her right hand, which is
suspended above the left one, she holds another
object, also painted gold against the gold background,
which, when I saw the cards, I took to be a fan. Mr
Ronald Decker has, however, suggested to me that
she is pouring from one vase into another, *which
would identify her as Temperance: this is the only
interpretation of this otherwise mysterious figure that
I have come across. The Hermit and World cards
closely resemble those of the Charles VI pack: the
latter shows a female figure standing on a globe
holding an orb in her left hand and swinging a censer
in her right; the corresponding card in the Charles VI
70 Part I: History and Mystery
set differs principally in that the female figure holds a
sceptre in place of a censer. It thus seems reasonable
to assign this pack also to Ferrara.
(8) A set of thirteen cards described and illustrated
in full in an article published in 1954 has since largely
disappeared from public view. They were at one time
all in the possession of Mr Piero Tozzi of New York:
one (Temperance) is now in the Museum of Fine Arts
in Montreal, and another (the Jack of Cups) was in
the F. Cleveland Morgan collection in the same city,
and is stated by Stuart R. Kaplan, op. cit, p. 100, to
have passed into the ownership of Mr Cleveland
Stewart-Patterson, presumably also of Montreal.
According to Kaplan, the remaining eleven were sold
in the early 1960s to a collector in Milan. The cards
were evidently made for some member of the Sforza
family, and all but one are copied, with some
deliberate divergences, from the Visconti-Sforza pack.
Their measurements were given in the article as 170 x
70 mm., but, as pointed out by Mr Ronald Decker,
this can be seen from the full-size reproductions to be
an error: it should be 170 x 87 mm. The set consists of
one card showing only the Visconti/Sforza emblem of
a crowned serpent swallowing a woman, one numeral
card, six court cards and five triumphs - the Pope,
Temperance, the Chariot, the Wheel of Fortune and
the Judgment. The Temperance card has been copied
from the corresponding one in the Visconti-Sforza
pack executed by the later, probably Ferrarese, artist,
so that the cards must date from after the time that
those six cards were painted. On the one numeral
card, the 5 of Swords, the Swords are straight, as in
the Visconti-Sforza pack. On the Wheel card, a point of
divergence from the Visconti-Sforza card is the ladder,
heraldic emblem of the Delia Scala family of Verona,
on the clothing of the topmost figure, who wears ass's
ears, being at the height of his fortunes and about to
experience their collapse.(22)
_____________
22 Miss Moakley, in her book cited in footnote 24, draws
attention to the initials ' A. C.' on the base of the throne of
the King of Swords in the Tozzi set. She thinks that these
initials are intended as those of Antonio Cicognara, a
painter to whom many authorities have credited various
surviving fifteenth-century Italian tarocchi. The attribution is
grounded on a purported quotation from Bordigallo's
Chronicle of Cremona given in Count Leopoldo Cicognara's
book referred to in footnote 11, to the effect that in 1484
Antonio Cicognara painted a Tarot pack for Cardinal
Ascanio Sforza. As observed in more detail in Appendix 2,
the quotation is spurious; Count Cicognara was honest but
gullible. Art historians are afflicted by an avid desire to
attach artists' names to works of art, however flimsy the
evidence for it; and so, until more careful study of styles
yielded the attribution to Bembo, sets (1) to (3), and others
as well, were ascribed to Antonio Cicognara, although no
one appears to have attempted to make the elementary
check of verifying that Bordigallo's Chronicle said what it
was supposed to say; even after the attribution to Bembo
(9) The only one of these nine sets that is, almost
certainly, from a regular pack is one consisting of "
fifteen suit cards, not including any Queen, and all
badly damaged by a fire that occurred in 1904, in the
Biblioteca Nazionak in Turin. On the testimony of
W.L. Schreiber,(23) who does not, however, appear very
well informed about the matter, this set comprised
twenty-four cards before the fire. It is helpfully
reproduced in full in Kaplan's book. Unfortunately,
the composition of the set before the catastrophe does
not seem to have been recorded, save on a list kept at
the library, which Mr Kaplan reproduces and which
has itself been partly consumed by the fire. The list
starts with the Coins suit (Cavallo, Jack, Ace, 3),
followed by the suit of Cups (King, Cavallo, Jack, 3, 4,
9, 10), and then the Batons suit, of which only Ace
and 6 are legible. Of the numerals, only Ace and 3 of
Coins, 4 and 9 of Cups, 6 and 10 of Batons and Ace, 3,
6, 7 and 10 of Swords survive. There is also a Cavallo
of Swords, and three court cards whose suit-sign is
unidentifiable, a Cavallo and two Jacks. From the list,
the Cavallo cannot belong to the Batons suit, but
must be of either Cups or Coins; the Jacks likewise
cannot belong to the Batons suit. Evidently there were
no triumph cards before the fire. The Swords are
curvedl-and intersecting; on the odd-numbered cards,
other than the Ace, there is no straight vertical Sword,
but unequal numbers on the two sides. To judge by
the surviving Cavallo of Swords, the general style of
the courts somewhat resembles that of the Rothschild
cards.(24)
______________
had been generally accepted, the claim was made that
Cicognara had painted the six cards in the Visconti-Sforza
pack that are not by Bembo. Now Miss Moakley was
convinced that the quotation was spurious, and hence that
there was no reason to suppose that Antonio Cicognara ever
painted any Tarot cards at all. Hence she advanced two
alternative hypotheses: that the initials "A. C." had been
added some time after 1831; or that the entire set was a
modern forgery. The second hypothesis is surely unlikely: a
forger would either have made the cards more unlike the
Visconti-Sforza ones, to reduce the suspicion of forgery, or
have made them exact copies, so as to throw doubt on which
was the original, which the copy. Whether Miss Moakley's
first hypothesis is correct, or whether the initials have some
altogether different significance, I cannot say. The
hypothesis that early playing cards might be forged is not,
as such, implausible: for an example of a forged copy of a
card from the Sola-Busca tarocchi, see D. Hoffmann, Die Welt
derSpielkarte, Leipzig, 1972, plate 23(a).
23. Die altesten Spielkarten, Strasbourg, 1937, footnote 10,
p. 102.
24. The Visconti-Sforza pack is the subject of a book by
Miss Gertrude Moakley, The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio
Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza Family, New York, 1966: all the
cards are illustrated and discussed in detail. It is also the
subject of Tarocchi: il mazzo visconteo di Bergamo e New York,
with text ty Italo Calvino and notes by S. Samek Ludovici,
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 71
As already remarked, of these nine packs, eight
contained both triumph cards and suit cards,
though in one case only one triumph card has
survived and in another only one suit card. Of
any fragmentary set not containing any card
distinctive of the Tarot pack, we can never say for
sure that it was not originally part of such a pack;
but, if the pack to which the Turin cards
belonged had been a Tarot pack, the chance that
all of the fourteen surviving cards should have
been among the fifty-two that could equally well
have come from a regular pack is very low
indeed, so that we can reasonably discount this
possibility. Nevertheless, the remaining eight
packs testify to the great popularity of tarocchi
among the fifteenth-century Italian nobility,
though we should bear in mind that the greater
scope given to an artist by the triumph subjects
_____________
Parma, 1969, which also gives illustrations of all the cards.
There is also a reproduction pack issued by the Grafica
Gutenberg, Bergamo; in the United States this is
distributed by U.S. Games Systems, Inc., New York. The
Visconti-Sforza, Visconti di Modrone and Brambilla packs
are illustrated in Emiliano di Parravicino, 'Three packs of
Italian Tarocco cards', Burlington Magazine, vol. Ill, 1903,
pp. 237-52. All three of these packs painted by Bonifacio
Bembo are discussed from an art-historical standpoint in
Pietro Toesca, La pittura e la miniatura nella Lombardia, Milan,
1912 (see pp. 626-7), reprinted Turin, 1966 (see p. 218); in
R. Longhi, 'La restituzione di un trittico d'arte cremonese
circa il 1460', Pinacoteca, vol. I, 1928, pp. 55-87, reprinted in
R. Longhi, Me pinxit, Florence, 1968; Fernanda Wittgens,
'Note ed aggiunte a Bonifacio Bembo', Rivista d'Arte, vol.
XVIII, 1936; and C. Baroni and S. Samek Ludovici, La
pittura lombarda del Quattrocento, Messina and Florence, 1952
(see pp. 91-116). The Visconti di Modrone pack is discussed
by Robert Steele, 'A notice of the Ludus Triumphorum and
some early Italian card games', Archaeologia, vol. 57, 1900,
pp. 185-200, and by Ron and Charlotte Decker, 'The
Visconti-Sforza cards in the Cary Collection', The Journal of
the Playing-Card Society, vol. IV, no. 2, November, 1975, pp.
27-32. Eight cards from it are illustrated in Catherine Perry
Hargrave, A History of Playing Cards, Boston and New York,
1930, reprinted New York, 1966, p. 226. The Brambilla
pack was completely illustrated in a booklet called 48 tarocchi
di Bonifacio Bembo, published by the Istituto Finanziario per
l'Arte, Milan, 1971; some of the captions are incorrect.
These and several other of the hand-painted Tarot packs
discussed in the text are discussed, with several illustrations,
in an excellent article by Robert Klein, 'Les tarots
enlumines du XVe siecle', L'Oeil, no. 145, 1967, pp. 11-17,
51-2. For illustrations of the Rothschild cards, see R. Klein,
op. cit., Detlef Hoffmann, Die Welt der Spielkarte, Leipzig,
1972, plates 17(a) and 20(b), and Leopoldo Cicognara,
Memorie spettanti alia Storia delta Calcografia, Prato, 1831, plate
XI. Many works illustrate and discuss the 'Charles VI'
tarots: see R. Klein, op. cit., an anonymous picture-book,
Antiche carte da tarocchi, Rome, 1961, plates III-V; William
[/size]
[new column]
must have created a strong incentive to a patron,
when ordering an expensive hand-painted set, to
specify a Tarot pack. Equally striking is the
constancy of the subjects used for the triumph
cards; despite the wide variety in their treatment,
we find always the same subjects as those known
from later packs, with the exception of three from
the Visconti di Modrone pack which will be
discussed below, and the possible exception of
the figure on the stag from the Catania pack. Of
the standard twenty-one subjects, the only one
not represented among any of the fifteenthcentury
Italian hand-painted cards surviving to us is the
Devil: but, since this figure appears on the
popular sets of tarocchi, printed by woodblock,
that have come down to us from the end of the
century, this should probably be ascribed to chance.
_____________
Andrew Chatto, Facts and Speculations on the Origin and History
of Playing Cards, London, 1848, p. 187; R. Merlin, L'Origine
des cartes à jouer, Paris, 1869, p. 89; H.-R. D'Allemagne, Les
Cartes à jouer du XIV au XXe siecle, vol. I, Paris, 1906, pp. 11,
13, 15, 181-2 and opposite pp. 12, 172, 414, and vol. II,
opposite pp. 4, 18; W.L. Schreiber, Die altesten Spielkarten,
Strasbourg, 1937, p. 101; and Eberhard Pinder, 'The
history of European playing cards', Graphis, vol. 11, 1955,
pp. 246-7. For the d'Este cards, see H.-R. D'Allemagne, op.
cit., vol. II, opposite pp. 12 and 38. Some cards from the
Catania pack, including the figure on the stag, are
illustrated in D. Hoffmann, op.cit., plate 18(a); see also R.
Klein, op. cit., and Antiche carte da tarocchi, plate I, and Guido
Libertini, II Castello Ursino e le raccolte artistiche e comunali di
Catania, Catania, 1937, pp. 112-13. The catalogue numbers
of the cards are 6425-51. One of the Turin cards is shown in
D. Hoffmann, op. cit., plate 18(b); see also R. Klein, op.
cit., Antiche carte da tarocchi, plate I, and W.LI Schreiber, op.
cit., p. 102. The Tozzi cards are all illustrated and discussed
in M. L. D'Otrange, 'Thirteen Tarot cards from the
Visconti-Sforza set', The Connoisseur, vol. CXXXIII, 1954,
pp. 54-60; see also Gertrude Moakley, op. cit., pp. 33-4, fn.
10, and Ronald Decker, 'Two Tarot studies related', part
III, Journal of the Playing-Card Society, vol. IV, no. 1, August,.
1975, pp. 46-52, particularly p. 50. R. Cavendish, The Tarot,
London, 1975, p. 140, illustrates in colour two Charles
VI cards. Kaplan, op. cit., gives illustrations of all
these set-s, as follows: (1) the Visconti di Modrone
pack, seven triumphs, pp. 88-92, and eleven suit cards,
pp. 92-5, with a colour plate of the Knight of Cups,
plate 9; (2) the Brambilla pack, both triumphs, p. 96,
and ten suit cards, pp. 97-8; (3) the Visconti-Sforza
pack, all the cards, pp. 36, 65-86, 285, with a colour plate of
the Bagatto, plate IV; (4) the Charles VI pack, all the cards,
pp. 112-16, with a colour plate of the Love card,, plate 2; (5)
the Rothschild pack, the one triumph, p. 121, and eight
court cards, including that at Bassano, pp. 120-2; (6) the
d'Este pack, all the cards, pp. 117-18; (7) the Catania pack,
two triumphs, p. 109; (8) the Tozzi pack, all the cards, pp.
