| Michael Dummett's basic work of Tarot-research "Game of Tarot" gives some informations to the Boiardo-deck. "... a pack designed by the poet Matteo Maria Boiardo (1441-1494. It was to have four suits, made up of the usual fourteen cards each, but with the non-standard suit-signs of Whips, Eyes, Arrows and Vases; in addition, it was to have a Fool (Folle) and twenty-one non-standard triumphs. Again, there was no correspondence between their subjects, each of which represented some quality, such as patience, modesty, etc., and was symbolized by an appropriate historical character, and the standard ones (33)" Note 33 - "Each card was to bear a descriptive tercet composed by Boiardo; there were also to be two extra cards, bearing sonnets by him. The resulting poems, consisting of the two sonnets and the tercets arranged to make five *capitoli*, one for each suit and one for the triumphs, were printed separately in 1523 in a volume published in Venice and containing poems by various authors. They were reprinted, under the title 'I Tarocchi', together with a previously unpublished commentary by Pier Antonio Viti da Urbino (c. 1470-1500), by Angelo Solerti in *Le Poesi Volgari e Latine di M.M. Boiardo* Bologna, 1894, pp. 313-38, with notes on pp. xxxii-xxxv, and again in Zottoli (ed.), *Tutte le opere di Matteo Maria Boiardo*, Milan, 1936-7, vol. 2, pp. 702-16, with notes pp. 748-9. The title 'I Tarocchi' is not Boiardo's; neither he nor Viti uses the word *tarocchi*, but, instead, *trionfi* (sometimes for the twenty-one triumph cards, sometimes for the pack as a whole). The suits represent four passions: love (Arrows), jealousy (Eyes), fear (Whips), and hope (Vases). Each court card depicts an appropriate Biblical or classical character. The Fool (called by Viti *macto*) is called *il Mondo* (the World), a reversal of the usual practice by which the World is the highest triumph card; each of the actual triumph cards represents some quality, such as patience, modesty, etc., and is symbolized by an appropriate historical character, there is no correspondence with the usual triumph subjects. Viti's commentary is addressed to a lady of the court of Urbino, he expresses the hope that his patroness will have a pack made in accordance with the designs he describes. She must have done so, since Carlo Lozzi, 'Le Antiche Carte da Giuoco', *La Bibliofilia*, vol. I, 1900, pp. 37-46 and 181-6, mentions just such a pack, though missing all the court cards, the Fool and all the triumph cards. (Merlin naturally does not recognise his pack as a Tarot pack, and Lozzi fails to connect his with Boiardo's poem). The pack illustrated by Merlin was very probably identical with one sold at Christie's in 1971 to Signor Carlo Alberto Chiesa of Milan; this was a pack printed from wood blocks, and also missing the Fool and all the triumph cards, as well as the few court cards and numeral cards. For more illustrations and further details, see M. Dummett, 'Notes on a fifteenth-century pack of cards from Italy', *Journal of the Playing-Card Society*, vol. I, no. 2, February 1973, pp. 1-6. The pack is now in an anonymous Swiss collection."(Game of Tarot (1980), pp. 76-77). |
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