Cabinet of Curiosities - The Visconti-Sforza Tarot by Charlotte Wightwick

The Hermit. 

In today’s Cabinet of Curiosities we’re heading to the Italy of the mid-late fifteenth century.

Italy in this period was not one unified country, but was instead made up of a great constellation of city-states: some tiny, others wealthy, powerful and magnificent. The five great powers were Florence and Venice, the Kingdom of Naples, the Papal States and the Duchy of Milan.

The stories of the Renaissance most closely lodged in many people’s minds are those of the great trading republic of Venice, of the beauties of Florence and the power of the Popes in Rome. In contrast, the Milanese ruling families of the period, the Visconti and the Sforza, don't hold a prominent place in public consciousness. Yet they embody just as much of what we find fascinating about the Renaissance – the beauty of the art coupled with the brutality and corruption of its politics – as do the Medici or the Borgias. Leonardo da Vinci, after all, spent nearly 20 years in Milan and created some of his greatest masterpieces there.

There were smaller treasures, too. For example, the ‘Visconti-Sforza tarot cards’ demonstrate the wealth and artistry that the Dukes of Milan could command. They were created most likely in the mid fifteenth century, probably shortly after Francesco Sforza’s ascension to the ducal throne in 1450.

The pack is made up of seventy four hand-painted playing cards (four are missing from the original pack of seventy eight). They are large compared to modern playing cards (and to other, lesser-quality cards from the fifteenth century) indicating that they probably were produced as items for display and to demonstrate status, rather than as cards to play with. They are mostly painted by the same person, although six were made by a different artist (who also painted other extant packs of cards). They are stunning, tiny masterpieces of Gothic art: rich with gold and the jewel-bright colours of a master illuminator’s craft; saturated with the symbolism of what we would think of as the medieval world: with knights, kings and queens, swords and grails.

Knight of Swords

There is no evidence that tarot (from the Italian tarroco, plural tarrochi) were used at this point for divination or were linked to the occult. Instead they were playing cards: a mixture of suit cards, which will be familiar to all as the basis for modern playing cards, plus a series of ‘trump’ cards, including a range of Virtues, astronomical symbols (the sun, moon etc) and people – Popes and Popesses, the Hanged Man and others.

We know that card games – both played with and without trumps – were highly popular across Italy at this time, although there were regional variations in how the games were played. In Milan, the duchess Beatrice d’Este, wife of Ludovico Sforza reportedly won three thousand ducats at play at one point in 1494 (and spent her winnings on alms and embroidery, although her husband was at a loss to see how she could have spent all of the money on just those two things!)

It is a fascinating glimpse into a courtly world, perhaps all the more so because it was a world doomed to disappear, a fact foretold by the cards themselves. One of the cards shows the Wheel of Fortune. A man is depicted in four different states: destined to rule, ruling and then, his Fortune overturned, on his hands and knees, without dominion.

The Wheel of Fortune

Only a few years after Ludovico Sforza wrote so cheerfully to his wife about her gains at the card table, he would be imprisoned by the French, his glittering court destroyed.

But in a strange way, that court lives on, for it was the Milanese version of these card games, and not those of other cities, which was taken back to France by the victors, and thence on to other parts of Europe and beyond, and so into modern culture.


For me, therefore, the Visconti-Sforza tarot stand not only in their own right as works of art, but of links between a glittering past and our own world today.


(All pictures from Wikimedia Commons)

Leonardo, Cecilia and that "ermine"

Now that the hugely successful Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery in London has sold out, it seems as if everyone has suddenly discovered this portrait. It adorns the front of the catalogues and graces thousands of carrier bags and leaflets.

On the day I went, less than a week after the exhibition opened, there was not a single postcard of it to be had. It seems the National Gallery had seriously underestimated the appeal of sixteen-year-old Cecilia Gallerani - if that is indeed who the sitter is.

It is frankly a bit annoying, like when everyone discovers the band or restaurant or city that you thought was a special find of yours and it's no longer your secret. I have known and loved this portrait for half a century; it has always been my favourite of Leonardo's paintings and now everyone else loves it too!

Still, it was very special thrill to be in the same room as Cecilia at last and she certainly lived up to expectations, although the painting is quite small (54.8 x 40.3cm) and was displayed behind glass. This picture was so famous that Bernardo Bellincioni wrote a poem about it not long after it was painted: "Cecilia, today so very beautiful, is she/whose lovely eyes make the sun seem dark shadow."  Funny he didn't mention that she is holding something like a ferret.

Leonardo had wriiten about ermines in his early period at the Milanese court: "the ermine out of moderation never eats but once a day; it will rather let itself be taken by the hunters than take refuge in a dirty lair, in order not to stain its purity."

Moderation and purity are odd virtues to associate with a teenage mistress yet this is what Cecilia Gallerani was: Ludovico Sforza's mistress, he who was Leonardo's master in Milan. She was a middle class girl, educated, with six brothers who took precedence over her and she lost her father when she was seven years old. It is highly likely that her liaison with Sforza began before she was quite fourteen but girls could marry at twelve or thirteen in the late fifteenth century. Indeed Cecilia was betrothed already to member of the Visconti family and had been since childhood - a betrothal that Ludovico dissolved.

But Ludovico Sforza was also a member of the Oder of the Ermine, a prestigious honour bestowed on him by the King of Naples in 1488. So in a sense, young Cecilia is caressing her lover.

In 1491 when Cecilia was still only eighteen and Ludovico had married Beatrice d'Este, she, the "lady with an ermine"  bore him a son. A few years later she was married to a Count, but hung on to the portrait until the imperious Isabella d'Este, Beatrice's sister, required it of her. She died in 1536, in her early sixties, a remarkable instance of survival.

That ermine is a northern variety of stoat, Mustela rminea, which would have had a white pelt in winter. Varnish has discoloured this to a brownish-grey. But it doesn't seem to have much fur at all! I had often wondered about this animal.

Mustela erminea

The exhibition makes all clear. In the same room as Cecilia are drawings Leonardo made - of a dog's feet, a bear's muzzle - that make it seem as if the animal might be a composite - a sort of fantasy ermine. Cecilia probably didn't have a pet mustelid after all. You can imagine the painter giving her a cushion and saying "pretend it's an ermine, if you would, my Lady."

And yet, and yet, look at her hands and the animal's paws. He is claiming her as she does him; I can't quite give up the idea that Leonardo painted them from life, even though the symbolism is everything.

More than Lisa Gherardini whose portrait known as Mona Lisa the painter kept with him till his death, more than Ginevra Benci or La Belle Ferronière (this last also in the National Gallery exhibition, the teenage Cecilia captivates and enchants the viewer, looking away to her left at something or someone out of the frame, as does the creature she hold so lightly and so securely. Maybe it was Ludovico himself, come to see what the Florentine was making of his young mistress. He can't have been disappointed.

Note: this information can be found in Massimiliano Capati Leonardo: a life through paintings (Mandragora 2009); Charles Nicholl Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of his Mind (Allen Lane 2004) and Luke Syson with Larry Keith Leonardo: Painter at the Court of Milan (National Gallery 2011)