100-2; and (9) the Turin pack, all the cards, p. 119.
72 Part I: History and Mystery
Besides these nine packs, there are a number of
others of which fewer cards have survived, as
follows.
(10) A set of five, consisting of four numeral cards
and one triumph, the Emperor, was acquired in 1974
from a Milanese dealer by the Fournier Playing-Card
Museum at Vitoria in Spain. Like the Tozzi cards, the
designs are based very exactly on the corresponding
cards in the Visconti-Sforza pack; the one notable
departure from the Visconti-Sforza designs is the
depiction of a three-tiered tower on the Coin in the
Ace of that suit, a heraldic emblem of the Gonzaga
family, Marquises of Mantua, according to Mr
Decker. The cards have black backs and measure 171 x
87 mm., as close as makes no difference to the
dimensions of the Tozzi cards (a discrepancy of a
millimetre or two in the measurements of different
cards from the same pack, or of the same card
measured by different people, is ndt significant). If the
backs of the Tozzi cards are also black, there is
therefore a possibility that these five cards belong to the
same pack.
(11) There are four numeral cards, one from each
suit, in the Correr Museum in Venice: the sword on
the Ace of Swords is encircled by a crown and has the
unusual feature of piercing a bleeding heart. The
cards are precisely similar in style to the numeral
cards of the Rothschild set, but, although there is no
overlap between them, they cannot actually be from
the same pack, since the dimensions do not tally (180
x 93 mm. for the Correr cards, 188 x 90 mm. - or,
according to Hoffmann, 186 x 93 mm. - for the
Rothschild ones).
(12) Another set of four cards, bought in Milan
before 1915; is in the Victoria and Albert Museum in
London: it includes two triumph cards - Death and
the Star - and two suit cards - the Jack of Coins and
the Ace of Cups. The Jack of Coins corresponds
almost exactly in design with that in the Visconti-
Sforza pack, and is in a better state of preservation: as
far as I am able to see, judging from this card alone, it
could perfectly well be by Bembo. The other cards,
however, do not in any way resemble the Visconti-
Sforza cards (though it will be recalled that the Star in
the Visconti-Sforza pack as we now have it is not by
Bembo, so that it is conceivable that the Victoria and
Albert Star resembles one by Bembo that is now lost).
Death is shown as a skeleton wielding a scythe and
wearing a cardinal's hat and robe, standing on a
black-and-white chequered floor and with a scroll
coming from his mouth saying 'Son fine'. The Ace of
Cups depicts the Cup as a fountain with a vertical
arrow between the two jets which spring from it; the
stem of the Cup bears the inscription 'nec spe nec
metu', which was the heraldic motto of Isabella
d'Este, and the Cup stands on grass; there are two
putti at its foot, one beaming a shield with the Colleoni
[new column]
arms. (25) The cards measure 167 x 85 mm. I know of no
connection between Isabella d'Este and the Colleoni
family; the cards could plausibly have been painted
for the famous condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni (1400-
1476), who was closely associated with Francesco
Sforza at certain stages of his career; but Isabella
d'Este, marchioness of Mantua, seems a more likely
recipient.
(13) Three isolated cards should probably be
grouped together. One is a Popess in the Fournier
Museo de Naipes at Vitoria. This card was bought at
the" Same "time" and from ' t ie "same~ dealer as the five
cards described under (10), but is slightly, though
visibly, smaller, measuring 170 x 85 mm.; it has a red
back, while the other five have black ones. It is a copy
of the Popess in the Visconti-Sforza pack, though not
an exact copy; the Popess's tiara, on this card,
projects further from her head. The second card is a
King of Cups in the collection of Mr N. Biedak of Los
Angeles, very closely resembling the Tozzi King of
Cups, but seen in right profile, like the Visconti-
Sforza one, not in left profile, like that of the Tozzi set;
according to Mrs Wayland, it measures 170 x 86 mm.
The third card is a Jack of Batons in the collection of
Signora C. Marzoli of Milan, measuring 170 x
85 mmj;s;and closely resembling the corresponding'
Visconti-Sforza card. I do not know the colour of the
backs of these last two cards; if it is red, it seems
probable that all three come from the same pack,
possibly one by the artist responsible for the Tozzi set.
Kaplan (op. cit., p. 103) mistakenly groups the Popess
with the other five Fournier cards.
(14) The Guildhall, London, has two pairs of handpainted
fifteenth-century cards, which are of very perceptibly
different widths, and do not come from the same pack.
The wider of these two pairs (138 x 72 mm.) consists of
the Aces of Cups and of Swords.
_____________
25. As often in heraldry, the device on these arms
represents a pun on the name of the bearer, though in this
case, one unlikely in more modern times: it consists of three
pairs of testicles (coglioni) which, by a euphemism, later
came to be called, and shown as, inverted hearts. The shield
on the Ace of Cups is parted per fess, not, as in all other
examples of these arms known to me, per pale. Kaplan, op.
cit., p. 99, remarks on the presence of a precipice at the very
bottom of the card on the Ace of Cups; it is also visible on
the Jack of Coins, though not present on the Visconti-Sforza
one. As Kaplan observes (pp. 70, 72), such a precipice is a
feature of four of the six cards not by Bembo in the Visconti-
Sforza pack, Temperance, the Star, the Moon and the Sun.
It is, moreover, to be found on three of the Tozzi cards,
Temperance, the Wheel of Fortune and the Jack of Cups.
Kaplan remarks (pp. 60, 106) that such a precipice is to be
found in the painting at the Carthusian monastery near
Pavia of Christ on the way to Calvary by Ambrogio
Bergognone (active from 1481, died 1523), but draws no
conclusion from the fact. Kaplan gives the inscription on the
Death card incorrectly as Sanfine (p. 104), which he takes to
mean 'Without end'; the first word is Son, meaning 'I am'.
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 73
The former shows a strong affinity with the Victoria
and Albert card: the cup is again a fountain with
vertical arrow between two cascades of water, but
stands on a chequered floor. There is a blank scroll
behind the cup; an odd detail is a small anchor in the
top left-hand corner of the card and a small straight
sword in its top right-hand corner, looking for all the
world like suit-signs, which they obviously cannot be.
The Ace of Swords shows a short sword encircled by a
crowned serpent biting its tail; behind the sword is a
scroll with the words 'Vim vi', and above it a sun with
rays and a face, with the letters MIA above the sun.
'Vim vi' is a motto borne by various Italian families,
but I have not been able to discover one for whom
playing cards are likely to have been painted; the
motto is oddly misread by Kaplan (op. cit., p. I l l ) as
'Arm(o)ur'.
(15) The narrower Guildhall pair (141 x 66 mm.)
comprises one triumph card, the World, which is a
very close copy, laterally reversed, of that in the
Visconti-Sforza pack, and an elaborate card that may
dubiously be identified as a Jack of Batons. This
second card, which Kaplan (ibid.) mistakenly groups
with the wider pair (14), shows a crossbowman
shooting at a heron over water; the archer wears a flat
cap, there are trees behind him, and the heron is
standing by some rushes. Over the right shoulder of
the archer, not attached to anything, is a vertical
cudgel, resembling a Baton of the so-called Spanish
type. It is true that on some early Italian cards,
including the d'Este tarocchi at Yale (6), the Batons
can be rather knobbly, but, with the exception to be
mentioned below, there is nothing else at all like this;
besides, in almost all other cases, the court figure
holds his suit-sign in his hand. Moreover, the whole
design seems rather German in style than Italian. The
Guildhall catalogue records both pairs as having been
found in an old chest in Seville.
(16) A pair of cards at the Muzeum Narodowego in
Warsaw, bought in 1946 from the Potocki collection,
are both court cards, the Cavalier of Coins and the
Queen of Cups; the presence of the Queen shows that
they must have come from a Tarot pack. They show
no especial stylistic resemblance to any other of the
cards here listed.
(17) A very fine pair of Jacks, of Swords and Coins,
is at Hanover (Niedersachsisches Landesmuseum):
the style is quite unlike Bembo's, but the Coin held by
the Jack of that suit bears the Visconti-Sforza serpent.
(18) An isolated card, the Jack of Coins, is in the
collection of Signor Francesco Andreoletti of Milan,
and is a copy, though laterally reversed, of the
corresponding card in the Visconti-Sforza pack; its
measurements (140 x 66 mm,) tally closely with those
of the narrower Guildhall pair.
(19) By far the most puzzling of all is the set of nine
cards known as the Goldschmidt cards, again from
[new column]
the name of a former owner, at the Spielkarten
Museum in Leinfelden. One is a 5 of Batons; the
Batons appear in exactly the 'Spanish' form and
arrangement. Another is an Ace of Cups: as in the
wider Guildhall pair and the Victoria and Albert set,
the cup is a fountain, with two cascades of water and a
vertical arrow between them; as on the Guildhall
card, it stands on a chequered floor. The stem of the
cup is encircled by a serpent biting its tail, like that on
the Ace of Swords in the Guildhall pair, although
uncrowned and facing in the opposite direction. A
third card is surely to be identified as the Ace of
Swords, although Detlef Hoffmann has suggested that
it be equated with the Death card of the Tarot pack. It
shows a short sword, very similar to that on the
Guildhall Ace of Swords, to the blade of which is
chained a skull and the hilt of which has a pair of
crossbones superimposed. A fourth card shows a
crowned dolphin: probably this is just a heraldic
device, and the card, like the Tozzi card showing the
Visconti-Sforza serpent, was not meant to be Used in
play. The remaining five cards are a complete
mystery, (a) One shows a falconer, standing on a
chequered floor, with a little dog at his feet, a bird on
his hand and a hoop suspended from his shoulders;
floating above his shoulder is a toothed wheel,
(b) Another shows a sun, with rays and a face, very
like that on the Guildhall Ace of Swords, above a
chequered floor on which stand three metallic objects
bearing respectively, the letters a, m, c (perhaps
heraldically conventionalised mountains, or perhaps
something quite different), (c) A third shows a
bishop, again standing on a chequered floor; above
his shoulder is an anchor, exactly like that on the
Guildhall Ace of Cups, (d) A fourth shows a lady
wearing a crown, holding a model of a castle and
standing on the usual chequered floor, her gown held
by a lady in waiting; W.L. Schreiber takes her to be
an Empress, (e) The final card has no chequered
floor, and shows a lady wearing a crown and kneeling
at a prie-dieu, with a maidservant in attendance;
Schreiber identifies her as a Dogaressa, with what
right I do not know.
(20) In view of the falconer on one of the
Goldschmidt cards, it is worth mentioning also a
single, very large, card (177 x 95 mm.) showing a
falconer, also at the Spielkarten Museum at
Leinfelden. In 1955 Eberhard Pinder established that
this card was a forgery, though he did not publish this
finding. However, the card is so unlike any other
known to survive that it is probable that the forger was
imitating some original that has since disappeared; he
would hardly have gone to the trouble of producing a
forgery bearing no resemblance to any authentic
prototype.(26)
_______________
26 For colour illustrations of eight of the nine Goldschmidt
cards, see D. Hoffmann, op. cit., plate 19; for discussion
of them, see pp. 18 and 67 of the same work, the article by E.
74 Part I: History and Mystery
One of the striking facts is how frequently the
Visconti-Sforza cards were copied, sometimes
only for certain cards in a pack. It is not
especially surprising that the cards of a famous
pack should have served as a model for later
artists; but it is rather notable that it seems
always to have been the Visconti-Sforza pack
which played this role, and not, for example, the
Brambilla or the Visconti di Modrone one. There
might be suspicions of the authenticity of some of
these cards; but such suspicions could not be
founded on the mere fact that Visconti-Sforza
cards have been copied, since there is surely no
basis for suspecting the genuineness either of the
Victoria and Albert cards (12) of of the narrower
Guildhall pair (15). On the whole, I am disposed
to believe that nos. (1) to (19) are all genuine.
It is obvious that the Goldschmidt cards pose a
severe problem. It is not apparent, from the cards
____________
Pinder in Graphis, vol. 11, 1955, p. 243, the same author's
Charta Lusoria, Biberach an der Riss, 1961, p. 89, W.L.
Schreiber, op. cit., p. 100, and R. Klein, op. cit. For a colour
illustration of the single 'Falconer' card, see E. Pinder's
Graphis article, p. 243. Pinder's later judgment that this card
was a forgery was based on a chemical analysis of the paint by
the Doerner Institut in Munich, backed by the stylistic
judgment of Dr Degenhard, of Munich, and others; I owe this
information to Frau Margot Dietrich, of the Leinfelden
Museum. For the Correr cards, see R. Merlin, op. cit., p. 66
and plates 8 and 9. For the Warsaw cards, see
Stanislaw Sawicky, 'Dwie wtoskie karty "tarocchi" w
zbiorach Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie', Roczwik
Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie, vol. II, 1957,
pp. 605-24. A colour illustration of one of the wider pair of
Guildhall cards (the Ace of Swords) is in Roger Tilley,
Playing Cards, London, 1967, p. 9. For a colour illustration of
the Hanover cards, see J»A.S. Morrison, 'Gamblers' printed
art', The Penrose Annual, vol. 53, London, 1959, p 54. Three of
the Victoria & Albert cards are illustrated, two in colour, in
R. Cavendish, op. cit., pp. 126 and 140. All the cards in sets
(10) to (19), but not the Falconer card (no. 20), are
illustrated in Kaplan, op. cit., as follows: (10), p. 103; (11), p.
