Italian renaissance woodcut playing cards

A group of closely related packs of early woodcut playing cards, among these two tarot packs, survive in the form of several larger and smaller fragments of uncut sheets of cards, as well as a small number of individual cards. Some of the fragments surviving together can reasonably be assumed to be parts of the same sheet, while others are from different imprints from the same woodblock. By combining several fragments, the more or less complete design of many of the woodblocks can be pieced together. From the selection of cards on each block as well as stylistic considerations, it is possible to ascertain which blocks that belong together, forming a complete pack of cards.

The largest collection is located in Szépművészeti Múzeum (Museum of Fine Arts), Budapest. What seems to be duplicates separated from this collection are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. In the following, I reference or depict all the fragments I have found documentation on in these and other collections, but I have been informed that there exist further unpublished fragments as well.

The most characteristic feature of this family of card designs is the form of the pip cards in the suit of spade or swords in all packs where any of these are preserved. This can be described as intermediate between the Italian and Portuguese styles – curved like the former but overlapping only in the centre of the card like the latter. They are clearly of north Italian origin and from the renaissance period, but as the cards themselves do not contain direct evidence, the exact place and time of origin have been subject to debate. The most recent and also most comprehensive analysis is an article in The Playing-Card vol. 52 no. 3 by Nathaniel Shockley, which quotes this web page with regards to the organisation of the fragments and my argument for including the most divergent group with the others. This article presents a compelling argument for a Venetian origin and a dating to 1485–1488 for the earliest cards in the group. A much cited dating of one of the blocks to 1462 is entirely spurious.

The tarot packs

All blocks are of the same size – slightly smaller than a modern A3 sheet. Each consists four rows of cards, with six cards per row in the majority of the blocks. Three blocks from the main collection are notably different in having only five slighly wider cards in each row. Two of these are the only ones to contain tarot trumps; together they contain all trumps and court cards of a standard tarot pack. Given the stylistic similarity and the very peculiar distribution of the trumps between them, it is obvious that they are part of the same pack.

The third of these blocks contains all cards from ace to ten in the suits of bastoni (batons) and spade (swords). Again, stylistical and pragmatical reasons indicate that it is part of the same pack as the previous two. A lost block with the same structure, only with the suits of coppe (cups) and denari (coins), would complete the set of four blocks of 20 cards each for a standard 78-card tarot pack (two positions are left blank in the first block).

Four badly preserved fragments in the private collection of Silvio Berardi in Bologna are depicted in A History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack: The Game of Triumphs by Michael Dummett and John McLeod. These form the bottom and top parts respectively of two sheets exacly like mirror images of the first and third blocks described above. Such reversals are commonplace, as new woodblocks were often made using prints from an older one as a template, but here even the roman numerals on the trumps and the legends on the suit of bastoni are reversed.

The crude pack

The remaining blocks, all with 24 cards, fall in three subtypes. Type 1 have the twelve court cards – fante (knave), cavallo (knight) and re (king) in each suit – in the lower half, while the upper half and the type 2 blocks have the cards from ace to nine in each suit. While this covers the normal structure for packs of the Spanish and Portuguese types of cards, Italian style cards of the period also contains tens. This discrepancy is explained by the single instance of a type 3 block, consisting of six copies of each of the four tens.

One pair of type 1 and 2 two blocks obviously belong together because of stylistic similarities and a distinctive division of the non-court cards between the two blocks. The single surviving type 3 block matches these (and only these) stylistically, resulting in the only completely preserved pack in the collection. I have chosen the term crude to denote this pack, as it differs from the other packs in being somewhat simpler both in design and execution of the pip cards.

The Bassano pack

A pair of substantial fragments are located in Museo Civico in Bassano del Grappa. Both contain all or part of every card in a type 1 block, containing the exact same selection of cards as block C1 described above, although in a different ordering. In the top half the designs are largely the same, but there are minor differences in the design of the asso di bastoni and in some of the legends of the bastoni pip cards. In the lower half, however, only the cavallo di spade is of the same design, although all are in a very similar style.

As mentioned above, the Spanish and Portuguese types of cards have the same structure as Italian ones, except that they lack tens. As it is precisely the tens that were relegated to a separate printing block in the crude pack, one might speculate that some packs were made for export, using only the type 1 and 2 blocks. Still, as the designs are recognisably Italian (though with a significant variation in the suit of spade), I find it probable that a type 3 block once existed also for the packs of which we now have evidence only for type 1 and sometimes type 2 blocks. The lack of evidence for such sheets, if they ever existed, is primarily due to there being printed only a sixth as many of them as the other two types; a proportion which could be even lower if part of the production was sold to a market where 48-card packs were preferred. On top of this comes the circumstance that what survives tends to be sheets that were never cut up into cards, but was rejected and reused as scrap paper. As type 1 and 2 sheets became worn at a rate at least six times greater, it must be assumed that these suffered from misprints leading to rejection more often as a result.

