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Dec 6

cover of Courts and Courtly Arts book
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From My Bookshelf: Courts and Courtly Arts in Renaissance Italy

If you want to immerse yourself in the world that gave us the Visconti-Sforza and Sola Busca decks, this book, subtitled Arts, Culture and Politics 1395 to 1530, will deliver.

Nothing was ever the same in Italian politics and society after Gian Galeazzo Visconti purchased the title of Duke from the Holy Roman Emperor in 1395. Other rulers soon followed suit: the Gonzaga of Mantua, Montefeltro of Urbino, d’Este of Ferrara and the rulers of Savoy.

Unlike a French or German aristocrat who could trace his pedigree back to Charlemagne, a newly-minted Italian duke did not have a divine right to rule. These parvenus were acutely aware of their modest origins as merchants or condottieri who had usurped civic power. They felt tremendous pressure to over-compensate by amassing a trophy art collection and building ostentatious palaces that were stage settings for elaborate ceremonies and festivals. Read more

Nov 27

Empress Zoni Tarot de Marseille of Bologna
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Zoni Tarot de Marseille: Big and Small

I’ve just acquired the tiniest deck in my historical facsimile collection — a miniature version (1-1/8 x 2-¼ inches) of Il Meneghello’s reproduction of a TdM printed in Bologna in 1780 by Giacomo Zoni. Lo Scarabeo also publishes a facsimile. Shown above is a mini card superimposed on the Lo Scarabeo, which is a bit larger than Il Meneghello’s full-size version. Read more

Nov 5

Johann Death engraving Ridinger
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Soprafino Death Card

When I saw this print on the Hyperallergic art blog, I immediately thought it must have been the inspiration for the Soprafino Death card (see below). The artist’s palette caught my eye first. Then I noticed so many other items the two images have in common: gold chains, a medallion, bishop’s hat, armor, a spear point and crown. I think I see the spine of a book near the far right edge of the print. The book isn’t nearly as prominent as on the card, but the stone tablet on the print sits in nearly the same location and tilted at the same angle as the Soprafino book. Read more

Nov 1

The Cloisters Flemish Playing cards box

A Fifteenth Century Flemish Hunting Deck

While 15th-century Italian aristocrats were commissioning gilded and hand-painted tarot cards, aristocrats further north were doing the same with regular playing cards. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is offering a facsimile of the only complete playing card deck from the 15th century in existence. This deck is unique for several reasons: it’s Burgundian, it’s the oldest known deck of its type, and it’s oval-shaped. Read more

Sep 28

Tarocchi Orientali Foudraz Empress

Tarocchi Orientali Foudraz

A collector recently discovered a trove of uncut sheets of tarot and playing cards that have been sitting in Turin’s archives of since the mid-19th century. Giordano Berti has given new life to one of these forgotten decks by transforming the black and white uncut sheets into the beautifully colored Tarocchi Orientali.

The deck was created by Claudio Foudraz, a lithographer working in Turin in the mid-19th century. As an all-purpose lithographer he printed business cards, invitations, ads and art prints. Foudraz’s tarot deck was useless for game playing because of mistakes in the numbering, which the current edition corrects, so it probably never reached the market. Read more

Sep 21

Tarocchi Fine dalla Torre
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Tarocchi Fine dalla Torre

The Museo dei Tarocchi near Bologna, Italy has given us many highly creative art decks. Now they have produced an historically significant bolognese tarocchi based on an original that rests in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

Bologna has its own unique tarot tradition that dates back to the early sixteenth century, and possibly earlier. The order of the trumps is slightly different, and pips two through five of each suit have been removed to make a shortened deck that was very popular for card games back then. Some trump cards have distinct imagery: the Fool as a street musician playing a drum and horn, the Three Magi on the Star card, and a woman with a spindle for the Sun are just a few examples. The Aces are very distinctive as well. In the early 18th century the deck took its present form when the Empress, Emperor, Papesse and Pope were changed into the four Moors and the trump and court cards became double-headed. Read more

Sep 5

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Tarot History Rant #5: Etteilla the hairdresser

At least three times in the past few weeks I’ve heard people refer to “the hairdresser Etteilla,” mindlessly repeating disinformation that Eliphas Levi and A. E. Waite rather viciously spread about the founder of modern tarot. Etteilla-bashing hit its stride in the mid-19th century when Eliphas Levi published statements like:

Etteilla or Alliette, an illumine hairdresser, exclusively engrossed by his divinatory system, and the emolument he could derive from it, neither proficient in his own language nor even in orthography, pretended to reform, and thus attribute to himself the Book of Thoth.

This illuminated hairdresser, after working for thirty years, only succeeded in producing a bastard set, the Keys of which are transposed, so that the numbers no longer answer to the signs.

The writings of Etteilla, now very rare, are obscure, wearisome and barbarous in style.

Generations of authors have mindlessly parroted Levi without bothering to learn about the man behind the slander. Read more

Aug 22

The Cartomancer cover Volume 2 issue 3
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The Cartomancer Magazine Summer 2016

The August 2016 edition of The Cartomancer contains two weighty, serialized articles, as well as the usual gorgeous artwork and an intriguing range of topics. The article that anchors this edition for me is Marseille Tarot: A Phylosophical Enquiry by three Brazilian tarotists. In this article, the first of two, the authors describe various philosophical approaches to tarot study. Quite frankly, I had a hard time sorting it out; but here’s how I disentangled the threads into four main approaches to tarot: Read more

Aug 16

Portraits of Francesco and Bianca Sforza
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The Visconti Sforza Tarocchi by U. S. Games

U.S. Games Systems has just reissued their facsimile of the Pierpont Morgan Bergamo Visconti Sforza Tarocchi, originally produced in 1975 and still in print. They’ve added bonus cards with portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Milan, probably by Bonifacio Bembo, who most likely created the original deck in the 1450s. Both editions are the same size as the original cards: 3.5 x 7.0 inches. Let’s compare the two decks. Read more

Aug 8

Nuns Behaving Badly book cover

From My Bookshelf: Nuns Behaving Badly

This book came about when the author, an American music professor, discovered a thick, lavishly bound manuscript of secular songs from a mid-1500s convent in Bologna. The following lyrics caught the professor’s eye:

You who’ve got that little trinket,
So delightful and so pleasing,
Might I take my hand and sink it
‘neath petticoat and cassock, squeezing.

Intrigued, professor Monson began his career as a topo d’archivio, an “archive mouse” scurrying about the archives of the Sacred Congregation in Rome, which oversees monastic discipline, looking for clues about what was really going on behind those convent walls. Read more

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