The Mantegna Cosmograph

"The so-called 'tarots of Mantegna' are one of the most illustrious series of engraved cards... In the opinion of Hind, who discusses this series in his catalogue of early Italian engravers, this provisional name is not at all appropriate since the cards have nothing to do with tarots nor with Mantegna and it is doubtful whether they are playing cards anyway.... The tarocchi di Mantegna are a graphic series with marked literary characteristics and it is likely that it was a social game for educated people.... Hind is quite correct when he notes that this was a game, like many others, which was to be found in the list of Alessandro di Francisco Rosselli, a graphic arts dealer of Florence...." (H 19.)

This was a copper-engraved series of fifty images "in the style of Mantegna", so his name is not inappropriately retained. They were probably intended to be pasted to cards and serve in a game of some sort, and the series shows some striking commonalties with Tarot. The Mantegna series depicts a cosmographic hierarchy divided into five groups of 10 images each. Although reflecting a Neoplatonic humanistic content, artistic style, and overall sensibility characteristic of the Renaissance, (rather than the Medieval Christianity of Tarot), there are definite similarities both in the overall design and in a number of details.

The first decade of Mantegna shows a well-ordered Ranks of Man design culminating in the Pope, as do the first six Tarot cards. (Differences include the fact that the Mantegna series uses all male figures, suggesting simple representation of social status rather than the allegorical females of the Tarot ranks of man. Also, the Mantegna series emphasizes the middle of the social hierarchy: It shows six intermediate secular figures between the lowest two and the Emperor, while Tarot shows only the lowest two, then the Empress and Emperor, with no secular intermediaries.) The final decade of Mantegna shows a traditional Ptolemaic cosmograph from the Moon up to God, (the First Cause), while the Tarot cards from the Devil upward depict key elements of Christian eschatology, culminating in Christ Triumphant in the TdM pattern. The middle section of both Tarot and Mantegna show allegorical figures per se. In Tarot, these include Love, Death, the Wheel of Fortune, and the three Moral Virtues. In Mantegna, these include the nine Muses as movers of the spheres, the seven Liberal Arts, and the seven Cardinal Virtues. In most Tarot orderings, as in the Mantegna series, there is no immediately intelligible order to the sequence in which the allegories of the middle section are ranked. The Muses, for example, have a traditional order which corresponds to the Ptolemaic order of the planets.

However, the Muses were not always ranked at all, and when they were there were different schemes. Likewise, the seven Liberal Arts have a common order: They are traditionally grouped into the Trivium (Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic) and the Quadrivium (Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astrology). The seven Cardinal Virtues were grouped and ordered in a great many ways over the centuries, along with an endlessly flexible list of other virtues. The three Theological Virtues, however, had a conventional order established by St. Paul -- Faith, Hope, and the greatest of all is Love (Charity). None of these more conventional orderings are reflected in Mantegna. In the table below, the Muses are numbered according to the Ptolemaic correspondences above; the Liberal Arts according to a traditional hierarchy of precedence; and the seven Cardinal Virtues according to a hierarchy of precedence given by St. Thomas Aquinas, and used in the Tarot de Marseilles design. None of these orderings, nor any others that I've seen, make sense of these three middle decades of Mantegna. Logical groupings within each decade have been indicated by color coding, such as commoners, nobles, and clergy in the ranks of man; Trivium and Quadrivium in the Liberal Arts; Classical and Christian virtues.

The Mantegna Cosmograph

Although any detailed significance of the middle decades is obscure, the overall design is not. The best explanation of the overall structure and meaning of the Mantegna series was given by John Shephard, in his 1985 book, The Tarot Trumps: Cosmos in Miniature. Shephard's analysis of the Mantegna series is not well known or readily available, so he will be quoted in detail.

Shephard on Mantegna

The Mantegna Tarocchi is constructed of five sets of ten prints. Each print bears at its foot a letter identifying its set (in the first edition E, D, C, B, A), a title in Italian, and a consecutive number (1 to 50). <...>

The subjects are largely traditional and, like the tarot trumps when taken individually, can mostly be found in other fields of art -- in books, illuminated manuscripts, paintings, sculpture in churches and so on. The real problem for us is not so much the source of ideas for the individual prints but, rather, the plan underlying the series as a whole. [Compare that observation with Dummett's emphasis on the meaning of the sequence of the Tarot trumps, quoted in The Riddle of Tarot.]

