The Mitelli Tarocchino

Bologna played its own tarot, the tarocchino: sixty-two cards, the pips from two to five thrown out, the Popess, Empress, Emperor and Pope replaced by four interchangeable Papi, and the Hanged Man by a Traitor caught mid-murder. Around 1660 Count Filippo Bentivoglio commissioned the city's great printmaker, Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, to redraw the whole pack, and the result is the only early tarot designed end to end by a famous artist under his own name. Mitelli signed it twice, in the cartouche of the Ace of Coins and along the step of a Papa's throne.

He treated the trumps as a theater of inventions. The World is Atlas under the globe; the Star is a night peddler walking by lantern light under an etched sky; the Chariot coasts with no horses; Fortune sits naked on her own wheel scattering coins; the thunderbolt card needs no tower, just a man flinching under falling fire. The Fool gets a flask and a pinwheel, and the Bagattino becomes a street performer with a dog. Nothing else in seventeenth-century cardmaking draws this well.

The designs were printed and played in Bologna for over a century, and complete sets of the etchings survive uncut in several great collections. This set, uncolored and sharp, is the Bibliothèque nationale's; the game the deck was cut for is still played in Bologna today.