123; (12), p. 104; (13), pp. 103, 105; (14), p. 111; (15), pp.
104, 111; (16), p. 109; (17), p. 108; (18), p. 105; and (19), p.
110. Mr Decker cites, as a reference for the Gonzaga tower,
The Complete Paintings of Mantegna, ed. N. Garavaglia,
New York, 1967, p. 104. Of the cards in sets (l) to (20), those
I have not personally seen are the ones in Paris, namely the
Charles VI and Rothschild sets (nos. 4 and 5), those at Turin,
Warsaw and Hanover (nos 9, 16 and 17) and those in private
collections (thirteen of the Visconti-Sforza set in the Colleoni
collection in Bergamo, the Marzoli and Biedak cards in set
no. 13, the Tozzi cards, no. 8, and the Andreoletti card, no.
18). For these I have relied on photographs and on
information, including measurements, very kindly supplied
by Dr and Mrs Harold Wayland, of Pasadena, California-,
who many years ago undertook a comprehensive study of
fifteenth-century Italian hand-painted cards, but regrettably
never published the results of their findings; their help,
without which I should not have known of some of these sets,
has been invaluable to me.
[new column]
themselves, that they are Tarot cards at all: not
one of them can be identified with any assuranceas
one of the Tarot triumphs. Hoffmann equates
the falconer (a) with the Bagatto; but the single
'Falconer' card (no. 20) resembles any ordinary
Bagatto even less, and so makes this
identification doubtful. Hoffmann also equates
card (b) with the Sun of the Tarot pack; but
since the very similar sun on the Guildhall Ace of
Swords clearly does not determine the identity of
the card, it may be that, on this Goldschmidt
card, the sun is again decorative, and that the
identifying symbol is the three mysterious objects
standing on the floor. The bishop might be a
replacement for the Pope: on a sheet taken from a
woodblock, mentioned below, a female bishop
evidently substitutes for the Popess. Schreiber
might be right in saying that the lady with the
model castle is an Empress; but none of these
identifications is compelling, and the lady at the
prie-dieu remains completely enigmatic.
There is, nevertheless, a reason for regarding
the Goldschmidt cards as part of some very
unusual Tarot pack. Their iconographical links
are with the wider Guildhall pair; but there is
some reason to suppose that the narrower
Guildhall pair comes from the same pack, which
must, if so, have been a Tarot pack, since one
member of that pair is the World. The
dimensions of the narrower Guildhall pair (141 x
66 mm.) coincide as nearly as may be with
those of the Goldschmidt cards (140 x 66 mm.).
Where the wider Guildhall cards have
unpatterned gold backgrounds, the narrower
ones have gold backgrounds with patterns very
similar to those on the Goldschmidt cards. The
pattern does not seem to be exactly the same on
any two of the Goldschmidt cards, nor does the
pattern on any one of them tally precisely with
that on either of the narrower Guildhall cards;
but the pattern on one is very similar to that on
Goldschmidt card (b) (the card with the sun),
and that on the other has a clear resemblance to
those on Goldschmidt cards (a) and (e) (the
falconer and the lady at the prie-dieu). Both the
narrow Guildhall cards have black borders, just
as do the Goldschmidt cards. The only
iconographical resemblances are the Spanishstyle
Batons on the Goldschmidt 5 of that suit and
the exactly similar one on the Guildhall card
presumably to be identified as the Jack of that
suit, and the caps worn by the latter figure and the
Goldschmidt falconer. These points do not
together make the assignment of the two sets to
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 75
the same original pack more than a plausible
conjecture: but since, in several of the
Goldschmidt cards and in the Guildhall Jack of
Batons, if that is what it is, we have the only
examples from these fifteenth-century handpainted
cards that present difficulties of
identification, with the sole exception of the
Catania figure on the stag, it is a tempting one.
If the Goldschmidt cards do come from a Tarot
pack, then they testify to the existence in the
fifteenth century of a type of such pack
employing the 'Spanish' form of the Latin suitsigns
and deviating greatly from the norm in the
representation of the triumph subjects, and
probably also in the selection of those subjects,
but yet having links with tarocchi of a more usual
kind, as exemplified by the Victoria and Albert
cards and by the Visconti-Sforza pack. The
implications of this possibility will be discussed
in more detail below.
The Goldschmidt cards, and their relation to
the two Guildhall pairs and to the Victoria and
Albert cards, do indeed pose a difficult problem
which is far from being solved. But if we set the
Goldschmidt cards on one side, and, with them,
the single Falconer card, almost all is plain
sailing: the smaller sets, (10) to (18), simply
confirm the impression derived from the nine
packs of which thirteen or more cards have
survived. There are a few problems about where
certain of the cards were painted or at whose
order: but their identity and the composition of
the packs from which they came are for the most
part unproblematic. Making the suggested
assumptions that the Marzoli and Biedak cards
belong with the Fournier Popess, and the
Bassano card with the Rothschild ones, we have
nine sets of from one to eight cards, of which five
come from Tarot packs and the other four could
be from regular packs. Of the five from Tarot
packs, all have some suit cards, and four have one
or more triumphs. Moreover, when it consists of
only four or fewer cards, the chance that a set
which could have come from a regular pack
actually came from a Tarot pack is significant. If
we take the denomination of a surviving card to
be random, there is of course a 2:1 chance that a
single card from a Tarot pack will be a suit card
other than a Queen. The chance that both of two
cards will be suit cards other than Queens is over
44 per cent, and, even with four cards, the chance
that none of them will be distinctive of the Tarot
pack is nearly 19 per cent. But even if we suppose
that every one of our sets from (1) to (18) that
[new column]
could have formed part of a regular pick did in
fact do so, there are, if the suggested
identifications are accepted, only five such sets
altogether as against thirteen from Tarot packs.
It is plain that the great majority of the playingcard
packs painted by hand for the Italian
nobility of the fifteenth century were tarocchi.
The Goldschmidt cards aside, the four more
fragmentary sets which include triumph cards -
the five Fournier ones (10), the four Victoria and
Albert ones (12), the Fournier-Biedak-Marzoli
trio (13) and the narrower Guildhall pair (15) -
confirm our previous impression that the
triumph subjects, though not their
representation, were standardised from an early
date. This is reinforced by the earliest detailed
reference to the Tarot pack, a sermon against
gaming from an anonymous manuscript volume
of sermons by a Dominican friar. The volume
was formerly in the possession of Robert Steele,
and is now at the Museum of Art in Cincinnati.
The bulk of the sermon was published by Steele
in his article of 1900, (27) in which he dates the
volume to between 1450 and 1470; in his
subsequent article of 1901,(28) he gives the date,
more cautiously, as between 1450 and 1480. In
this sermon, the preacher lists the twenty-one
triumph cards, together with the Matto, as if
they formed an invariable set: the subjects are
precisely the usual ones, though not in exactly
the. order most familiar to us. The same selection
of triumph subjects is confirmed by many literary
references from the sixteenth century.(29) It is
found, likewise, on certain surviving sheets of
cards, printed from wood blocks and made for
the popular market, dating from the end of the
fifteenth century. For our purpose, the sheets
showing regular packs are not of importance: I
shall list only those four which show tarocchi.
_______________
(21) Three coloured sheets for one such pack are in
the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and show, in
whole or part, twenty of the twenty-one standard
triumph cards.
(22) A sheet for another such pack, showing all
twenty-one triumphs and three Queens, is in the
Rosenwald Collection in the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, and another copy, much less well
preserved, in the Spielkarten Museum in Leinfelden.
The Rosenwald Collection has two other sheets,
probably though not quite certainly from the same
pack, showing suit cards.
__________
27 See footnote 2.
28 See footnote 15.
29 See Chapter 20.
76 Part I: History and Mystery
(23) Yet another sheet, showing six triumph cards,
is in the Rothschild Collection at the Louvre. A
further sheet of six triumph cards, without doubt from
the same pack, is at the Bibliotheque de l'Ecole
Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris.
Together they show the Wheel, the Chariot, the
Hermit, the Hanged Man, Death, the Devil, the
Tower, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, the World and
the Judgment or Angel.
(24) Finally, a sheet showing two numeral cards, a
fragment that is probably the Fool, and, in whole or
part, fifteen triumph cards, is at the Beinecke Library
at Yale, having been part of the Cary Collection.
Among these, there are certainly identifiable the
Bagatto, the Empress, the Emperor, Temperance,
Fortitude, the Wheel, the Chariot, the Devil, the
Tower, the Star, the Moon and the Sun: there are also
fragmentary cards that could be the Pope and Love
cards, and a female Bishop who presumably replaces
the Popess. Several cards resemble the corresponding
ones in the Tarot de Marseille pattern.(30)
A discussion of the probable places of origin of
these various popular Tarot packs will be
postponed until Chapter 20. A detailed analysis
of all the cards in the hand-painted packs (1) to
(19) and on these four sets of sheets will be found
at the end of the present chapter.
There are two late fifteenth-century exceptions
_____________
30. A fragmentary card on one of the Metropolitan
Museum sheets is probably the Moon, but might be the
Star; the other of this pair is missing. Their catalogue
numbers are 26.101.5, 26.101.4 and 31.54.159; a
composite photograph of the last two is reproduced by
Kaplan, op. cit., p. 125. The catalogue number of the
Rosenwald sheet is R 19823; the two other sheets with suit
cards are B 19821-2. See Boris Mandrovsky, 'Early Italian
playing-cards in the Rosenwald Collection, the National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D . C , Journal of the Playing-
Card Society, vol. I, no. 2, November 1972, pp. 1 and 8.
The catalogue number of the Rothschild sheet is 3804.
The cards shown are the Chariot, Death, the Devil, the
Tower, the Star and the Moon. See W.L. Schreiber, op. cit.,
p. 104, where, however, the sheet is. incorrectly stated to
show the Sun instead of the Star. The catalogue number of
the sheet in the Cary Collection is 1-1005. The cards
definitely identifiable are the 7 and 8 of Batons, the Bagatto,
the Emperor, a female bishop presumably representing or
replacing the Popess, Temperance, Fortitude, the Chariot,
the Wheel, the Devil, the Tower, the Star, the Moon and the
Sun. There are also fragments probably to be identified as
the Fool, the Pope and Love. Half of the Rosenwald sheet
with the triumph cards is illustrated in Mandrovsky's article,
and the whole of it by Kaplan, pp. 130-1, in both cases
printed the wrong way round; the Rothschild sheet is
illustrated by Hoffmann, op. cit., plate 14(b), and it and the
Beaux Arts sheet by Kaplan, pp! 128-9. The Cary sheet has
not, so far as I know, previously been reproduced.
[new column]
to the general rule that the triumph subjects are
always the same; these both substitute individual_
classical and Biblical characters for the
generalised figures of the usual Tarot triumphs.
One is the celebrated Sola-Busca tarocchi, a
copper-engraved pack of which several examples
are extant; it was made in Venice by a Ferrarese
artist in 1491, or possibly in 1523.(31) It has the
usual number of cards in each suit, and the suit-
signs are standard; but the numeral cards are
very fancifully executed, the suit-signs not being
displayed in the usual manner, but worked into a
picture containing one or more figures. The court
cards are identified with various historical
characters, whose names are shown on the cards.
There is a Matto, but the twenty-one triumph
cards, which are numbered from I to XXI, again
depict characters of classical and Biblical history,
their names being shown on the cards; there is no
correspondence with the usual subjects.(32) The
other is a pack designed by the poet Matteo
Maria Boiardo (1441-1494). It was to have four
suits, made up of the usual fourteen cards each,
but with the non-standard suit-signs of Whips,
Eyes,""Arrows and Vases; in addition, it was to
have a Fool (Folle) and twenty-one non-standard
triumphs. Again, there was no correspondence
between their subjects, each of which
represented some quality, such as patience,
modesty, etc., and was symbolised by an
appropriate historical character, and the
standard ones.(33) Both these are evidently
_____________
31. One card bears the inscription 'Col permesso del
Senato Veneto nell'anno ab urbe condita MLXX' ('With
the permission of the Senate of Venice in the year 1070 after
the foundation of the city'). A traditional date for the
foundation of the city of Venice is 421, yielding the date
1491 for the cards; but W.L. Schreiber, op. cit., p. 105,
remarks that an alternative date is 453, yielding 1523 for the
cards.
32. D. Hoffmann, op. cit., p. 68, gives Ferrara as the place
of origin of this pack. For discussion and illustrations, see
Arthur Mayger Hind, Early Italian Engraving, London, vol. I,
1938, pp. 241-7, and vol. IV, 1938, plates 370-93. Kaplan,
pp. 126-7, illustrates twenty triumphs and three court cards.
