The Visconti-Sforza Tarot

The Sun, from the "Visconti-Sforza Tarot",

attributed to Franco dei Russi (1453-1482)

A surviving account book tells us that around 1442, the Duke of Milan gave his daughter a deluxe set of handcrafted playing cards in the pattern we call Tarot. This meticulously painted deck was valued at 1,500 ducats, 10 times the annual salary of a palace servant.

The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York has a bunch of Renaissance Italian tarot cards, some of which are probably associated with the Dukes of Milan. There are no complete sets, just various cards from several different sets executed by different artists. They describe these cards as the "Visconti-Sforza Tarot." The Viscontis and the Sforzas were two families that both held the rank of dukes of Milan, the Sforzas taking over (violently) from the Visconti in 1447. 

No expert myself, I find this designation misleading in the extreme, but anyway these are 15th-century tarot cards from northern Italy, and they are quite amazing.

Death and Judgment, attributed to 

Bonifacio Bembo (1420-1480)

Temperence, attributed to Franco dei Russi

The Three of Cups, attributed to Bonifacio Bembo. More at the NY Times

There is also a related set of cards known as the Cary Yale Playing Cards, now kept in the Beineke Library at Yale. These also date to the mid 1400s and are also from northern Italy, but the rest of what I read about them strikes me as speculation.

Quite delightful that so many of these little wonders survive in North American and European Collections.

The Songbook of Zengeren van Male

One of the weirdest manuscripts you will ever see, chock full of bizarre images across hundreds of pages.

Salamanca's Two Cathedrals

The New Cathedral

Salamanca, Spain had a cathedral, its construction begun around 1125. It was nice, a fusion of late Romanesque and early Gothic in style. But as Spain's wealth and power soared, fed by its New World empire, it came to seem small and dingy. So a new cathedral was planned, and its construction began in 1520.

Alas, things did not go as planned, and the nw Cathedral was not actually completed until 1733. By that time everyone had gotten used to having the smaller old cathedral attached to the side of the new one, so it was left in place. This view shows the crossing tower of the old cathedral set against the bulk of the new cathedral to the left.

Here is a plan of the resulting arrangement; the remains of the old cathedral are the lighter colored sections to the lower left.

Interior views of the old cathedral.

And the new.

Looking over the roof of the old Cathedral at the new.

Two facades of the new Cathedral.

Choir stalls.

Seems like a wonderful place.

Renaissance Illustrations to Marco Polo

Marco Polo sailing from Venice, and detail

People have been arguing over how to view Marco Polo's Book of Marvels of the World since it first appeared in 1300. The skeptics have had their day, but now the general view is that Marco Polo really did travel to China and serve Kublai Khan as an ambassador. There are embellishments in the text, but most of them are called out as things Polo only heard about and did not see himself; and as for the rest, well, the man to whom Polo dictated his tale was a noted author of romances named Rustichello da Pisa. Blame him.

Two versions of the Polo brothers doing homage to Kublai Kahn 

And one that shows the brothers receiving a gold passport.
These were real, one of the many accurate details in the book,

The Great Khan hunting

Harvesting pepper in Indonesia

The Polos served the Khan as ambassadors to South Asia, traveling to Indonesia, Burma, and India.

A battle between the Mongols in the King of Burma

And some of the fabulous details that made it into the manuscript.

A Painting of Medieval Galley Combat

It might surprise you to learn that historians know very little about pre-cannon naval combat. One supposes that triremes, galleys, or longships tried to ram each other but otherwise came together and the crews fought. But how did they do that? Did they have some way of coming together without breaking all their oars, or did they just accept that battles meant breaking lots of oars? Were there special troops who stood in the bow and started the fighting, as certain Viking poems suggest?

Sadly, nobody bothered to write any of this down, so we are mostly reduced to guesswork.

Which brings to a fresco that resides in Palazzo Pubblico of Siena. It was painted by Spinello Aretino in 1407-1408. It depicts the naval battle of Punta San Salvatore, supposed to have been fought in 1177 between Venice and the emperor Frederick Barbarossa. There is no remotely contemporary evidence that this battle was ever fought, and the consensus seems to be that it was made up by some Venetian "historian." But for our purposes that is neither hear nor there, because what we are looking for is a depiction of galley combat in the age before artillery.

And here we have one. What does it show?

Well, for one thing we see that much of the fighting is done by soldiers who are clearly marked out from the oarsmen by their armor, shields and weapons. The soldiers include swordsmen and archers. The ships are depicted lying alongside each other, which may just have been to fit them into the painting, but anyway the are not shown meeting bow to bow. No ramming or fancy maneuvers, just coming together and fighting it out.

 It is not the best evidence, but given how little we have, it counts.