![[Card]](../images/visconti-arcanum-01.jpg "The Magician")
After
writing last week's entry on tarot, I
decided—acting on a sudden impulse so characteristic of
me—to buy myself a deck of (fortune-telling) tarot. (I might
mention that I collect playing cards; not that I do it very seriously,
but I do have a good number of decks. Which is odd, given that I
practically never play any card games. Anyway.) Now I wanted an item
of some artistic value, not the common and ugly “tarot de Marseille” or one with cheap XXth
century New Age illustrations (although I admit that I do find
artistic value in some illustrations of the kind). So, on a friend's
counsel, I decided to get (a facsimile, of course, of) the
Visconti Sforza tarot, drawn in the mid XVth century by
Italian artist Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti and Sforza dukes of
Milan; and the drawings are very beautiful, as illustrated, for
example, by the first major arcanum, The Magician (Il Bagatino in Italian), which I reproduced here
on the left (click to
enlarge). Only four cards (out of seventy-eight) are lost from the
Visconti tarot (the fifteenth and sixteenth major
arcana—respectively the Devil and the Tower—, the Knight
of Coins, and the Three of Swords); the game I bought has them
replaced with cards drawn in the style of the original, and I have to
admit it is not badly done at all.
I would have liked to avoid giving money to occultists (because I
don't like the idea of making profit out of people's gullibility), but
it doesn't seem that that was possible: so I bought the cards from an
occultist that sells
on-line (if someone—in France—wants to buy the same
cards, they are item tar134 in their catalog, costing
€75; they are printed by AGMüller in Switzerland, though US Games Systems also seems
to be somehow part of the editing process).
Incidentally, the same Stanley Morison who designed the ubiquitous Times character font also designed one, modeled after a XVth century font by Francesco Griffo, which he called “Bembo”. This is named after Cardinal Pietro Bembo, because the original font was used to print Pietro Bembo's De Ætna. I don't know what is the relation between the humanist Pietro Bembo and the artist Bonifacio Bembo.