The key to the basic structure is given by the last print of the series, the First Cause (Figure A). This is a sort of model or schematic diagram of the hierarchy of the universe, of a kind not uncommon in those days. A broadly similar diagram from a sixteenth-century book, [a 1519 edition of Aristotle's Libri de Caelo] though with some minor differences in some of the circles, is shown for comparison in Figure B.

The hub of the cosmological wheel is formed by four inner concentric circles representing the spheres of Earth, Water, Air and Fire, the four elements of the sublunar world, the mingling and mixture of whose qualities determined the natures of everything in the regions below the sphere of the moon. The elements should not be regarded as identical with their counterparts in the physical world but rather as symbolizing the essential principles underlying terrestrial earth, terrestrial water and so on.

The innermost of the four circles in the Mantegna diagram shows the sphere of Earth. This corresponds to the first set of prints, E, the Ranks of Man, in which all the figures are purely human, from the Beggar up to the Pope. This is the world of human personality, the world of everyday life on Earth.

The next circle in the diagram shows the sphere of Water. This corresponds to the second set of prints, D, figures of the Muses and Apollo. The Muses brought the arts to mankind; they stirred the artistic emotions in man and woman. They were believed to live on Earth around springs and streams, particularly the Castalian spring on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. They were nymphs, spirits of Water.

The third circle shows the sphere of Air and corresponds to the third set, C, of the prints, allegorical figures of the seven Liberal Arts and the three great wisdom disciplines of Philosophy, Astrology, and Theology. Instruction and teaching of all kinds were thought to have affinity with the element of Air.

The fourth circle shows the sphere of Fire and corresponds to the fourth set of the prints, B, in which all the figures are of angelic nature: Iliaco, Chronico, Cosmico and the four Cardinal Virtues and the three Theological Virtues. The sphere of Fire, highest and most rarefied of the four sublunar elements, was the home of the angels, the messenger spirits who had form but no physical bodies. They could cross the lunar boundary which divided the celestial regions from those below; they could rise to Heaven but they could also descend to Earth. The soul, which shared in the nature of both Heaven and Earth, was regarded as having affinity in many ways with the sphere of Fire.

The four innermost circles in the cosmic diagram thus represented the spheres of the four elements of the sublunar world and corresponded to the first four sets of the Mantegna prints. Around them and encompassing them come the circles of the spheres of the Heavens, the celestial and divine worlds, shown in the final set, A, of the prints. In this set are the seven planets of antiquity, the eighth sphere of the zodiac and the fixed stars, and the ninth sphere of the Primum Mobile, the First Moving Sphere which sets in motion the rotation of the heavens and the rising of all the stars and planets.

Finally comes the First Cause, represented in our diagram by three further circles the outermost of which is fringed with sunlike radiance spreading out to infinity; these stand for the Trinity -- the Holy Spirit, Christ the King of Heaven, and God the Father -- they may also carry a more humanistic interpretation along neoplatonic lines. (Shephard 44-47.)

In The Survival of the Pagan Gods, Jean Seznec wrote that the Mantegna series showed a Cosmos "from which every trace of Christianity has disappeared". In fact, the Mantegna series shows a dramatically Christian Cosmos. The Pope is the highest of the ranks of man; Apollo, leader of the Muses, was a conventional allegory of Christ; Theology sits atop the Liberal Arts; and there is the allusion to the Trinity in First Cause. There is also the inclusion of the three Christian Virtues at the conclusion of the middle three decades. Faith is illustrated with a cross and ciborium; Hope is shown with a phoenix, and the figure displays a conventional posture that was an iconographic attribute of the Christian Hope of resurrection; Charity reveals a flaming heart, and is shown with a pelican -- both symbolic of Christ's Charity/Love. All these elements reflect an over-arching Christian design in the Mantegna cosmograph. However, instead of the Medieval Christian summa of salvation seen in Tarot, we have a Neoplatonic Christian schematic, characteristic of the Renaissance. This difference in content is paralleled by the difference in artistic styles of Mantegna versus Tarot; and both content and style differences are representative of changes that took place in Northern Italy during the middle of the fifteenth century. Each of the designs typifies its original milieu, even though only separated by a few decades.

Mantegna's explicit didactic content was far from being unique. Moreover, the Mantegna series of images itself was influential for at least 150 years, as shown by their almost immediate use to accompany a 1471 series of poems by Ludovico Lazzarelli, and by their much later use reflected in the designs of the 1616 Labyrinth Game. The following related items are linked to the main listing, where there are additional details and references.