The Fournier pack

The largest group fragments from this pack, at least in coverage if not in number, is located in Museo Fournier de Naipes (the Fournier Playing Card Museum), Vitoria-Gasteiz. Two overlapping fragments form an almost complete top half of a type 1 block. Another group form an almost complete lower half, with a small tab extending into the upper half. The perfect match in the small overlap demonstrates that they belong together, forming an almost complete block. As it is mounted in the available pictures, it is not obvious how many fragments the lower parts consists of, but most likely there are two large fragments with a narrow gap between them placed on top of a less clearly printed fragment bridging the majority of the gap.

The three remaining fragments do not overlap, but if it is assumed that they belong together, they form an exact type 2 complement to the type 1 sheet preseved alongside it. As they are also stylistically very compatible, there can be no doubt that they form parts of the same pack.

Another group of fragments sold at Sothesby’s in 1994 primarily come from imprints of the same two woodblocks, which also have been cut up for reuse in the exact same way. This group additionally contains a fragment of a cardback sheet and another containing parts of a king and a knight. This is cut in such a way that the king would join up almost perfectly with one on the “mirrored” fragments described below, yet the different knight design show that they come from different blocks.

The pip cards from two to nine in the suit of spade are identical to those in the tarot pack, apart from having the right and left edges trimmed somewhat in order to fit on the narrower cards, and those of bastoni are very similar. While the knaves and knights have unique designs in the general style of the entire group, the kings are very similar to those in C1, although different enough that they cannot be copies of the same original design.

The reversed pack

In the main collection there is a type 1 block where all but one of the cards in the upper half are mirror-image copies of the corresponding Fournier designs. Such reversals are common in historical card production, as the easiest way to copy a pack was to trace an existing set of cards directly onto the face of a woodblock, which of course gives a reversed image when used for printing. What is remarkable about this instance (like the mirror-image version of the Tarot sheets) is that the text denoting the value of the pip cards in the suit of bastoni is also reversed. For this reason I have chosen to call this the reversed pack. Its court cards do not copy the same Fournier sheet, however, but two of the knight cards are mirror-image copies of those in the crude pack, and a third is a non-reversed copy.

The lost type 2 and 3 blocks would presumably be mirror images of the corresponding blocks of the Fournier pack. However, as the asso di denari (ace of coins) is different, it is possible that also the other cards of this suit also had another design.

The mirrored packs

Four fragments out of a group of five previously in the private collection of Giulio Bernardi of Trieste contains between them almost complete imprints from two type 1 blocks that are near perfect mirror images of each other. The only publication of these to my knowledge is an entry by Alberto Milano in a 1984 catalogue, where only the fragments making up the lower halves of the sheets containing the court cards are depicted; the upper halves being only briefly described. With the exception of the kings being identical to those in C1, the lower halves are very close copies of R1, both in layout and individual card designs. From the description, it is clear that the same must be the case for the upper halves. In the table, I have therefore suggested that the layout of the sheet with non-reversed text is laid out like a mirror image of R1, even though the description lists 4 to 9 of batons in ascending order. The legend on the two of batons is given as duo ba, obviously a misreading of duob2 for duob[us] as in the Fournier and reversed packs.

Fragment 5 contains a cardback design which according to another description matches the one I hypothesised for the main group.

The elegant pack

The relationship between the final block and all the others presents something of a conundrum.

On one hand, these cards are stylistically less closely related to the other packs, and shares no identical designs with any of them. It has more detailed pip cards in the suit of coppe than the Fournier pack, which in this regard is substantially better than the crude pack (the only other packs to preserve these cards). The court cards are more refined, using hatched shading (this is also used in the Fournier pack) and more detailed foregrounds in the court cards. I have therefore chosen to call this the elegant pack.

On the other hand, it has the same block and card sizes, identical borders around the cards and around the outer edge. The selection of cards and their general placement within the block is identical to block 1 of the Fournier and reversed packs, except having the pip cards from two to nine of coppe instead of bastoni. It is not only preserved in the same collection as the majority of the other sheets, but the chararteristic shapes of the fragments, including small rectangular holes along one of the short edges, indicates that it went through the same kind of reuse after being scrapped. Thus these fragments are not merely placed among the others at a later date by a collector.

Absent any other explanation of the latter points, my tentative conclusion is that despite the stylistic differences, this pack was most likely made in the same workshop and at the same time as the others.

On this background, it is of great interest to observe that the elegant pack’s asso di spade (ace of swords) fits much better with the pip cards of this suit in the tarot and the Fournier packs than the ones actually present in those packs.

In depth

• Tabular overview of the state of preservation of each cards, by pack and block
• About the pip cards in the suit of spade
• Legends on the bastoni pip cards
• The backs of the cards
• About the presence of female court cards
• Similarities across the various packs