Franco Pratesi
1453 AN EARLY ARRIVAL OF TRIUMPHS INTO ROME
by Franco Pratesi, 3.11.2011 (Trionfi card development).
Many thousands of pages have been written on the origin and first spread of tarot. Instead of summarising the main theories, let me start with a rather recent article, which lists the relevant places and dates involved. (1) Two figures of that article are an excellent starting point: one is a map of Italy with regions shadowed in two ways: dark grey, in which trionfo was known before 1452; light grey up to 1475. The second figure is a table in which places and dates, from 1442 to 1482, are put in order – at its bottom we find the year 1442 in correspondence with Ferrara, then on subsequent lines we find Cremona/Milan/Pavia, followed by Florence, Siena, Padua, Bologna, Ancona/Fabriano/Recanati, Mantua, Naples, and Rome. The initial presence in Rome is marked at 1474 and it is this date which is the most interesting here. It is well known that the best documented initial spread of tarot refers to Ferrara. The documents of the Este court have been preserved and studied for a long time. Recently, card historians could avail themselves of the extraordinary …. read more
Franco Pratesi: Playing cards in Florence 1840
FLORENTINE CARD PRODUCTION IN ABOUT 1840
by Franco Pratesi, 18.11.2011
The countless books and files kept in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF) have been variously ordered and catalogued. Of course, when a recent and detailed inventory exists, it can make any research much easier. This has been the case for the archive section Libri di commercio e di famiglie. At the ASF we have now available a big work, bound in four volumes: Inventario N/422 Libri di commercio e di famiglie, edited by Vanna Arrighi, Stefano Calonaci, and Veronica Vestri. 2008, 1843 pp. I simply checked “carte da gioco” in its subject index and found there marked items 152, 153 and 154. Item 154 is actually formed by a lot of slips of paper with receipts that I leave to any interested person for future study. On the contrary items 152 and 153 have immediately caught my attention: they are twin pieces, each formed by four registers, one for each of the four manufacturers of playing cards active in Florence. The four registers of item 152 correspond to the year 1839; the four of 153 to the year 1841. Thus, the uncertainty present in the title of this note is solved: we don’t have exactly the production of 1840, …. read more
Oldest Minchiate games
ROSENWALD’S FOURTH SHEET
by Franco Pratesi, 24.11.2011
When the great Michael Dummett (apparently he has been a great author in several fields, but let me limit here this acknowledgement as a card historian, whom I know better) wrote his fundamental book(1), it was impossible for him to recognize the Rosenwald sheets as parts of a minchiate pack. As far as he could know the situation in 1980, no minchiate could exist as early as the sheet in question, generally considered to belong to the end of the 15th century or the beginning of the 16th. On p. 403 of the book mentioned he thus states: “This is certainly not a Minchiate pack, since it has only twenty-one trumps. … It therefore seems probable that the set represents an early form of that standard pattern for the Tarot pack on which the Minchiate designs were later based, or some closely related pattern.” After several findings, it is now easy for me to see here nothing less than a part of a minchiate pack. My greatest interest however is not focused on the three known Rosenwald sheets, but on the fourth one, which remains unknown to the point that I am not aware of anybody having described it up to now. Of course to describe somet …. read more
Searching Tarot Sources
SEARCHING FOR TAROT SOURCES
by Franco Pratesi, 1998 (from: The Playing-Card, XXXVII, No. 2, 64-68 and No. 3, 111-116)
Many people have spent many years reflecting on the possible origins of the
tarot. I too have been interested in this rather neglected topic and although the genesis of the tarot is not the only problem which I have investigated recently, it is nevertheless one of the most complex. A game having undefined origins cannot be considered as exceptional – the same thing indeed occurs with many games including chess, draughts, and even such recent widespread card games such as bridge and rummy. The fact is that for tarot, the occult tradition associated with these cards has rendered their origin even more obscure than the origins of other games. In my opinion, the occult tradition is based on nothing plausible and is essentially a fantasy created in an attempt to carry back the origin of tarot to the ancient civilisations. In the printed images of the cards there may be traces of older figurative details, but the origin of tarot must be dated to the Italian Renaissance. Despite this attribution, I am however, ready to accept an early date, down to the
turn …. read more
Notturno Napolitano Tarocchi
Notturno’s Gioco di Triomphi
by Franco Pratesi, 1988 (from: The Playing-Card, XVII, No. 1, 23-33)
