Tarocchi of Mantegna

Tarocchi of Mantegna

"Little is known of the Tarocchi of Mantegna and what we do know entirely contradicts it name. Most scholars are of the opinion that this Tarocchi has been wrongly attributed to Andreas Mantegna (1431-1506) the painter and printmaker of the School of Padua, and rather are to be seen as emanating from the School of Ferrara. They are not a 'Tarocchi' pack in the true sense of that technical term, and they are not cards but a set of prints. Kenneth Clark, the well known art historian of the Renaissance, attributes them to a Parrasio Michele, Master of the School of Ferrara. They consist of a set of 50 finely executed engravings divided into five decades, which could be characterised as:-

1 The archetypal social stations of humanity;
2 The nine Muses and Apollo;
3 The Liberal Arts;
4 The Cardinal Virtues;
5 The Heavenly Spheres.

The symbolism of these cards, or perhaps we should say 'emblematic figures', would seem to derive from the Hermetic tradition which is now recognised as underlying the Italian Renaissance of the mid-fifteenth century. It was during this period that the Platonic Academies of the Medici's were set up and Ficino and other scholars began translating texts such as the Corpus Hermeticum and the works of Plato, some of which were brought to the Court of Florence from Constantinople by Gemistus Plethon (c.1355-1450), a Greek scholar who was probably an initiate of a 'Platonic' Mystery School in the East. This reconstruction of hermetic and neoplatonic esotericism is reflected in such ideas as the Muses, the Liberal Arts, the Cardinal Virtues, and the Heavenly Spheres, and it is my view that the Tarocchi of Mantegna should be seen as an 'emblem book...' "