33. Each card was to bear a descriptive tercet composed by
Boiardo; there were also to be two extra cards, bearing
sonnets by him. The resulting poems, consisting of the two
sonnets and the tercets arranged to make five capitoli, one for
each suit and one for the triumphs, were printed separately
in 1523 in a volume published in Venice and containing
poems by various authors. They were reprinted, under the
title 'I Tarocchi', together with a previously unpublished
commentary by Pier Antonio Viti da Urbino (c. 1470-1500),
by Angelo Solerti in Le Poesi Volgari e Latine di M. M. Boiardo,
Bologna 1894, pp. 313-38, with notes on pp. xxxii-xxxv,
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 77
conscious departures from the norm: they in no
way call in question the existence of a norm. The
standard composition of the Tarot pack was
plainly fixed at a very early stage in its history,
despite occasional experiments such as the Sola-
Busca tarocchi and those of Boiardo. Later, as we
shall see, a number of variant forms developed;
but, in fifteenth-century Italy, the number and
identity of the cards of the Tarot pack was
completely determinate.
The important exception to this is the Visconti
di Modrone pack, which we have yet to describe.
It diverges from the norm in two ways, both in
respect of the suit cards and in respect of the
triumphs. Among the sixty-seven surviving cards
are all forty numeral cards save the 3 of Coins.
However, there are six different denominations of
court card, a male and a female one of each rank:
King and Queen, Knight and Dame (or male and
female Cavalier), and Page (or Jack) and Maid.
Although there is no suit in which all six court
cards survive, they are distributed so randomly
______________
and again in A. Zottoli (ed.), Tutte le opere di Matteo Maria
Boiardo, Milan, 1936-7, vol. 2, pp. 702-16, with notes pp. 748-9.
The title 'I Tarocchi' is not Boiardo's; neither he nor Viti uses
the word tarocchi, but, instead, trionfi (sometimes for the
twenty-one triumph cards, sometimes for the pack as a
whole). The suits represent four passions: love (Arrows),
jealousy (Eyes), fear (Whips) and hope (Vases). Each court
card depicts an appropriate Biblical or classical character.
The Fool (called by Viti macto) is called il Mondo (the
World), a reversal of the usual practice by which the World
is the highest triumph card; each of the actual triumph
cards represents some quality, such as patience, modesty,
etc., and is symbolised by an appropriate historical
character; there is no correspondence with the usual
triumph subjects. Viti's commentary is addressed to a lady
of the court of Urbino; he expresses the hope that his
patroness will have a pack made in accordance with the
designs he describes. She must have done so, since Carlo
Lozzi, 'Le Antiche Carte da Giuoco', La Bibliofilia, vol. I,
1900, pp. 37-46 and 181-6, mentions just such a pack,
though missing all the court cards and the Fool, and R.
Merlin, L'Origine des cartesà jouer, Paris, 1869, pp. 94-6 a'nd
plate 28, speaks of another copy, missing five court cards,
seven numeral cards, the Fool and all the triumph cards.
(Merlin naturally does not recognise his pack as a Tarot
pack, and Lozzi fails to connect his with Boiardo's poem.)
The pack illustrated by Merlin was very probably identical
with one sold at Christie's in 1971 to Signor Carlo Alberto
Chiesa of Milan; this was a pack printed from wood blocks,
and also missing the Fool and all the triumph cards, as well as
a few court cards and numeral cards. For more illustrations
and further details, see M. Dummett, 'Notes on a fifteenthcentury
pack of cards from Italy', Journal of the Playing-Card
Society, vol. I, no. 2, February 1973, pp. 1-6. The pack is now
in an anonymous Swiss collection.
[new column]
as to make it impossible to suppose otherwise
than that there were originally all six in each
suit: there survive the King, Queen, Dame arid
Maid of Swords, the Queen, Dame, Page and
Maid of Batons, the King, Knight, Page and
Maid of Cups and the King, Queen, Knight,
Dame and Maid of Coins. Of the eleven surviving
triumph cards, eight represent standard subjects
- the Empress, the Emperor, Love, Fortitude, the
Chariot, Death, Judgment and the World. The
other three cards, however, represent the three
theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity,
subjects which do not, of course, occur in the
ordinary Tarot pack.
The Visconti di Modrone pack is the only
Tarot pack, of any kind, in which the suits include
court cards other than the usual King, Queen,
Cavalier and either Jack or Maid. There must
have been sixty-four suit cards in all: how many
triumphs there were originally, and whether a
Fool was included, it is impossible to say.
Ronald Decker has suggested that there may
originally have been only fourteen triumphs, and
no Fool, so as to make up the usual total of 78
cards;(34) but the total number of cards in the pack
_____________
34. Letter to the Journal of the Playing-Card Society, vol. Ill,
no. 1, August, 1974, pp. 23-4, 48; see also letter by M.
Dummett, ibid., vol. Ill, no. 2, November, 1974, pp. 27-31,
and Ronald Decker, 'Two Tarot studies related', part III,
ibid., vol. IV, no. 1, August, 1975, pp. 46-52 (esp. p. 50). Mr
Decker presumes that the Visconti di Modrone pack had
only 78 cards, like other Tarot packs; since it must have had
64 suit cards, that leaves only 14 triumph cards and no
Fool. There can, on this reasoning, have been no Fool, since
Mr Decker accepts my view that the three, missing Virtues
must originally have been present, and, if we add these to
the eleven surviving triumphs, we already obtain 14, and
there is no roorfl for the Fool. Mr Decker then takes the very
illogical step of arguing that, since there are only 13
(surviving) triumph cards in the Visconti-Sforza pack that
were painted by Bembo, perhaps these, together with the
Fool, were all that the pack originally contained. This is
illogical because in this pack there are only the usual 56 suit
cards, so that he is suggesting an original pack of only 70
cards, whereas the original premiss was that all Tarot packs
had 78 cards. He attempts to rescue his hypothesis by
conjecturing that the Visconti-Sforza pack had originally six
court cards in each suit; but this is obviously very special
pleading. On his hypothesis, there would, besides the suit
cards, have been seven cards in common between the two
packs: the Empress, the Emperor, Love, Justice, the
Chariot, Death and the Judgment. Seven of the triumphs
present in the Visconti di Modrone pack would then have
been removed, namely the World and the six Virtues other
than Justice, when the Visconti-Sforza pack was painted, to
make room for the Fool, the Bagatto, the Popess, the Pope,
the Wheel of Fortune, the Hermit (which originally
78 Part I: History and Mystery
is unlikely to have been seen as a significant
feature. Since four of the stock set of seven
Virtues were included among the triumphs, it
seems probable that the other three were also:
Temperance and Justice, which belong to the
standard list of triumph subjects, and Prudence,
which does not. It is just possible, on the other
hand, that what was held constant was the ratio
between the number of triumphs and the
number of cards in each suit, which, in the 78-
card Tarot pack, is 3:2; if this was also so in the
Visconti di Modrone pack, it would have had
twenty-four triumph cards, in which case it could
have contained all save one of the usual subjects,
making, if the Fool was included, a pack of 89
cards altogether; indeed, if we do not suppose
that it included Prudence, it could have had all of
the usual subjects.
However this may be, the divergence of the
Visconti di Modrone pack from the norm, both
as to the number of suit cards and as to the
subjects, if not the number, of the triumph cards,
strongly suggests that it dates from an early
period when the Tarot pack had not yet assumed
its definitive form. In fact, it is probably the
earliest of all the examples of that pack that have
survived to us. It has usually been thought to
have been made for Filippo Maria Visconti,
which would date it to 1447, the year of his death,
at the latest. All three of the Bembo packs
bear emblems and mottoes of the Visconti family,
but that does not prove that they were made
for Filippo Maria, since Francesco Sforza,
his successor, had in 1441 married his
illegitimate daughter by Agnese del Maino,
Bianca Maria Visconti, and had assumed the
name Visconti-Sforza and, with it, many of the
_______________
represented Time) and the Hanged Man. Later, when the
number of triumphs was increased by eight, this was done
by restoring, from the original set of subjects, the World and
two of the Virtues, Temperance and Fortitude, but not the
other four, and adding the Devil, the Tower, the Star, the
Moon and the Sun. All this makes so little sense, and is so
grossly implausible, that the hypothesis that demands it is
not to be entertained. What is impressive about the
fifteenth-century Tarot packs that have come down to us is
not the variation in subjects, but, on the contrary, their
invariance, given the fact that no pack has survived
complete. Certainly we must allow that, after the Visconti di
Modrone pack was made, four of the seven Virtues were
removed; the advantage of the hypothesis that that pack
contained twenty-four triumph cards (not including the
Fool as a triumph) is that it gives a reason for the removal of
at least three of them when the number was reduced to
twenty-one.
[new column]
Visconti devices. It is indeed, virtually certain
that the Visconti-Sforza pack was made for_
Francesco Sforza. One reason given by Robert
Steele for taking the Visconti di Modrone pack
to have been made for Filippo Maria is
admittedly flimsy. He thought that the Love
card, which shows a man and woman joining
hands before a tent above which flies a winged
and blindfold Cupid, carried a reference to
Filippo Maria's second marriage. Filippo Maria
divorced his iirst wife,_ Beatrice di Tenda, in
Italian style, having her executed for adultery in
1418; in 1428, he married Maria of Savoy,
although the marriage was probably never
consummated. The tent on the Love card is hung
with shields, alternately showing the Visconti
serpent and a white cross on a red ground, which
Steele took to be the arms of Savoy. But, if the
cards were painted by Bembo, an attribution
questioned by no one, they cannot have been
made as early as 1428, and it is unlikely that
there should have been any allusion to this
unfortunate marriage at any later date; Ronald
and Charlotte Decker identify the shield with the
cross" as the arms of the Principality of Pavia, a
title held by all the-Visconti and Sforza dukes.35
The principal reason for thinking that: the cards
were painted for Filippo Maria is, however, that
the numeral cards of the Coins suit, other than
the Ace and 2, show actual coins, the gold florin
of Filippo Maria, bearing the letters 'FI MA' and
made by the imprint of an actual die; the same is
true of all the eleven surviving cards of the Coins
suit in the Brambilla pack, but not of the
Visconti-Sforza pack. The Deckers surmise,
instead, that they were made by means of 'seals
of the sort used to attach wax imprints to official
documents'; (36) this strikes me as rather unlikely,
in view of the fact that both sides of the coin are
shown: it does not seem probable that there were
two distinct seals, corresponding exactly to the
two sides of the coin. The figures on the court
cards of Swords in the Visconti di Modrone pack
bear a gold fruit on their costumes, which the
Deckers identify as a quince, a Sforza emblem;
but this need not imply that the cards were
painted after Filippo Maria's death, since
_________________
35. Ron and Charlotte Decker, 'The Visconti-Sforza cards
in the Cary Collection', Journal of the Playing-Card Society, vol.
IV, no. 2, November 1975, pp. 27-32; see p. 29.
36 Ibid., p. 31. The Deckers wish to prove that the pack
was painted for Francesco Sforza, not for Filippo Maria
Visconti.
[Transcriber's note: In The Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards Dummett says that the coin-imprints on the cards are too large to be from actual coins. Hence they are from dies. On THF Marco shows that the designs on the cards do not in fact correspond to known coins. I wold add that the "rearing-horse" design remained essentially the same since the time of Gian Galeazzo, only the name of the reigning duke being changed.
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 79
Francesco Sforza was in his service, as well as
being married to his daughter. The probability
seems therefore to be that both the Visconti di
Modrone and the Brambilla packs were painted
for Filippo Maria Visconti, the former being the
earlier of the two and dating from the earliest
stage of existence of the Tarot pack.
The Deckers believe that all three Bembo
packs were painted after the death of Filippo
Maria. Stuart Kaplan, on the other hand, takes
the more usual view that the Visconti di
Modrone and Brambilla packs were both
painted for him, but regards the Brambilla pack
as the earlier (op. cit., p. 107). So far as we can
tell, the composition of the suits in the Brambilla
pack was standard (or what came to be
standard); since only two of the triumphs
survive, we cannot be certain about them. If the
composition of the Brambilla pack was in fact
standard, it seems more likely that it is the later
of the two. Hankering still after an identification
of the Visconti di Modrone pack as a wedding
present, which has only tradition, not evidence,
to speak for it (and not, of course, an ancient
tradition), Kaplan makes the novel suggestion
that it was painted for the wedding of Francesco
Sforza with Bianca Maria Visconti in 1441.
Taken together with his view that the Brambilla
pack is earlier still, this yields a date rather too
soon for such a commission to have been given to
Bembo, whose earliest dateable work is from
1442. As Ronald Decker has observed, the style
of the Visconti di Modrone cards resembles
Bembo's illustrations for a History of Lancelot
dated 1446. If we assume that the Brambilla pack
was the later, we must leave time for Bembo's
receiving from Filippo Maria a second
commission to execute a set of Tarot cards; we
shall therefore probably not be far wrong if we
date the Visconti di Modrone pack to about
1445. We know from the Ferrara account-books
that the Tarot pack (carte da trionfi) was already in
existence by 1442, and was sufficiently familiar to
that court to bear a generic name. On the other
hand, I have argued that the Visconti di
Modrone cards are not likely to have been
painted many years after the first invention of the-
Tarot pack. That event may therefore be
reasonably placed at somewhere around 1440 -
the approximate date, incidentally, assigned to
the painting in the Casa Borromeo.
