T is for Trionfi

Visconte-Sforza deck, Photo from wikipedia.

Playing cards came from Italy. Or France. Or Islam. Or China. The Internet will give you all those answers. But, in Europe, the first cards used were called trionfi also called tarot or tarock, and they reflected the 78-card tarot deck which became familiar to cartomancers across the centuries. At the time, they weren’t used for divination. Later folks claim they went back to the pharoah’s Egypt which has been disproved. No one seems to know why the Mamluk Egyptians had them, but they weren’t from Hermes Trismegistus.

The Milanese tarocchi, @1500. Photo from wikipedia.

When They Weren’t Riding Horses, They Needed Other Pastimes

The oldest surviving European decks came out of Milan from the early part of the 1400s. They are named the Visconti-Sforza deck, after Fra Lippo Visconti who commissioned them and his son, Francesco, of whom his later son tried to get Leonardo to build a bronze statue of horse. See L is for Leonardo. (I’m getting late in the alphabet–everybody seems to know everybody else).

The cards were exquisitely painted, sometimes with jewels. (What did a 14th century glue gun look like?) They even painted members of the duke’s family, which makes them historical documents. No complete deck has survived; multiple museums have incomplete decks.

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S is for Summa di Arithmetica

Pacioli also created a font. This Majuscule seems especially appropriate.

Having just spent the past two months analyzing a 1494 accounting textbook, it seems natural to devote one my alphabetic letters to the greatest math teacher of the Renaissance age–Luca Pacioli. I stumbled upon him and his work last year for the letter “P,” so I’m not going to rehash his biography.

Luca Pacioli woodcut from Summa, his 1494 600-page math textbook.

Nor will I tell you the secrets of my 35-page treatise on how this chapter on double-entry bookkeeping for Florentine wool merchants reveals their pious contract with heaven and the Catholic church. Feather Beds and Jesus may just be my next book, who knows? What I will talk about is why this work was so revolutionary, despite accusations of plagiarism and critics calling it of “little or no value.” Boo on them!

Free the Numbers!

If numbers give you a headache, I apologize in advance. But we have to talk about numbers. Perhaps you aren’t crazy about multiplying large numbers, like 9876 * 6789. That’s what calculators are for. Now imagine that it’s the year 1490 CE, and you’re still using Roman numerals, and you don’t have a calculator. You have to multiply IXDCCCLXXVI * VMDCCLXXXIX. Can you imagine? There were, apparently, ways to multiple Roman numerals that involved writing them in columns, doubling and halving, then crossing out odds and evens. You would be desperate to find an easier way. Welcome to Hindu-Arabic numerals.

Pacioli’s explanation on how to multiply 9876 & 6789, from Summa.
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R is for Raphael

St. George and the Dragon (1) by Raphael, in the Louvre. Wikimedia photo.

Raphael was a rock star. He was the Elvis of his generation, the “prince of painters,” at a time when painters were the A-List celebs. It pissed off Michelangelo and Leonardo to no end. He died young, as rock stars do, and there was even a legend around that.

The Pope’s Mission

Raffaelo Sanzio da Urbino was in his early twenties when he traveled to Rome from Florence and Urbino, two other Italian cultural centers of the time. It helped that he was buddies with the future Duke of Urbino and distantly related to Bramante, who was designing the dome for St. Peter’s Basilica. Pope Julius II invited him in for a chat and immediately gave him the commission to paint his private library.

The paintings won immediate acclaim, to such a degree that the rooms he ended up painting in the Vatican are now called the “Raphael rooms.” This first one included the School of Athens which I’ve included in posts on more than one occasion. This photo is a little wavy because it was hot and crowded on the Vatican tour (in 2018), and I was being jostled as I stood right at the wall, trying to take a quick photo. But it may give you a sense of the enormity of the canvas and its sense of grandeur. And such vibrant colors!

Standing in front of “School of Athens” by Raphael, photo by kajmeister.
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