1459 Mantua, Italy.

Heinrich Brockhaus suggested that the Mantegna series was designed at a religious council.

1463 Rome, Italy.

A direct connection between the Mantegna series of images and Cusanus’ Globe Game has been suggested by some. Both games are clearly cosmographic in their design, and to that extent they are related. Not only are the planetary images related to the spheres, but the Muses are shown in their role as movers of the spheres. (Seznec.) Two cosmographic games invented at virtually the same time, suggest that games were being seen in Italy as models or examples of universal forces, combining a well-ordered cosmos with elements of both skill and chance. However, they appear to be unrelated in any detailed manner.

c.1465-70 Ferrara, Italy

This appears to be the most likely time and place of Mantegna's origin.

1471 Ferrara, Italy.

Verses by Ludovico Lazzarelli were assembled into a volume, illustrated with 23 images from the Mantegna series, and four other images in a similar style.

1484 Rome, Italy.

Some of the Mantegna images were used as models for bas-reliefs of the tomb of Pope Sixtus IV.

1496 Germany.

Albrecht Durer created a series 21 of images derived from the Mantegna series.

1502 Germany.

Thomas Murner published an explicitly educational deck, based on the Institutes of Justinian.

1528 Italy.

The Rosselli inventory, listing plates for printing a number of otherwise unknown games with didactic themes.

c.1600 Italy.

The cards of a deck in the Museo Correr show "a cartouche with one word, such as Water, Air, Earth, and Fire, Virtues and Vices, Money, Peace, Paradise, Beginning, Rome, and Venice. <...> This is a social game, like that known by the name of "Continental Conversation Cards" in the England of the eighteenth century. The cards provide a stimulus for profound discussions between educated people and this could easily have been the case with the tarots of Mantegna."

1616 Venice, Italy.

Many of the images for the Labyrinth game, by Andrea Ghisi, were taken from the Mantegna series, with the rest executed in a similar style.

It isn't known whether the Mantegna images were ever pasted on cards or used for a game, although Dummett suggests that their use in some kind of game was quite likely. Even if they were, Hoffman offerred the suggestion that they were not intended as a standard card game, but are related to the didactic games listed in the 1528 Rosselli Inventory, and used as conversation pieces, similar to the c.1600 cards from Museo Correr. However, the indexing of the Mantegna images into five lettered "suits", with an overall hierarchy, suggests a gaming motive for which all players would need to understand and agree on the ranking of the images. As noted above, the order of the middle three decades is by no means obvious, or even intelligible. Numbering would therefore be essential for use in a game, while seemingly pointless if their relative positions were fixed by being printed in a book, or pointlessly distracting were they intended as conversation pieces, in which some of the relative positions would vary from one discussion to the next. Shephard's explanation of the first four decades as representing the four sublunar elements, (which are themselves analogous to the four regular suits), would make the final decade analogous to a permanent trump suit. Five suits, analogous to the five suits of Tarot, would make the Mantegna cards suitable for a Tarot-like game, with a 50-card deck instead of a 78-card deck.

Seznec, Jean. The Survival of the Pagan Gods. Princeton University Press, 1940

Hind, Arthur Mayger. Early Italian Engraving. M. Knoedler & Co. 1938-48.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Roy Publishers, 1950.

Kaplan, Stuart. The Encyclopedia of Tarot. U.S. Games Systems Inc., 1978.

Dummett, Michael. The Game of Tarot. Duckworth, 1980.

Shephard, John. The Tarot Trumps: Cosmos in Miniature. Aquarian Press, 1985.

Kaplan, Stuart. The Encyclopedia of Tarot: Volume II. U.S. Games Systems Inc., 1986.

Robert V. O'Neill's email, Requiem for Lazzarelli, was posted to TarotL on 5/20/00, and is the only readily available and reliable information on Lazzarelli's poems that I'm aware of. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TarotL/message/2209. (You must subscribe to the mailing list to access their archives.)