With the possible exception of the
Goldschmidt cards and of one or both of the
[new column]
two Guildhall pairs, all the early Tarot cards we
possess are Italian; and though, as we shall see, it
cannot be ruled out that the pack was known
elsewhere during the fifteenth century, there is
no conclusive evidence that it was. We can
therefore safely say that it was in Italy,
specifically in northern Italy, that the pack was
invented and first became popular. Furthermore,
it appears initially to have originated and have
been in use in aristocratic circles. The type of
pack of which the few sheets, printed from wood
blocks, listed above are the only remaining
representatives was no doubt, in its time, very
common. As already remarked, cheap mass-
produced playing cards are highly ephemeral,
and survive, when they do, only through some
unusual accident, whereas costly objects made
by an acclaimed artist are preserved: there are in
fact not very many more popular cards, printed
from wood blocks, surviving from fifteenth-
century Italian regular packs than there are
Tarot cards of the same type. We may therefore
safely assume that in the last quarter of the
fifteenth century the Tarot pack attained great
popularity among the lower ranks of society; this
is confirmed by the Steele sermon, the author of
which was probably not preaching to a
congregation drawn only from the nobility, and,
perhaps, by the painting at Issogne.
Nevertheless, the connection with the nobility,
and especially with the courts of Ferrara and
Milan, compels attention. We have seen that at
least two out of three, and probably more, of the
cards hand-painted for the nobility were tarocchi,
a proportion there is no reason to suppose so high
for the popular cards printed from wood blocks.
The three packs by Bonifacio Bembo were all
made for the Milanese court, the Visconti di
Modrone and Brambilla packs probably for
Filippo Maria Visconti and the Visconti-Sforza
one for Francesco Sforza. We have noted that the
Tozzi, Fournier, Biedak and Marzoli cards come
fronxat least two distinct packs, though probably
by the same painter. That painter must have had
access to the Visconti-Sforza cards in order to
make such close copies of them. The card in the
Tozzi set bearing only the Visconti-Sforza
serpent implies that that pack was intended for
the Milanese court. If Ronald Decker is right in
identifying the three-tiered tower on the Fournier
Ace of Coins as a Gonzaga emblem, that
suggests that the five cards of the Fournier set (10)
do not after all come from the same pack as the
80 Part I: History and Mystery
Tozzi cards, and that we therefore have to do
with three distinct copies of the Visconti-Sforza
pack. A possible supposition is that all three were
commissioned from the same artist by Beatrice
d'Este, who married Lodovico il Moro, the last
great Sforza duke, in 1491 and died in childbirth
in 1497: one (the Tozzi set) for her own use, one
(the five Fournier cards) as a present to her sister
Isabella, who married Francesco Gonzaga,
Marquis of Mantua, in 1490, and one (the
Fournier-Biedak-Marzoli trio) for an unknown
recipient. (The Delia Scala emblem on the figure
on the Wheel of Fortune card in the Tozzi set
remains a mystery, since that family had been in
eclipse for a century.) The Victoria and Albert
cards may also come from a pack made for
Isabella d'Este, in view of the inscription of her
motto on the Ace of Cups (though the presence
on that card of the Colleoni shield would then be
mysterious); the artist must surely also have had
access to the Visconti-Sforza cards, in view of the
exact correspondence of the two Jacks of Coins.
The painter of the narrower Guildhall pair and of
the Andreoletti Jack of Coins, whether or not
these are from the same pack, must also have
seen the Visconti-Sforza cards. In view of the
presence of the arms of the King of Naples on two
of the cards, the d'Este pack at Yale was
probably made for Ercole I, the father of Beatrice
and Isabella, who became Duke of Ferrara in
1471 and died in 1505, since he was married to
Eleanora of Aragon, the daughter of Ferdinando
I, King of Naples. We may also with reasonable
confidence assign the Charles VI, Rothschild and
Catania packs to those made for the Ferrara
court. The Ferrara account-books continue to
record orders for Tarot packs, among cards of
other kinds, for example, in 1452, in 1454 and in
1461;(37) and in 1492 Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, the
brother of Beatrice and Isabella, wrote from
Hungary, where he was staying with his aunt,
Beatrice of Aragon, Queen of Hungary, to thank
his mother Eleanora for sending a variety of
things including gilded Tarot cards {triumphi
dorati).(38) We have no way of being sure, but a
plausible guess might be that the Tarot pack
originated in the court of Ferrara, in 1440 or a
few years earlier, and was soon afterwards
adopted by the wealthier court of Milan. In any
case, it seems probable that, for the first two or
_______________
37. See the references under footnote 19.
38. See G. Bertoni, op. cit., footnote 19, p. 218.
[new column]
three decades of its existence, it was restricted to
the nobility, and only after that spread out among a
wider social circle.
Although the Tarot pack originated in the
fifteenth century, it did not originally bear that
name. The word 'Tarot' has become more or less
naturalised as an English word; it is in fact the
French adaptation of the Italian name of these
cards — tarocchi or, in the singular, tarocco. In early
sources the French word is sometimes spelled
tarau (plural taraux),tarault or simply taro. In
every other language but French and English, the
hard c sound of the Italian word has been kept -
Tarock in German (formerly often spelled Tarok
or Taroc), tarokk in Hungarian, taroky in Czech, etc.
Where the word tarocchi comes from, nobody
knows: no plausible etymology for it has ever
been suggested, and this deficiency was already
being commented on by an Italian poet, Lollio,
in 1550. (39) It is not, however, the original name of
the cards: the first use of the word tarocchi known
to me dates from 1516, once again from an
account-book of the Ferrara court.(40) Throughout
the fifteenth century, the word used was always
trionfi, or, in Latin, triumphi - 'triumphs': this
name was still in use in 1500.(41) The word trionfi,
________________
39. 'Invettiva contra il Giuoco del Taroco': 'E quel nome
fantastico, e bizarro/Di Tarocco, senz'ethimologia,/Fa
palese a ciascun, che i ghiribizzi/Gli havesser guasto, e
zorpiato il cervello' ('And that whimsical, bizarre name
"Tarocco", without any etymology, makes plain to each that
fantasies have damaged and befuddled his brain '- 'he' being
the inventor of the game).
40. In 1516 the Registro di Guardaroba of the court of Ferrara
repeatedly records the purchase of two, or four, para de
tarocchi, and similar entries occur in the following year; see
G. Bertoni, op. cit., 1917, pp. 218-19. The word tarocchi also
occurs in Francesco Berni, Capitolo del Giuoco delta Primiera,
Venice, 1526. I know no sixteenth-century use of the word
trionfi to refer to Tarot cards in general, or to the game played
with them, although it continued to be used to refer
specifically to the triumph cards. Nor do I know any
authentic occurrence of the word tarocchi before 1516. For an
almost certainly spurious one, see Appendix 2 to this chapter.
41. The word triumphi occurs in an ordinance from Reggio
nell'Emilia in 1500, forbidding games of chance, including
dice and cards, but specifically excepting 'tables' (i.e.
backgammon), chess and triumphs (hoc tamen statuto non
comprehendentur ludentes ad tabulas et scachos et triumphos cum
cartis); see W.L. Schreiber, op. cit., p. 79, where, however,
the city is mistakenly identified as Reggio di Calabria. Such
exceptions were quite frequent, as at Brescia in 1488, Salo in
1489 and Bergamo in 1491 (see W.L. Schreiber, op. cit., pp.
78-9); in all of these cases the expression used was triumphi
or ludus triumphorum. It thus seems clear that the replacement
of the word trionfi or triumphi by the word tarocchi occurred
some time between 1500 and 1516.
Where and When the Tarot Pack was Invented 81
strictly speaking, refers only to what we have
been_calling the triumph cards, sometimes taken
as including the Fool, sometimes not. By
transference, it was used to apply also to the
game played with the Tarot pack, and sometimes
to the pack itself, including the suit cards; but the
more correct way of referring to the cards of the
Tarot pack, taken together, was as carte da trionfi.
At some time between 1500 and 1516, the new
name, tarocchi, superseded the old one, and was
thereafter invariably used as the way of referring
to these cards in Italian.
An opinion that has gained some support was
first advanced by Robert Steele, namely that the
Tarot pack was formed by uniting the regular
pack with what had previously been an
independent entity, a pack consisting solely of
the Matto and the twenty-one triumphs used on
their own, and that the early references to trionfi
should be taken as alluding, not to the composite
pack known to us as the Tarot pack, but to this
supposed 22-card pack. He based his opinion on
the text of the sermon by the anonymous
Dominican the manuscript of which was at that
time in his possession; indeed, that sermon
formed his only ground for that opinion. The
preacher inveighed, in his sermon, against three
types of game: first dice; then playing cards
{cartulae); and finally triumphs {triumphi). When
he comes to the last of these, he lists the twentyone
triumph cards and the Fool, but makes no
mention of the suit cards. Now, doubtless, if we
knew nothing of the Tarot pack save what we
learn from this sermon, we should have no reason
to think that a set of triumphi consisted of
anything but these twenty-two cards. But the fact
is that there is no other evidence whatever for the
existence of a pack consisting solely of the
triumph cards and the Matto; as we have seen, it
so happens that every fragmentary Tarot pack
that has come down to us includes at least one
suit card. The remarks of the Dominican friar
provide a very flimsy basis for contradicting the
assumption so compellingly suggested by the
actual cards that have survived, namely that the
triumph cards of the Tarot pack from the first
formed only part of a composite or augmented
pack, one containing, in addition to them, the
four suits of the regular pack. The preacher was
not, after all, trying to introduce his congregation
to vices with which they were previously
unacquainted: he was trying to wean them from
[new column]
what he regarded as vices to which they were
already addicted. He therefore did not need
carefully to inform them of the precise
composition of a trionfi pack, something they
already knew very well: he was trying, by
rhetorical devices, to convince them of his view
that all these things - dice, regular playing cards
and triumphs - were instruments of the devil; the
list of triumph cards evidently served as a
memorandum for expatiating on this topic. What
more natural than that, having left the subject of
regular playing cards, he should, when he turned
to denounce triumphs, mention only the cards
peculiar to the trionfi pack? We may agree that it
was primarily to these additional cards that the
name triumphi applied, without in the least
inferring that they ever formed by themselves an
independent pack.(42)
Miss Moakley is inclined to the same view as
Steele, but adds a further complication: she
thinks that there were also packs, consisting
solely of picture cards, but different in number
and subjects from the triumphs of the Tarot
pack, and likewise known as trionfi. On her view,
the term trionfi originally applied to cards of any
pack of a certain generic type, one consisting of
cards depicting mythological figures, personified
abstractions and the like, and only later came to
have specific application to a composite pack
formed by uniting a particular such series to the
regular four-suited pack. That there were, during
the fifteenth century, various packs answering to
this general description, Miss Moakley
undoubtedly establishes. It does not appear,
however, that they were, at any time, of
widespread use; none of them gained a hold on
general taste or remained more than an isolated
curiosity. Nor can it be shown that they were in
existence at an earlier date than the composite
Tarot pack. What is most to the point, however,
is that there is no reason to think that the word
___________________
42 Stuart Kaplan, op. cit., pp. 26, 349, offers a piece of
spurious evidence for the Steele thesis, stating that St
Anthony, Bishop of Florence, in a Treatise of Theology written
in 1457 'refers to playing cards and tarot, thus suggesting
that the trumps or trionfi were considered a separate game
from playing cards, which comprised court cards and
numeral or pip cards'. He presumably intends to refer to the
Summa Theologica of St Antoninus, Archbishop of Florence;
Pars 2 (Nuremberg, 1447), chap. 23, of this work does indeed
contain several mentions of playing cards, under the
alternative names of cartae or naibi, and their suit-signs (e.g.
§ viii, 'Unde in cartis sive naibis sunt figure non solum
baculorum, denariorum, cupparum, sed et gladiorum'). No
mention of triumphi is, however, to be found.
82 Part I: History and Mystery
trionfi was ever used for any kind of playing cards
other than Tarot cards. If Miss Moakley were
right, the references to carte da trionfi in the
account-books of the Ferrara court, from 1442
onwards, might relate, not to Tarot packs, but to
others of this more general type; but such a
generalised use of the term cannot be
substantiated.
