Contents and Preface (by G. Moakley)

THE TAROT CARDS 
PAINTED BY BONIFACIO BEMBO
FOR THE VISCONTI-SFORZA FAMILY
AN ICONOGRAPHIC AND
HISTORICAL STUDY BY
GERTUDE MOAKLEY

THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
1966

[new page, unnumbered]

Published with help from the
Emily Ellsworth Ford Skeel Fund

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 65-18551
Copyright 1966 by The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Designed by Bernard Etter and Barbara Beri,
Composed in the Printing Office of the New York
Public Library, printed by offset and bound by
Edwards Brothers, Inc. Ann Arbor, Michigan

[new page, unnumbered]

TO MARTIN DRAYSON
AND THE AIR-CONDITIONED CONNELL LIBRARY CENTER
SINE QUIBUS NON

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[new page, unnumbered]

CONTENTS

Preface .... 10
Undocumented Prelude 13


PART I

1. The Cards and their Maker ..................19
PRESENT LOCATION OF THE CARDS 21
NOTES FOR CHAPTER 1..................... 24

2 The Cicognara Mix-up......... 27
NOTES FOR CHAPTER 2 .... 32

3. The Family for whom the Cards were Made 35
NOTES FOR CHAPTER 3............................41

4. Triumphs and the Game of Triumphs..43
NOTES FOR CHAPTER 4 ..................51

5. The Death of Carnival 55
NOTES FOR CHAPTER 5 58

PART II

The Procession..61
NOTE...............62

I. Il Bagatino (Quarterpenny, the Juggler) 62
NOTES ............................................... 63

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Le Coppe (Cups) 64
NOTE............... 64

II. L'Imperatrice (The Empress) 70
NOTES ................................. 70

III. L'Imperadore (The Emperor) 71
NOTES ...................................72

IV. La Papessa (The Popess) 72
NOTES ..............................74

V. II Papa (The Pope) 73
NOTES ...................74

VI. La Temperanza (Temperance) 74
NOTES .....................................75

VII. Il Carro (The Car) 76
NOTES..................... 76

VIII. L'Amore (Love, The Lovers) 77
NOTES..................................... 77

IX. La Fortezza ( Fortitude) 78
NOTES 78

I Bastoni (Staves) 79
NOTES ............. 80

X. La Ruota (The Wheel of Fortune) 86
NOTES......................................... 87

I Denari (Coins).88
NOTE.............. 88

XI. II Gobbo (The Hunchback, Time) 94
NOTES.......................................... 94

XII Il Traditore (The Traitor, The Hanged Man) 95
NOTES .........................................................96

XIII La Morte (Death) 96
NOTES.................... 97

[unnumbered page]
XIV. Il Diavolo (The Devil) 98
NOTES ............................98

XV La Casa del Diavolo (The Devil's House, The Tower) 99
NOTES .........................................................................99

Le Spade (Swords) 100
NOTES................ 100

XVI. La Stella (The Star) 106
NOTES ........................ 107

XVII La Luna (The Moon) 108
NOTES...........................108

XVIII Il Sole (The Sun) 109
NOTES ..................... 109

XIX L'Agnolo (The Angel, The judgment) 110
NOTES................................................. 110

XX La Justicia (Justice) 111
NOTES ...................... 111

XXI II Mondo (The World) 112
NOTES........................... 112

Il Matto (The Fool) 113
NOTES ................114

Bibliography 117

EDITOR’S NOTE: The scattered tarot cards were photographed for reproduction under varying conditions; light reflecting from the gold leaf at different angles caused differences in contrast which we have made every effort to minimize.

[page 10]
PREFACE

THIS STUDY began almost as a matter of chance. I am a library cataloger, and I wanted to find out how well a library catalog serves the researcher, and whether anything about it needed improvement. I determined to become a researcher for a few weeks, and find out what. I wanted to know from actual experience.

