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View at the museum ↗The Angel and the Eighth Sphere, plate 48 from Planets and Spheres
Master of the E-Series Tarocchic. 1465
- Attribution
- Master of the E-Series Tarocchi Italian, active c. 1465
- Medium
- Engraving in black on tan laid paper
- Physical dimensions
- Image: 16.7 × 9.7 cm (6 5/8 × 3 7/8 in.); Plate: 17.9 × 10.1 cm (7 1/16 × 4 in.); Sheet: 18.2 × 10.4 cm (7 3/16 × 4 1/8 in.)
- Credit line
- Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Potter Palmer, Jr.
Museum metadata is available under CC0. Image availability and rights are separate; consult the source record.
Source rights statement: Public domain
View the museum record ↗From the museum
The deck of fifty so-called Tarocchi are not tarots in the modern, fortune-telling sense, nor were they intended as playing cards. No cut-out impressions mounted for play are known, and they lack the suits and numbers of a regular deck. Instead, these delicately engraved didactic allegories are grouped in five numbered ranks describing the workings of the spheres of man, the muses, the liberal arts, the cosmos, and the heavens in order of increasing significance, and offer a didactic sequence to educate courtly youths or possibly university students, who could have used them as flashcards or a pamphlet.
Description: Art Institute of Chicago · CC BY 4.0