The most interesting of the special packs
which Miss Moakley claims as examples of trionfi
in the alleged more general sense, and one to
which she draws particular attention, is a set of
sixteen picture cards commissioned by Filippo
Maria Visconti from the painter Michelino da
Besozzo (fl. 1394-1442) - a painter, incidentally,
to whom the murals of games players in the Casa
Borromeo have been attributed by some. This set
was sent in 1449 by a Venetian, Jacopo Antonio
Marcello, as a present to Queen Isabella, wife of
King Rene I, Duke of Lorraine. It was divided
into four groups of four, representing Virtue,
Virginity, Riches and Pleasure; each card
depicted a suitable classical divinity. The pack
has not survived, but the letter to Queen Isabella,
written in Latin, describing the pack and saying
that Michelino painted it, has.(43) The letter
applies the word ludus (game) to the set, showing
that it was really meant to be used to play some
kind of game; but there is no use of the word
triumphi in reference to the cards.
[Transcriber's note: here Dummett is mistaken. See ]
A celebrated but problematic passage in the
life of Filippo Maria Visconti, written in Latin by
Pier Candido Dezembrio (1399-1477), runs as
follows: 'He was accustomed from his youth to
play games, of various kinds ... and particularly
that type of game in which images are painted,
which delighted him to such an extent that he
paid 1500 gold pieces for a whole pack (ludum) of
them, made in the first place by Marziano da
Tortona, his secretary, who executed with the
utmost diligence images of gods, and placed
under them with wonderful skill figures of
animals and birds.' (44) There are many oddities
about this passage. In the first place, as W.L.
43. See Chapter 3, footnote 2.
44. The passage runs: Variis autem ludendi modis ab
adolescentia usus est ... plerunque eo ludi genere, qui ex imaginibus
depictis fit, in quo precipue oblectatus est adeo, ut integrum eorum
mille, et quingentis aureis emerit, auctore pel in primis Martiano
Terdonensi ejus Sectretario, qui Deorum imagines, subjectasque his
animalium figuras, et avium miro ingenio, summaque industria
perfecit. Dezembrio's life is reprinted in L.A. Muratori,
Rerum italicarum scriptores, vol. XX, Milan, 1731, and the
passage will be found in col. 1013.
[new column]
Schreiber remarked,(45) playing cards were
perfectly well known when Dezembrio .. was_
writing, and it is quite obscure why he should
choose to describe them as for readers who had
never heard of them before. In the second place,
even for someone as rich as Filippo Maria
Visconti, the price for a single pack seems
staggeringly high. In the third place, as remarked
by Campori,(46) Marziano is not known to have
been a painter, and a funeral oration for him
makes no mention of his having been one.(47)
However, if the information given by Dezembrio
is at all correct, the pack described was
presumably not a Tarot pack, which does not
normally contain images of gods or pictures of
animals and birds. Hence this was probably a
pack of the kind Miss Moakley is concerned
with; but there is not in Dezembrio's text any use
of the word triumphi. The word does, indeed,
occur in what Campori cites as a contemporary
translation into Italian of Dezembrio's life of
Visconti, written by someone using the
pseudonym Polismagna, the manuscript of
which is said by Campori to be preserved in the
d'Este library; but it may quite well be that the
translator, like others' after him, was puzzled by
the passage, and assumed that it must refer to
some kind of Tarot pack.(48)
Another documentary source cited by Miss
Moakley is an inventory of the workshop of the
engraver Francesco Rosselli made in 1528.(49) This
inventory lists plates for printing a number of
remarkable games: the giuocho del trionfo del
petrarcha; the giuco d'apostoli chol nostro singnore; the
giuoco di sete virtu; and the gioucho di pianeti cho loro
fregi (the game of the triumph of Petrarch; the
game of Apostles with our Lord; the game of
______________
45. W.L. Schreiber, op. cit., p. 100.
46. G. Campori, 'Le Carte da Giuoco dipinte per gli
Estensi nel Secolo XV, Atti e Memorie delle RR. Deputazioni di
Storia Patria per le provincie modenesi e parmensi, vol. 3, Modena,
1874, p. 125, fn. 4.
47. The funeral oration is printed in Tiraboschi, Storia della
letteratura italiana, vol. 6, p. 1196.
48. See G. Campori, op. cit., p. 125, fn. 3. The translation
runs: Alcuna volta zugava a le carte de triumphi. Et di questo giocho
molto si delectoe per modo che comparoe uno paro di carte da triumphi
compite mille et cinque cento ducati. Di questo maximamente auctore et
casone Martinno da Terdona suo secretario, il quale cum meraviglioso
inzegno et somma industria compite questo giocho de carte cum le
figure et imagine de li dei et cum le figure de li animali et de li ocelli
che gli sum sottoposti.
49. See. A.M. Hind, Early Italian Engraving, part I, vol. I,
London, 1938, pp. 10, 11, 305-8. The spellings are given as
in Hind.
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 83
seven virtues; and the game of planets with their
borders). These must, again, have been games
with picture cards of special kinds; but they are
not labelled, generically, trionfi. The name of the
first game relates to the poem by Petrarch called
I Trionfi, and cannot, therefore, fairly be cited in
support of a general thesis.
None of the special packs so far mentioned has
survived: the only one of this kind that has come
down to us from this period is the celebrated
copper-engraved set, which exists in two
versions, known as the tarocchi di Mantegna, about
which it is invariably, and correctly, observed
that they are neither tarocchi nor by Mantegna.
They are thought to date from about 1465, and
were made by an unknown artist of the Ferrarese
school. Many have doubted that this set was used
for a game at all, on the ground that existing prints
are on paper too flimsy to be used for play; but it is
quite likely that it was originally intended for a
game of some kind. The set consists of fifty
picture cards, divided into five groups of ten
each, representing respectively social ranks,
Muses, sciences, virtues and the celestial spheres:
the cards are individually numbered, and each,
group is distinguished by a letter. Once again,
there is no evidence that they were ever referred
to as trionfi, although at a later date the term
tarocchi was attached to them by a vague
analogy.(50)
The fact is that games of this kind represent a
persistent, and natural, inclination to invent new
games to be played with packs of playing cards
having a structure entirely different from that of
the regular playing-card pack or from an
augmented form such as the Tarot pack, an
inclination already manifest in the fifteenth
century and freely indulged in by games
______________
50. Miss Moakley also suggests that some engravings
ascribed to Nicoletto da Modena, illustrated in A.M. Hind,
op. cit., vol. VI, 1948, plates 640-7, form part of a pack of
cards; but this cannot be so, since they differ considerably in
size. The literature on the tarocchi di Mantegna is vast: for
illustrations, see A.M. Hind, op. cit., vol. IV, 1938, plates
320-69; for a survey of the literature, see D. Hoffmann, op.
cit., p. 67. For arguments in favour of regarding them as
playing cards, see Fritz Saxl, 'Verzeichniss astrologischen
und mythologischen illustrierten Handscrhiften des
Lateinischen Mittelalters in JR.6mischen Bibliotheken',
Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademieder Wissenschaften, pp.
101, 222, and Heinrich Brockhaus, 'Ein Edler Geduldspiel
"Die Lietung der Welt oder die Himmelsleiter" und die
sogenannte Taroks di Mantegna vom Jahre 1459-60', in
Miscellanea di Storia dell Arte in onore Igino Benvenuto Supino,
1933, p. 397.
[new column]
manufacturers to-day. There was a particular
vogue for such games in Italy, which lasted
through the seventeenth century, as two such
packs designed by Mitelli bear witness. In most
cases, however, the games invented to play with
packs of this kind have no strong attraction to
outweigh the disadvantage of having to buy a
special pack of cards to play them; often they
merely imitate the features of traditional games
played with the regular pack. As a result, the
packs designed for use in such games prove
ephemeral and leave no progeny. The only
exception to this is the Cuccu pack, an Italian
invention of the seventeenth century which not
only exists to this day but spread to other parts of
Europe, where it gave rise to the Hexenkarte of
Germany, no longer extant, and the Gnav pack of
Denmark and Norway and the Killekort of
Sweden, both still well known in those countries.
This was, and is, used to play a simple and
enjoyable game which, in a simplified form,
adapted to the regular pack, is known to British
children under such names as Ranter Go Round
and Catch the Ace. But, of course, this has
nothing to do with the Tarot pack, and no-one
ever thought of calling these cards trionfi or tarocchi.
There is thus no reason to suppose that the
Tarot triumphs ever formed a separate pack by
themselves; and there is still less reason to think
that they were ever regarded as just one species of
a large genus known, as a whole, as trionfi. It is
evident that the Tarot pack became immensely
popular within a short time after its invention;
but the only reasonable hypothesis is that it was
from the start a composite pack, containing the
four suits of the regular pack alongside the
additional cards to which the name trionfi
properly applies, and that, in connection with
playing cards, the word trionfi, as used in the
fifteenth century, applied only to the Tarot
triumphs or, by extension, to Tarot cards as a
whole.
There can be no doubt that it was in Italy that
the Tarot pack was invented, and there that,
throughout the fifteenth century, it was chiefly
popular; but the question when it first became
known in any other country does not admit 6f so
ready an answer. It was certainly in France that
it first became known outside its country of
origin; but it is difficult to be precise at what date
it was first known there. The earliest certain
reference to it there comes from Rabelais in 1534;
he includes it, under the spelling tarau, in his long
84 Part I: History and Mystery
list of the games played by Gargantua; tarots are
again referred to in the posthumous Fifth Book of
1564.*51) The earliest surviving Tarot pack known
to have been made outside Italy is one made by
Catelin Geoffroy in Lyons in 1557.(52) But we have
seen that the term tarocchi did not come into use
in Italy until after 1500, and we should therefore
assume the same to be true of the term tarots in
France: if there were any reference to the Tarot
pack from fifteenth-century France, we should
expect it to be by means of some such word as
triumphes. And indeed we find, once more from an
account book, that in 1496 Rene II, Duke of
Lorraine, is reported as having played at
triumphe;(51) the earliest recorded use of the word in
French as the name of a card game dates from as
early as 1482.(54) Unfortunately, we cannot be
certain that these references are to games played
with the Tarot pack. In Italy, after the adoption
of the new term tarocchi, or perhaps
simultaneously with it, the term trionfi was
transferred to a game played with the regular
pack; this new use of the word trionfi goes back at
least to 1526.(55) In France also there was a very
ancient game, played with the regular pack, and
known as Triumphe, which is also mentioned by
Rabelais. If we conceive of the Tarot pack as not
having been introduced into France until after
the adoption of the name tarocchi, that is, at the
beginning of the sixteenth century, so that the
cards were never known there otherwise than as
tarots, then we could interpret these late fifteenth-
century references to triumphe or triomphe as
alluding only to the game known from Rabelais's
time to the present day under that name. But this
supposition, although possible, is unlikely. It
implies that the use of the name 'Triumphe' tor a
card game in France is unconnected with the
______________
51. F. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, book I, ch. 22 and
bookV.ch. 23.
52. Seventeen cards from this pack are illustrated in Detlef
Hoffmann, op. cit., plates 15(b) and 36(a), nine of them in
colour. Nine are illustrated by Kaplan, op. cit., p. 132. The
pack is in the Museum fur Kunsthandwerk, Frankfurt am
Main, catalogue number K 1.
53. See H.-R. D'Allemagne, op. cit., vol. II, p. 212. The
references occur in the account-books of the court of
Lorraine for the year 1495-6, and run respectively:
Au Roy, le 29 avril pour jouer au triumphe a Vezelise
deux francs.
Encore audit seigneur roy le 1e mai pour jouer audit
triumphe a Vezelise deux florins d'or.
54. See F. Godefroy, Dictionnaire de I'ancienne langue francaise,
Complement, s.v. 'triomphe'. See also Chapter 9, fn. 2.
55. In Francesco Berni, Capitolo del Giuoco della Primiera.
[new column]
contemporary use in Italy of the word trionfi for
Tarot cards and the games played with them,
that it was mere coincidence that two such
similar names were used for different things. On
this theory, the transference of the term trionfi to a
game played with the regular pack might have
occurred in imitation of the name of the French
game also so played, necessitating the
introduction of a new word for Tarot cards. This
is possible; but it is not probable. For reasons
that will-not-be-set out in full until Chapter
7, it is much more likely that no coincidence
was involved: that the name trionfi was
transferred from the Tarot cards to a game
played with the regular pack precisely because
that game was in part adapted from that which
the Tarot pack was used to play, and that the
game played in France under the name
Triumphe, like other games with similar names
in other countries, originated from, the
dissemination of the same idea. If this is so, then
the game known to this day as Triumphe cannot
have come into existence until after the term
trionfi had ceased to be used specifically for Tarot
cards; and the fifteenth-century uses of the word
triumphe or triomphe must be taken as referring to a
game played with the Tarot pack, whose
introduction into France must therefore be dated
to at least about 1480. It fits well with this
hypothesis that the later reference concerns the
court of Lorraine, to which we^ have noted a
pack of playing cards made for the Milanese
court being sent as a present some forty-odd
years earlier.