Adam McLean's 1983 essay, An Hermetic Origin of the Tarot Cards? A Consideration of the Tarocchi of Mantegna, presents a misleading discussion of Tarot and the Mantegna series. It has the entire series illustrated. http://www.levity.com/alchemy/mantegna.html. In fact, the Mantegna cosmographic series is not in any way an origin of Tarot cards. Tarot was invented a half-century earlier and has a medieval Christian design rather than the humanist Neoplatonic hierarchy of the Mantegna cosmograph. The term "Tarocchi of Mantegna" is misleading in this context, despite the fact that it has historical precedent. Beyond that, there is nothing Hermetic or esoteric about the Mantegna cosmograph itself, but instead a perfectly conventional and systematic representation of the God-given order of the universe. The schematic design was as exoteric and scientific (for its day) as a Periodic Table of the Elements. Hermetic philosophy, magic, and mysticism, (unless defined so broadly as to lose all meaning), were not ubiquitous during the late Middle ages and Renaissance; however subject matter such as the planets and their spheres, the Virtues, and the Liberal Arts, were seen commonly and in various contexts.

The symbolism of these cards, or perhaps we should say 'emblematic figures', would seem to derive from the Hermetic tradition which is now recognised as underlying the Italian Renaissance of the mid-fifteenth century. It was during this period that the Platonic Academies of the Medici's were set up and Ficino and other scholars began translating texts such as the Corpus Hermeticum and the works of Plato, some of which were brought to the Court of Florence from Constantinople by Gemistus Plethon (c.1355-1450), a Greek scholar who was probably an initiate of a 'Platonic' Mystery School in the East. This reconstruction of hermetic and neoplatonic esotericism is reflected in such ideas as the Muses, the Liberal Arts, the Cardinal Virtues, and the Heavenly Spheres, and it is my view that the Tarocchi of Mantegna should be seen as an 'emblem book' of this hermetic current. The fact that its designs show parallels with the later tarot decks should therefore be of the greatest interest both to students of tarot and of Hermeticism.

Rafal T. Prinke's 1990 essay, Mantegna's Prints in Tarot History, offers some historical information and theory about the Mantegna series, and has the entire series illustrated. http://www.levity.com/alchemy/prink-ma.html.

In spite of the traditional name of this set, all the modern writers state that the engravings are not the work of Andrea Mantegna (1432-1506). Nobody, however, seems to have noticed the short fragment on Mantegna in the best source on Renaissance Italian artists - Giorgio Vasari's Lifes of Artists - where it is clearly stated that he made copper engravings of trionfi which "were considered to be perfect, as no better ones were known". In the original Italian the sentence reads: "Si diletto il medesimo, siccome fece il Pollajuolo, di fare stampe di rame, e fra l'altre cose fece i suoi trionfi, e ne fu allora tenuto conto, perche non si era veduto meglio" (Giorgio Vasari, Vite de' piu' eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti, Milano, 1809, vol. 6, p. 218). This short quotation is of utmost importance for tarot history. It proves that Mantegna was indeed the author of the engravings attributed to him (which are dated to circa 1460) and, what is even more important, that the term trionfi was not reserved for the standard tarot deck only but was a generic name for a certain type of cards including those of Mantegna (Michael Dummet [sic] in The Game of Tarot p. 82 and 83 says there are no such proofs).

Joannes Opsopoeus Brettanus' 1996 Praefatio ad Lectorem, weaves a fanciful tale about the Mantegna series, incorporating the Brockhaus theory with other legendary and historical elements, as part of the preface to his "Secret History of Virgil by Alexander Neckam." http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/BA/AV/praefatio.html. (The bracketed text appears in the original.)

Francesco Petrarca [Petrarch, 1304-74], who wrote the Trionfi, knew the Images of Albricus, and even saw the Sardinian cave, which he described [Africa, Canto III, 140-262] as the Hall of King Syphax (but he hid its location by placing it in Numidia). These descriptions were collected into a little book about the Images of the gods [i.e. the Libellus de Imaginibus Deorum, c. 1400], which was also put under the name Albricus.

Then Parrasio Michele of Farrara [d. 1456] put together these Images, and they were later used by Pope Pius II and Cardinals Bessarion and Nicholas of Cusa at the council in Mantua (Vergilius' birthplace) that lasted from June A.D. 1459 to January A.D. 1460, but the cards were not well received by them, for they were considered Heretical or even Pagan. In later times this series of images were called the Tarocchi del Mantegna [Tarot of Mantegna], after the Paduan painter Andrea della Mantegna [1431-1506], or the Carte di Baldini [Cards of Baldini], after Baccio Baldini [fl. 1460-85], for these artists also illustrated the Trumps [Triumphi]. Ludovico Lazzarelli made them into a book, De Gentilium Deorum Imaginibus [On the Images of the Gods of the Gentiles, c. 1471 CE, codex Vat. Urb. 716].