Any subject would have done as well as another, but books on the tarot had been given me to catalog, and when I looked into them I was not satisfied with their treatment of the subject. Surely a few weeks of research would uncover a serious book or article on the tarot by some qualified art historian, and I would have had the experience I desired.

However, the weeks passed and the most thorough digging turned up nothing at all of any worth. By this time my curiosity had become almost unbearable, and my original purpose was lost in the determination to find the answers to all my questions about the tarot.

The Visconti-Sforza tarot, or rather tarocchi (since they are Italian) soon came to my attention. Photographs of these cards became my constant companions, and I looked for their meaning with ardent fervor. At first I barked up all the wrong trees: were they connected with magic? alchemy? witchcraft? Were they some kind of secret code? It gradually became clear to me that they were more related to the literary works of their time than to any of these other things; yet I could not find any such work which told the same story as the tarot cards. At last I found two tapestries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, depicting the Triumph of Fame and the Triumph of Time, as Petrarch had described them in his poem I Trionfi. Here I had the lead at last.

But there was more that I wanted to know about the Visconti-Sforza tarocchi. What did the first of the tarocchi trumps represent? It did not seem to have anything to do with Petrarch's poem. Why were the Pope and a Popess among the victims of Cupid's triumph? What were those devices embroidered upon the robes of the Emperor and Empress, and what did they mean? In short, I wanted to know as much as I could possibly discover of the meaning the cards had for the family which originally owned them.

I think I have now found as many answers as I can hope to find, and offer them here for the satisfaction of any other people who may be as curious as I was.

A great deal of this information would never have come to me with-

[start p. 12]
out the help of a number of people, whom I want to thank here. First of all, the great and generous Professor Erwin Panofsky, for his help and support when I was writing the essay out of which the present book grew — "The Tarot Trumps and Petrarch's Trionfi," in the Bulletin of The New York Public Library of February 1956 — and for an important lead to the constitution of one of the earliest, of the Ludi triumphorum. I am also indebted to Professor Maurice G. Kendall for the significance of the number cards in the four ordinary suits of the tarocchi, to Professor Archer Taylor for calling my attention to the tarot riddle in Straparola's Facetious Nights, to Professor Guido Kisch for new information about the Hanged Man, and to Professor Allan H. Gilbert for reading the present book and suggesting a number of needed changes.

My colleagues in The New York Public Library have also greatly helped. I cannot name them all, but I must express particular thanks to Elizabeth Roth, Leo M. Mladen, Elizabeth M. Hajos, Patricia Spindler, and Maud D. Cole, for much help, and to William Sloan who photographed some of the cards. In other libraries and museums several librarians and curators have given me help without which my search would have been much longer. Of these I want especially to thank E. Maurice Bloch, formerly Keeper of Drawings and Prints at the Cooper Union Museum, Alice Newlin and Janet Byrne of the Prints Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Dr John Plummer, the Curator of Manuscripts at the Pierpont Morgan Library. I wish to thank the following publishers for allowing me to quote from their publications: Penguin Books, for permission to quote from Dorothy Sayers' translation of Dante's Inferno, International Universities Press, for permission to quote from The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, and Alfred A. Knopf for permission to quote from The Gentleman and the Jew, by Maurice Samuel. Finally I wish to thank the owners of the Visconti-Sforza cards, the Pierpont Morgan Library, Dott. Comm. Ippolito Pipia, President of the Academy of Fine Arts in Bergamo, the Accademia Carrara of Bergamo, and Conti Colleoni, for permission to reproduce photographs of the cards, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art for permission to reproduce photographs of the three old printed tarocchi which have been used to give some idea of the lost cards of the Visconti-Sforza set.

[start p. 12]

ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES

In general, any book listed in the bibliography is cited in the notes by the last name of the author and the first important word of the title, enclosed in parentheses. For instance, "Patch (Goddess)" will be found in the bibliography as "Patch, Howard Rollin, The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1927."

Other abbreviations:

Arch. stor. lomb..... Archivio storico lombardo
Enci. Ital.... Enciclopedia italiana
Enci. spett. ...Enciclopedia dello spettacolo