It is natural to ask “where did this idea for atouts come from?
” After all, among the handful of regions
with “native” ancient playing card traditions – East Asia, India, Persia, Egypt, and western Europe,
only Europe knows of them. And, more specifically, in Europe it is only in one place, northern Italy in
the early 15th century, that the idea of a trump suit was conceived, and from there spread to
geographically contiguous regions in western Europe.
Since it is unique to Italy, what is most surprising about this innovation in card playing is that it
happened twice within about 25 years, a very short time by historical standards.
A suit of atouts was invented twice – or was it only once? The two places, Milan and Florence, were
not strangers to one another. Despite a series of hostilities in the 20s and 30s, and a generational
ideological battle between the two forms of government, normal human intercourse went on as usual.
Diplomats, churchmen, and scholars, tradesmen and artists, traveled back and forth, as they did all over
Italy and the rest of Europe. It did not take long for a notable new fashion to make the rounds.
But the first invention of atouts – the “proto-Tarot” of this exhibition – did not become any kind of
fashion. As far as we know, it remained a singular invention which never left the castle of Porta Giovio
and the hands of its owner, the duke Filippo Maria Visconti. Tarot – triumph cards – the second
invention of trumps, shows up in three places almost simultaneously, between 1440 and 1442. Since
one of the earliest surviving packs of Triumph cards is due to Visconti, it seems plausible to suspect
that Tarot was invented in Milan as well, in which case a conceptual link between the two sorts of
atouts becomes natural. Filippo Maria Visconti had a hand in the conception of both types of Triumph
games, this view suggests.
But discoveries of the last 15 years so tend to confirm what some of us have long suspected, that the
earliest kind of Triumph game was that represented by Bologna and Florence, the A or Southern
Family, and that the game was probably invented in Florence shortly before 1440.
This distance in time and place leads us to think that the unusual invention of a permanent trump
sequence with moral symbolic figures must have happened independently in the two circumstances,
Milan in the 1410s, and Florence in the late 1430s. Especially since Filippo Maria's game remained
isolated and obscure. Did some Florentine diplomat play it with him, and introduce the innovation of
atouts to an artist and cardmaker back in Florence? This is a plausible, yet vague, scenario. It leaves us
merely guessing the who and when, and leaves untouched the most intriguing question, which is how
could the game of the deification of pagan heroes inspire the game of Florentine triumphalism?
Power cards and ludic logic
There is some evidence that additional cards, not part of the suit system, existed already. From John of
Rheinfelden, and surviving early cards like the Lichtensteinische Spiel with five suits, we know that
experimentation with the composition of packs of cards happened early. Extra suits, extra court cards,
and changing the suit symbols, are all well-attested. But another innovation, an extra card or two, that
serve as wild cards or trump cards, seem to have been tried as well. We might even see these in some
traditional Chinese packs. Sometimes a cardmaker adds a card merely as decoration, which players
then adopt into their games. This can be seen in the invention of the Joker in the USA in the mid-19th
century, as well as in Dal Negro's current Tarocco Bolognese, which adds two “La Matta” cards, black
and red, to the pack. In Florence the game of “Imperatori,” in 1423 called “VIII Imperatori,” is attested.
Did this have such “power cards,” depicting Emperors? We can't say. But the statesman and poet
Fernando de la Torre, in Burgos, Spain, invented such a game in about 1450. His game was essentially
the standard Spanish 48 card pack, to which he added an Emperor, but which depicted the game's
dedicatee, the Countess of Castañeda. He called the card “Emperor,” and said that its power was to beat
all the other cards. Notably he does not use the word “trump.” De la Torre's game might at first seem
like his own independent invention, but the story becomes more intriguing when we learn that he
studied in Florence in the years 1432 to 1434, from the age of 16 to 18. Was Fernando exposed to some
kind of Emperor game in Florence, one with a single Emperor that acted as a unique trump, but did not
yet bear the name? It is a tantalizing possibility.
These examples are intended to show that such “power cards,” as I call them, do not add up to the
coherent symbolic programme of a trump sequence, like those of Marziano and Tarot. Power cards and
trump sequences are categorically different species. While the power cards are part of ludic logic,
arising in games spontaneously in various times and places, the multiple trump sequences, following a
coherent symbolic programme, are not spontaneous or the result of a slow evolution of power cards
over time into something more complicated (the Joker has existed for over 150 years, but has not
inspired the invention of a trump suit of Jokers). The two we know, Marziano and Tarot, are singular
acts of genius. Their uniqueness and proximity of time and place forces us to ask if there could be a
connection between them, the earlier somehow inspiring the later.
