Lorredan wrote:Thanks Ross- it would seem that Denis Mack Smith was loose with his words as well.
Maybe better to delete my post?
Then again your information makes interesting reading as a corect rebuttal.
~Lorredan
It's certainly not necessary to delete it! We all learned something because of it, I imagine. First, both Schreiber (1937) and one of his sources, Zdekauer (1884), were not aware of the 1506 reference (Schreiber's book was actually unfinished at his death, so he may have found it if he had had more time, for instance in Dolcetti). So this is another entry to put under the Venice entries about playing cards at trionfi.com .
Denis Mack Smith's words themselves are not completely misleading; he doesn't say that the law of 1455 prohibited "tarocchi", for instance. I take it that "the passion for gambling" in general is what he means. However, I can't find an outright prohibition of the
sale of dice and cards, just the prohibitions of playing the games, either a broad one, like in 1506, or a narrow one, like in 1455. So he appears to be wrong in this passage.
The great classical educator Vittorino da Feltre, portrayed above in a medal by Pisanello, would not have approved of the passion for gambling and Tarrocchi playing that overtook Italy in the fifteenth century. In Venice it became so widespread, and ruined so many noble families, that the Council of Ten (1455) passed legislation prohibiting the sale of dice and cards.......
With regards to Vittorino, he certainly would not have allowed his students to indulge in gambling or frivolous games, but he would probably have approved of Triumphs, at least for children, for teaching calculation skills.
http://archive.org/stream/vittorinodafe ... 2/mode/2up
"Arithmetic, which he valued for its training in accuracy and businesslike habits of mind, was in the rudimentary stage taught by games, 'following the practice of the ancient Egyptians, whose method in the subject Vittorino highly commended.'"(this last part in single quotes is reported by Sassuolo, a student of Vittorino). I imagine that a card game like Triumphs, which is a skillful and mentally challenging game, would be appropriate for learning arithmetic. I don't think that the Este court would have allowed two boys of 8 and 9 years old to play the game, since they were under the equally strict educational philosophy of Guarino da Feltre, unless it were held to inculcate some positive habits of mind.
An older contemporary of Vittorino, Pier Paolo Vergerio, in 1404 explicitly approves of sedentary "games of skill", while naturally forbidding dice.
"The game of 'tabulae' which Palamedes is said to have invented during the Trojan war to keep his soldiers occupied during wearisome inaction, is free from all such objections [that trivial activities must lead to vanity and immorality]. Dice-playing is to be utterly condemned. It is either a base form of money-getting, or an effeminate excitement;
though a game of skill, in which chance plays but a small part, is allowable. Claudius, the Emperor, wrote a book on dice-playing, which the vicious have found a useful argument for their indulgence".
(
De Ingenuis Moribus, §6; translated by William Harrison Woodward in
Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators (1897) page 117; same as the book cited above at
http://archive.org/details/vittorinodafeltr00woodiala )
"...a game of skill, in which chance plays but a small part", can describe some board games as well as some card games, and legislation of games would often recognize the distinction between games of pure chance like dice, mixed chance and skill like cards, and pure skill like chess.