The evidence presented in this article derives from a scarce booklet which existed in the 18th century in Capponi’s library and whose reported title already indicates its interest for the history of tarot: Notturno Napolitano “Gioco de trionfi, che fanno quattro compagni, detti Delio, Timbreo, Castalio, e Caballino, con due sonetti in laude del Bembo”. Perugia per Cosmo da Verona detto il Bianchino s.a.(1). Therefore, it did not escape attention by the few Italian scholars who seriously attempted to collect and discuss the literary evidence about the game.(2) Both Cian and Renier, however, could not examine a copy of the book, due to its rarity, and only mentioned the title as derived from the Capponi catalogue. Also in the known work by Sander(3) the booklet is only mentioned, under Caracciolo Antonio, among others by same author and printer, with the statement that any presence there of engravings was still unknown. Nowadays, more catalogues exist, and bibliographical researches are easier to carry out to the required depth. In this case, a copy of the book was found to exist in the Br …. read more
Sicilian playing cards
NEW INFORMATION FROM A SICILIAN JOURNAL
by Franco Pratesi, 05.12.2011
About 20 years ago, when I was more active in my research on the history of games, I took the opportunity to visit public archives and libraries in a lot of towns. Palermo has been one of them. Starting from Florence, it is about as far as Paris (where I arrived too in my visits) – this means that it is not surprising that only once and only for about a week I visited the three main locations in Palermo: Biblioteca centrale della regione Sicilia “Alberto Bombace”, Biblioteca comunale in Casa Professa,(1) and Archivio di Stato. All of them are in the old part of the town and walking in the surrounding district (with a satisfactory knowledge of what it had been in the past centuries) was a pleasant experience, also from the touristic and photographic point of view. In this research, I could examine in Casa Professa (the former Jesuit college) the manuscripts of Francesco Maria Emanuele e Gaetani, Marchese of Villabianca (1720-1802), which represented one of the most useful bases for the pioneering work of Michael Dummett. …. read more
Export Playing Cards in Florence
EARLY PLAYING CARD EXPORT FROM FLORENCE ?
by Franco Pratesi, 29.12.2011
Maybe you have once seen the following film: “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain”. What follows here is a somewhat similar event, but the corresponding title should be: “The Florentine Who Went Up a Mountain But Came Down a Hill”. Indeed, the description of my research, at least in its present stage, is like the description of a climb on an enormous mountain, which ultimately must be recognized just as a little hill. What this exactly means will become clear after a few pages of text. 1 – PRELIMINARY RESEARCH 1.1 – From the book of Arnold Esch Arnold Esch has studied the registers of the Roman customs for years. On the basis of his articles, Thierry Depaulis(1) published a pioneering article that allowed card historians to become acquainted with this new data. In the meantime, Esch’s articles have been collected, augmented and published as a whole book, (2) with some further data that Ross Caldwell has introduced into the discussion of card historians.(3) From this book, the date of 1453 has then been taken as the first document of triumph imports into Rome.(4) The starting point of the p …. read more
Notturno Napolitano
1521 Notturno revisited
by Franco Pratesi, 26.12.2011
It seems that Nottuno’s work is still little known among card historians. About it, Lothar Teikemeier has asked me to insert my article, written about a quarter of a century ago, in these web pages. This I have agreed upon for the complete text of that old article, including a few sentences which at the time I wrote in support of the alternative hypothesis that this could be a 22-card pack. I remember my hesitation at that time whether this could really be considered a Minchiate pack. With respect to current knowledge, 1521 appeared to be too early to suppose the existence of a full pack of Minchiate – moreover in the countryside. Now, I am convinced that this pack had already been in existence for several years, or better decades. It is however preferable that any reader reaches his own conclusion, and I am thus adding below the relevant part of the original work in question. It is evident that this poet was far from the level of the best poets of the time. This may in part explain the absence of suitable comments in the histories of literature and, consequently, in the histories of playing cards too. Another justification can b …. read more
Trionfi cards trade Florence
1486: Giovanni da Pistoia di Bari
by Franco Pratesi, 17.12.2011
Discussion, updated and outdated. From the moment I found the quotation of Giovanni da Pistoia(1) in the book of Arnold Esch(2), a discussion began between Lothar Teikemeier and I, which we have debated for a while – as sometimes happens with us for questions of this kind. Let me begin with my opinion, because it appears to be simpler. Many of the renowned Florentine artists and personages of the Renaissance were active in Florence, but were born more or less far from this town; just to list a few of them: Benedetto da Maiano, Baccio da Montelupo, Desiderio da Settignano, Angelo Poliziano, up to Leonardo da Vinci. Therefore, finding this Giovanni da Pistoia who brings cards into Rome, as several other Florentine merchants did, I had no problem in considering him one of them. My problem was just to find if he had also got a family name at the time, or if I had to search him just as Giovanni da Pistoia in the documents kept on the local merchants in the Florentine archives. Lothar Teikemeier’s opinion was more complex, because it pointed to two different directions. To begin with, he considered that the Florentine provena …. read more