Of the various hand-painted Tarot cards of the
fifteenth century, the only ones of which we
could not be certain that they came from Italy
were the Goldschmidt cards and the two
Guildhall pairs, though they had connections
both with the Victoria and Albert cards and the
Visconti-Sforza pack. Opinions about the
provenance of the Goldschmidt cards have been
very various. W.L. Schreiber assigned them to
Venice, on the strength of his identification of the
kneeling lady as a Dogaressa. Eberhard Pinder
thought they were made in the Upper Rhine
region by an Italian artist. Now the Victoria and
Albert cards are surely Italian, if only because of
the Italian inscription on the Death card; and it
is plain that the painters of the Goldschmidt
cards and of the wider Guildhall pair were
familiar with the convention used in the Victoria
and Albert pack for the representation of the Ace
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 85
of Cups. Furthermore, if the narrower Guildhall
pair really is part of the same original pack as the
Goldschmidt cards, the artist must have known
the Visconti-Sforza pack, including the later
cards not by Bembo. There is therefore good
reason for thinking that an Italian artist, or at
least one acquainted with Italian cards, was
responsible for this pack. Nevertheless, Detlef
Hoffmann is surely right in fastening upon the
appearance of the Batons in their so-called
Spanish form as the most significant clue. Batons
on Italian cards of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries may vary somewhat in shape: but they
invariably intersect, and, like the Swords (which
do not always intersect), they invariably extend
the whole length of the card. They are never
found disposed, as in Spanish-suited packs and
as on the 5 of Batons in the Goldschmidt set,
upright and in the manner of the pips on a
French-suited card, in separate rows. It seems
unthinkable that this pack can have been made
for use in fifteenth-century Italy.
From the fact that the two Guildhall pairs
were discovered in a chest in Seville one might be
tempted to believe that the Goldschmidt cards
represent an otherwise unknown phenomenon -
Spanish Tarot cards. But this would surely be a
mistake. As has already been remarked, that
variant of the Latin suit-system which was in the
course of the sixteenth century adopted as the
national suit-system of Spain was not in origin
Spanish, but French. What little we know of late
fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Spanish
cards suggests that at that time cards made in
Spain employed the Latin suit-system in
something very much more like what was to
become its Portuguese variant, with straight but
intersecting Swords and knobbly but intersecting
Batons, though doubtless French-made
'Spanish'-suited cards were imported in
considerable numbers. It is possible, therefore,
that the Goldschmidt cards represent a type of
Tarot pack used in some noble house of fifteenth-
century France, though there is no need to locate
them more narrowly in Provence, as Hoffmann
does. They differ too much from anything else
that has come down to us, however, for this to be
more than a conjecture. Only a single Tarot pack
survives to us from sixteenth-century France,
that by Catelin Geoffroy already referred to; and
this is no guide to the way the suit-signs
appeared on early French Tarot packs, since it
uses completely non-standard suit-signs. The
[new column]
subjects on the triumph cards are, however,
standard, and show no relationship with
the enigmatic figures on the Goldschmidt
cards. The next earliest French Tarot pack
we have is one made in the early seventeenth
century; and on this the Swords and Batons are
neither of the usual Italian shape, nor of the
Spanish one; they do, however, for the most
part intersect with one another. In all
later French Latin-suited Tarot packs, the
Italian suit-system is used. It thus appears that, if
the Goldschmidt cards really were made for use
in France, they have left no progeny and may
have been an isolated experiment; but the data
are too sparse to ground a firm opinion. It could,
indeed, be argued from the fact that the Tarot
pack was later associated so firmly with the
Italian version of the Latin suit-system that it
cannot have been introduced into France until a
time when that suit-system was no longer very
familiar, or, at least, no longer seemed quite
ordinary, on the ground that otherwise the suitsigns
would have undergone the same
modification to their 'Spanish' form that was
imposed on regular Latin-suited packs in France.
Such an argument would rest upon the
assumption that we have made that originally the
'Italian' suit-system was everywhere in use. But,
even if this assumption and the foregoing
argument are correct, this does not threaten our
conjecture that the triumphe played by Duke Rene
II and the triumphe mentioned in 1482 were games
played with the Tarot pack, or even that the
Goldschmidt cards represent the type of pack
that may have been used. The 'Spanish' variation
on the Latin suit-system was in existence by
about 1460, but it may have been invented
earlier; and the Goldschmidt cards might
represent an early phase when the Tarot pack
was known only in a few aristocratic circles.
In all Tarot packs made outside Italy, the
triumph cards bear Roman or Arabic numerals
to indicate their position in the sequence; and,
in all non-Italian Latin-suited Tarot packs after
1700, except in the Revolutionary period, and in
some seventeenth-century ones, they also
have their names inscribed in full at the bottom
of the card (save for the Death card, whose name
is usually missing). The same practice was
usually observed for the court cards as well, and
often for the Aces. Italian Tarot cards made
before the eighteenth century do not carry verbal
inscriptions (save for a few non-standard packs,
86 Part I: History and Mystery
and some occasional mottoes); and even the
practice of putting numerals on the triumph cards
seems to have come in only gradually. On the
sheet in the Rosenwald Collection in Washington,
the numbering stops at XII, the top nine cards
being left unnumbered; on the sheets at the
Metropolitan Museum, New York, the triumph
cards are numbered from I to XX, only the top
card, the World, being left unnumbered; but, on
the sheet in the Cary Collection, and on those in
the Rothschild Collection and at the Ecole des
Beaux Arts, the triumph cards bear no numerals.
There is an incomplete pack in the Bibliotheque
Municipale at Rouen from the early sixteenth
century, whose triumph cards bear numerals;
although a classicised pack, the figures can
easily be equated with the usual subjects, unlike
in the Sola-Busca tarocchi.(56) Count Leopoldo
Cicognara knew a complete example of a very
similar, though not identical, pack, and
illustrated six cards from it in his book of 1831; (57)
in his pack, there were no numerals on the
triumph cards. The triumphs of the Sola-Busca
pack itself do bear numerals. Numerals do not
seem to have been an original feature of any
of the hand-painted packs: there are numerals
on three of the triumph cards at the Castello
__________
56. The pack is part of the Leber Collection, catalogue
number 1351-XIV. Four cards are illustrated in colour in D.
Hoffmann, op. cit., plate 23(b), and nine by Kaplan, op.
cit., p. 133. Thirty cards survive, including the Fool and
seven triumph cards. The latter are to be identified with the
usual subjects as follows: Imperator Assiriorum,
unnumbered (the numeral is presumably covered up by the
turned-over edge) - the Emperor; Pontifex Pontificum, 5 -
the Pope; Victoriae Premium. 7 - the Chariot; Omnium
Dominatrix, 10 - the Wheel of Fortune;. Rerum Edax
(Saturn), 11 - the Hermit (or Time); Perditorum Raptor
(Pluto), 14-the Devil; Inclitum Sydus, 16-the Star.
57 See L. Cicognara, op. cit., pp. 163-6 and plate XIV; the
cards are also shown in D. Hoffmann, op. cit., fig. 6. The
cards illustrated by Cicognara are the Aces of the four suits,
Cupid = Love, and Apollo = the Sun. Contrary to what is
said by D. Hoffmann, op. cit., p. 68, the pack described by
Cicognara was not the same as that at Rouen, though very
similar. The Rouen set includes the Aces of Batons, Coins
and Swords, and these differ considerably in design from
those .shown by Cicognara. Also, Cicognara describes the
Fool of his pack in detail, and it is quite different from that
at Rouen: Cicognara's Fool was a drunkard lying bn his
back, supporting, with his legs in the air, a jar marked
'Muscatello'; that at Rouen shows a man armed to the
teeth, and dressed in armour, but with genitals exposed and
urinating, and bears the inscription 'Velim fundam dari
mihi'. The Cicognara pack is ascribed by A.M. Hind, op.
cit., vol. V, London,' 1948, pp. 139-40, to Nicoletto da
Modena.
[new column]
Ursino in Catania (not on the unidentified
one showing the figure on a stag), but these
have obviously been added much later; There
are also numerals on the triumph cards of the
'Charles VI' set, which are also later additions,
although, in their case, they may have
been added in the fifteenth century. Otherwise
the hand-painted triumph cards are all
unnumbered. It should not be thought, however,
that the lack of numerals in these packs is
evidence that the triumph cards did not
originally form an ordered sequence. The sermon
quoted by Steele lists them in a definite sequence,
even giving their numbers, a sequence that is
confirmed by some literary sources of the
sixteenth century. It is not that the cards did not
have an order, but just that those who used them
were expected to remember this order without
recourse to enumeration, just as they would
know the order of the court cards of any suit
without any further aid. It might seem that to
keep in mind the order of twenty-one distinct
cards is too difficult a feat for people to have been
expected to perform; but this supposition can, as
it happens, be decisively refuted. The particular
form of Tarot pack still used in Bologna, which
has changed comparatively little since the
sixteenth century, save for becoming double-
headed (it was one of the earliest standard
patterns to do so), did not, until the mid-
eighteenth century, bear numerals on any of the
triumph cards at all. Yet, in the game played
with this pack (which has also changed very
little, at least since the eighteenth century, and,
probably, since long before that), the triumph
cards have a definite ranking. Eighteenth-
century descriptions of this game list the triumph
cards by name, and never refer to them by
number, and were probably written for players
using packs without numerals on the cards. In
any case, there is a clear demonstration that the
same ranking applied before it was the practice
to put numerals on the triumph cards. Before
that time, a celebrated geographical Bolognese
Tarot pack was designed by Canon Luigi
Montieri in 1725: the main body of each triumph
card (including the Fool) carried geographical
information, and that of each suit card showed
coats of arms. (There was a great vogue in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for such
instructional packs, particularly geographical
and heraldic ones; both regular packs and Tarot
packs were designed for this purpose.) In
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 87
Montieri's pack, the usual symbol giving the
denomination-of each card was confined to a
small panel at the top. In each such panel on the
triumph cards is a single letter; when the
triumphs are arranged in descending order, with
the Fool at the end, these letters spell C LUIGI
MONTIERI INVENTOR, a clear indication
that, at that time, the triumphs ranked in the
same order as that which they have had from the
mid-eighteenth century until now.(58) Another
famous Bolognese Tarot pack was made (in 1664,
according to C. P. Hargrave) for the Bentivogli
family by the engraver Gioseppe Maria Mitelli
(1634-1718); the engravings were also issued in
book form, with ten cards to a page, and the
triumph cards are again arranged, in descending
order, in the usual sequence.(59) It is thus apparent
that, long before the Bolognese triumphs bore
numerals, they were arranged in a determinate
order, and that, from the early sixteenth until the
mid-eighteenth century, players were expected to
remember this order. What Bolognese players
could do up to the eighteenth century, others
could do in the fifteenth. There is therefore no
obstacle to supposing that the triumph cards
formed, from the outset, a sequence with a definite
order.
Why, then, were these cards called 'triumphs'?
Many have tried to explain the word from the use
of the twenty-one triumph cards in play, namely
as 'triumphing' over the other cards; and we
cannot say for sure that this explanation is
incorrect. A brilliant suggestion of Miss
Moakley's is, however, more attractive. This is
that the name has nothing to do with the use of
the cards, but only with what is shown on them,
the series of triumph cards representing a sort of
triumphal procession. As documented by
_________________
58. The Montieri cards are illustrated in Playing Cards of
Various Ages and Countries Selected from the Collection of Lady
Charlotte Schreiber, vol. Ill, London, 1895, plates 74-9, with
notes pp. 13-15. There is also a reproduction pack issued by
the Edizioni del Solleone in Lissone in 1973, edited by
Signor Vito Arienti and illustrated by Kaplan, op. cit., p.
147.
59. Two of the Mitelli cards are illustrated in C. P.
Hargrave, op. cit., opp. p. 232; see also opp. p. 99 in 1966
edition; twenty-four are shown in Kaplan, op. cit., p. 54.
The book version was issued as Giuoco di Carte con nuova forma
di Tarocchini; Intaglio in Rome di Gioseppe Maria Mitelli, and
was reprinted in 1970 by Huber und Herpel of Offenbach
am Main as Gioseppe Maria Mitelli, B]ologneser Tarockspiel
des 17. Jahrhunderts. C.P. Hargrave, A History of Playing Cards,
New York, 1930, 1966, p. 232, confidently cites the date
1664, but gives no authority for doing so.
[new column]
Burckhardt and Miss Moakley, a favourite
entertainment in the courts of Renaissance Italy
was the staging of just such triumphal processions,
with floats bearing figures either derived
from classical mythology or representing
abstractions such as Love, Death, etc.: a
transformation of the utterly serious triumph of a
Roman general or Emperor into an elegant allegorical
entertainment. A frequent ingredient
in such Renaissance triumphs was the idea
underlying Petrarch's poem I Trionfi, in
which each successive personified abstraction
triumphs over, that is, vanquishes, the last;
thus, in the poem, love triumphs over gods
and men, chastity over love, death over
chastity, fame over death, time over fame
and eternity over time. The case would be
clinched if it were possible to explain the subjects
of the triumph cards of the Tarot pack as forming
a triumphal procession of this sort; but in
spite of Miss Moakley's determined efforts,
supplemented subsequently by those of Mr
Ronald Decker, such an explanation, while
plausible in principle, is difficult to make
convincing in detail. Nevertheless, in default of a
better explanation, we may accept it as likely,
though by no means certain, that it was this
association of ideas which prompted the use of
the name 'triumphs' for the additional cards of
the Tarot pack.
Appendix 1:
A Problematic Set of Tarocchi
After I had finished this book, and was engaged on
final revision, I received a copy, kindly sent me by the
author, of Stuart R. Kaplan's The Encyclopedia of Tarot
(New York, 1978), already referred to. The most
valuable feature of the book is the extensive series of
illustrations of all the sets of fifteenth-century Italian
hand-painted c'ards, and of many other Tarot packs
surviving from before the eighteenth century. I have
inserted references to Kaplan's illustrations of the
packs discussed in this chapter in the footnotes. I have
some disagreements with Kaplan's judgments; to
some of these I have drawn attention in the text or the
footnotes of this chapter. There is, however, one set of
hand-painted Tarot cards illustrated by Kaplan of
which I was quite unaware, discussion of which I
thought it best to relegate to this appendix.
The set in question comprises twenty-three cards;
Kaplan states (p. 106) that the last known owner of
the set, before the Second World War, was a British
dealer named Rosenthal, and says (p. 99) that in 1939
Part I: History and Mystery
it was offered to a leading American collector, who
refused it because he doubted its authenticity. Kaplan
supplies illustrations of all the cards (p. 99);
unfortunately, these are rather minute, so that it is
difficult to see details even with a magnifying glass. Of
the twenty-three cards, eleven closely resemble the
corresponding Visconti-Sforza ones: the Emperor,
Justice, the Cavalier, Jack, 5 and 4 of Swords, the
Queen and Jack of Batons, the King of Cups, and the
King and Jack of Coins. Four resemble the Visconti-
Sforza cards in general style, but differ in detail: the 5
of Batons, the 5 of Cups, and the 5 and 3 of Coins.
The former two differ in the arrangement of the suitsigns,
the latter two in the disposition of the scrolls
inscribed a bon droit, which is the form of the Visconti
motto consistently used in this set (the spelling is
always droyt on the Bembo cards, as on the Tozzi 5 of
Swords, though it is droit on the Fournier 2 of Coins).
Two cards, the Star and the Ace of Cups, are very
similar to the Victoria and Albert ones. The Star is
almost precisely the same, but the Ace of Cups shows
some differences: the Colleoni arms are not parted,
there is an inscription I cannot read on the upper
scroll, the cliff noted by Kaplan is missing, and,
though the stem of the 'cup' or fountain is still
inscribed nec spe nec metu, the inscription occupies two
lines instead of four. Another card in the Rosenthal
set shows only the Visconti/Sforza serpent, exactly
like the Tozzi card. The remaining five cards are: (i) a
Falconer card, very closely resembling no. (20), save
for the design on the cape; (ii) a card showing a sun
with rays and a face, as on the Goldschmidt and wider
Guildhall cards, over a castle, with a wheel and a fleur
de lys above the castle on either side, and, at the
bottom, a scroll inscribed Fortezza (a word which may
mean either 'fortress' or 'fortitude'); (iii) an Ace of
Swords, showing a dagger dripping blood, and, at the
bottom, part of a sun with an inscription I cannot
read, and two scrolls higher up on the card, marked a
bon droit and, apparently, REPUB; (iv) a Cavalier of
Batons, like the Visconti-Sforza one but laterally
reversed, and with a three-turreted castle in the top
left-hand corner, encircled by an inscription I cannot
read, and an unidentifiable object in the top righthand
corner; and (v) an Ace of Coins, showing a
cardinal in the Coin, and, according to Kaplan, an
inscription, not visible in the illustration.
It is very hard to draw conclusions about this
extraordinary set from Kaplan's diminutive
illustrations, taken from a photograph in his
possession; they deserve publication in colour and in
full size (though Mr Kaplan does not know their
measurements). The salient reason for supposing the
suspicions of the American collector who refused to
buy them to be justified is the figure of the cardinal on
the Ace of Coins; it looks very much like an attempt to
establish the set as really being, at last, from the pack
supposedly painted for Ascanio Sforza. However, the
When and Where the Tarot Pack was Invented 89
style of this Ace of Coins seems totally unlike that of
the rest of the set; it is possible, therefore, that it is a
forged addition to an otherwise genuine set. A more
subtle reason for doubt lies in the form of the Colleoni
arms on the Ace of Cups; here the device takes the
later form of three inverted hearts, not of three pairs of
coglioni (testicles), as on the Victoria and Albert card
and other contemporary presentations of these arms,
for instance in the Colleoni chapel at Bergamo (see
footnote 25). This strongly suggests that the
Rosenthal cards could not have been painted in the
fifteenth century.
If the set should nevertheless prove to be genuine
(perhaps with the exception of the Ace of Coins), it
would establish the most interesting links between
other surviving sets of fifteenth-century Tarot cards.
First, it would supply an original for the Falconer card
(no. 20), and from a Tarot pack, though whether it
represented the Bagatto, or even the Fool, or some
distinct alternative triumph subject, would remain
obscure; this would increase the probability that the
Goldschmidt cards are also genuinely from a Tarot
pack. Secondly, it would establish the sun with a face
as a device employed on various Milanese Tarot
cards, and thus would make it less likely that the
Goldschmidt cards or the wider Guildhall pair had a
non-Italian origin; the significance of this sun would
remain problematic. Thirdly, it would provide further
examples of the practice of placing small emblems in
the upper corners of cards, a practice that would still
be baffling.
Whether genuine or forged, the set poses some new
puzzles of its own. What is the significance of the
inscription REPUB on the Ace of Swords? On the
death of Filippo Maria Visconti in 1447, the citizens
of Milan, tired of their Dukes, as well they might be,
declared a republic; in 1450, however, Francesco
Sforza captured the city and proclaimed himself
Duke. Can this card be meant to contain an allusion
to the bloody suppression of the short-lived republic?
The card inscribed Fortezza cannot, in view of the
inscription, represent the Sun; if the card is genuine,
this provides corroboration of the view that the sun on
the Guildhall card we took to be the Ace of Swords
and on the unidentified Goldschmidt card is not, in
either case, the feature of the card determining its
identity. The Fortezza card, if spurious, may be meant
to represent the Tower; but, if genuine, it can hardly
do so, because that card, although it went under
various names and had many representations, is never
called la Fortezza, or even la Torre, in early Italian
sources. It is much more likely to represent Fortitude,
by a kind of visual pun, even though this subject is
normally represented by a personification; la Fortezza
is the name invariably given to this subject in the early
sources, as against the name la Forza (Strength)
usually employed in the later Tarot de Marseille-
derived packs. It is hard to avoid being impressed by
[new column]
this card. Unlike most of those in the set, it is not a
close copy of some other existing card. If we suppose it
a forgery, then to suppose it intended to represent the
Tower is to attribute a very crude mistake to the
forger. If we regard it as representing Fortitude, on
the other hand, it becomes, an ingenious and
unexpected representation of its subject, and
presupposes enough knowledge of the literary sources
on the part of any forger responsible for it for him to
be aware that the regular word used for the Fortitude
card in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was
Fortezza. These considerations seem to me to weigh in
favour of the authenticity of the set; and, if the
Fortezza card is genuine, the lady with the model
castle in the Goldschmidt set may be another deviant
version of Fortitude.
It thus becomes a matter of some importance for
the study of fifteenth-century hand-painted tarocchi to
determine whether any or all of the Rosenthal cards
are genuine, and, as a first step, where they are. Mr
Albi Rosenthal, of Oxford and London, who is
presumably the British dealer referred to by Kaplan,
has informed me that in the 1920s his father sold some
hand-painted Italian tarocchi to Herr von Hardt of
Switzerland, but does not know where the von Hardt
collection is now. He has also told me that at a later
date some fifteenth-century hand-painted tarocchi were
shown to him at his Curzon Street office in London,
but that these were definitely found to be forgeries.
Which of these two sets, if either, is that designated
'the Rosenthal cards' by Kaplan is unclear. It is to be
hoped that the cards themselves, or at least some
more detailed illustrations of them, become available
for examination; in the meantime, we owe a
considerable debt to Mr Kaplan for bringing the set to
public attention.
Appendix 2:
The Tarocchi of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza
In Count Leopoldo Cicognara, Memorie spettanti alia
Storia delta Caliografia, Prato, 1831, p. 16, there is
quoted an alleged excerpt from the Chronicle of
Cremona by Domenico Bordigallo. The excerpt is in
Italian, and states that in the year 1484 the excellent
painter Antonio Cicognara (of the same family as the
Count) painted uno magnifico mazzo de carte dette de'
Tarocchi, da me veduto (a magnificent pack of the cards
called tarocchi, seen by me) for Cardinal Ascanio
Sforza. Count Cicognara says that this passage was
communicated to him by Mgr Antonio Dragoni from
the schede (notes) of Giacomo Torresino, an
eighteenth-century Cremonese antiquarian. On the
strength of this passage, numerous art historians have
ascribed various hand-painted Tarot cards of the
fifteenth century to Antonio Cicognara, including the
[new column]
six cards of the Visconti-Sforza pack that are not by
Bembo; but the passage is almost certainly spurious.
Any historical document connected with Dragoni is
under the gravest suspicion, since he was either a
forger or the dupe of forgers, although he was
primarily concerned with documents relating to the
Dark Ages, of which he made, or manufactured, a
large collection. Torresino did indeed compose notes
on local history, using a page for each year, and
entering quotations relating to that year from various
sources; but this work, at any rate in the form in
which it survives in the Biblioteca Statale at Cremona,
stops before 1484. Bordigallo's Chronicle was written
in Latin, and has never been published; the
manuscript was located by Signor Marco
Santambrogio, of the University of Bologna, in the
Biblioteca Treccani in Milan, where, with the kind
assistance of Signora Carla Treccani degli Alfieri, he
examined it; he found that, while the entry for 1484
does contain a reference to Ascanio Sforza, namely to
record that it was in that year that he was created a
Cardinal, it mentions neither Antonio Cicognara nor
tarocchi. It is conceivable that the quotation was in
some later section of Torresino's notes that has since
been lost, but from some other source, or that it is in
Bordigallo's Chronicle, but under a later year
(Ascanio Sforza died in 1505); but the probability is
that it is quite inauthentic. In any case, the use of
the modern word mazzo for 'pack' was, so far as I am
aware, unknown in fifteenth-century Italian, which
uses paro or gioco instead; so, even if the Italian given
by Count Cicognara is a translation of some genuine
Latin original, the word tarocchi is not likely to have
occurred in that original. See M. Dummett, 'A Note
on Cicognara', Journal of the Playing-Card Society, vol. II,
no. 1, August 1973, pp. 14-17 (original issue), pp. 23-
32 (reissue), and 'More about Cicognara', ibid., vol.
V, no. 2, pp. 26-34. These two articles are cited by
Stuart R. Kaplan in his annotated bibliography (The
Encyclopedia of Tarot, New York, 1978, p. 356), but he
mentions only their discussion of the Fibbia portrait,
not of the Bordigallo Chronicle. Mr Kaplan does,
however, state categorically (pp. 33, 351) that the
Chronicle contains no reference either to tarocchi or to
Antonio Cicognara. Though I consider this quite
probable, I cannot vouch for it, since Signor
Santambrogio had time to examine only the section
dealing with the year 1484, and I have not yet seen the
manuscript myself. From the absence of
acknowledgment to myself or to Signor
Santambrogio, the reader might naturally suppose
that Mr Kaplan was speaking on his own authority
and had examined the Chronicle in more detail than
Santambrogio had done; but this seems unlikely in
view of his mistaken assertion (p. 33) that it was in
1484 that Bordigallo wrote his Chronicle, since
anyone who had seen it would have observed that the
entries go beyond that year. From his curious
90 Part I: History and Mystery
statement (p. 374) that Torresino's notes contain
Bordigalio's Chronicle, it is equally unlikely that he
has seen them. Mr Kaplan expresses the belief (pp.
100, 107) that the initials ' A. C.' on the Tozzi King of
Swords may stand, not for 'Antonio Cicognara', but
for 'Ascanio Cardinale'; this seems somewhat
illogical, since Count Cicognara's purported
quotation from Bordigallo is the only positive
evidence either that Antonio Cicognara painted any
tarocchi or that any were painted for Ascanio Sforza,
and Mr Kaplan agrees that the quotation is spurious.
His assertion of its inauthenticity occurs during a list"
(pp. 31-3) of spurious sources, and is repeated in the
bibliography; in the section discussing the authorship
[new column]
and dates of the hand-painted packs (pp. 106-7), he
cites the purported Bordigallo quotation in full
without, indeed, endorsing it, but without repudiating
it either; only the most alert reader is likely to
remember the earlier declaration of disbelief in it. Of
course, it is perfectly plausible that Ascanio Sforza
should have had some tarocchi made for him. But, ever
since 1831, the names of Antonio Cicognara and of
Ascanio Sforza have been endlessly cited, in books,
articles and museum catalogues, in connection with
tarocchi, and it is in my view best to make no further
reference to those two individuals until some genuine
evidence of such a connection becomes available.
[There follows two tables summarizing the surviving cards in the decks 1-12, 14, 19, 22, and 24 of this chapter.]