1433: Diritta and Pilucchino in Florence
1433: DIRITTA AND PILUCCHINO BEFORE THE COURT
by Franco Pratesi, 11.12.2011
Diritta – the game Diritta was one of the first card games documented in Florence. The word simply means that the game was played in a “direct” way, and another game, with various names, was often associated with it: Torta, or Vinciperdi, or Ritrosa. The latter game probably was nothing else than the former game itself, played however to avoid taking cards or points instead of collecting them. To play in a direct way was mentioned for various games, and sometimes also attributed to the game of Triumphs. It is thus unclear whether, and when, this attribute could either be described as a typical way of playing these games, or rather that it was used to indicate a specific card game, as apparently occurred in Florence. To my knowledge, the first time that we read of a game “directly” played was in 1420 in Milan.(1) The attribute is here expressed in Latin: “secundum antiquum et rectum modum”, according to the ancient and direct manner. Contrary to the following cases, in which we have just the name of the game, without any further indication, here some detail is added: one puts his own cards onto the table say …. read more
New Documents in Palermo
New Documents from Palermo
by Franco Pratesi, 1992 (from: The Playing-Card, Vol. XXI, No. 1, 9-15.)
It is not easy to find something new concerning cards and card playing in Sicily. There are two main reasons for that, the objective lack of documents and the pioneering interest to the topic by Michael Dummett. Not to mention his remarkable contributions from oral witnesses, it is unlikely that any relevant archival evidence has escaped his attention! Nevertheless, I could recently study in some public Libraries and in Archivio di Stato of Palermo a few documents which provide further useful information. Let us begin with Archivio di Stato located in a fine Palazzo near Cala and Vucceria, the old port and market of Palermo, respectively. Archivio di Stato Here are kept the already known impressions of wooden and copper blocks for Sicilian cards (Misc. I n.225); a 1846 edition of Chitarrella rules for mediatore and tresette (Misc. II n.212); some bandi, as that of Ferdinando II dated Naples 10.12.1844 (Misc. II n.654) – Four kinds of cards are allowed: Carte ordinarie, Italiane fine, Francesi, Tarocchi. They have to be stamped in colour in Palermo with 3 gigli semplici (fleurs-de-lys) …. read more
Trionfi card painter: Filippo di Marco
1453-1458 Florentine triumphs by Filippo di Marco
by Franco Pratesi, 12.01.2012
In the previous year, namely a half month ago, I concluded a note (1) with the following sentence. «I hope, however, that somebody else – following one or another of the paths here outlined – may obtain the wanted results.» The question itself was simple: after the discovery of imports of Florentine cards in the registers of Roman customs, can we confirm this trade with similar documents from the town of origin? I was convinced that such documents existed and could not escape my search, but after that I did not find any of them. My closing opinion was that some further years were needed before the question could obtain a satisfactory answer. Now I have found with great amazement that my question has already been answered, and exactly… a half century ago! Let me describe this “new” progress, coming from so long ago. Two German books I have recently read with great interest a book written by a German author on the German people living in Florence in the early Renaissance, or, to be more precise, in the late middle ages.(2) This is a hardbound book of 412 pages. Unfortunately for us, the main …. read more
Alberti Tower: Palazzo dei Diavoli
PALAZZO DEI DIAVOLI AND THE TOWER
by Franco Pratesi, 17.01.2012
Many years ago Sylvia Mann encouraged me to publish in The Playing-Card my studies on Italian cards. She labelled “New Discoveries” my whole series, and recommended to me not to leave any contribution unpublished in a drawer of my desk. As a supposedly convincing stimulation, she used to remind me that several of her friends had died just before bringing their useful results to the press. Understandably, I followed her advice in every case, with however one exception. In just a case I concluded that I had to accept the risk of disappearing before letting people know a maybe significant result of my research. It seems now that the world of card historians is fortunate enough to receive also this nth contribution of mine, because I am still alive and got ready to communicate it. Where did such a long hesitation come from? Probably it derived from my education, based on humanities, and also on scientific subjects. With this kind of education, you have to base your reasoning, as far as possible, on concrete matters and reliable working hypotheses. This case is different: its basis is something similar to instin …. read more
