print;
playing-card
- Museum number
- 1845,0825.309
- Description
-
Rhetoric; a female armed warrior wearing a crown and holding a sword, flanked by two winged children blowing horns; inscribed at lower left: 'C', at lower centre: 'RHETORICA XXIII' and at lower right: 'Z3'; encircled by a frame of diamonds. c.1470-80
Engraving
- Production date
- 1470-1480 (circa)
- Dimensions
-
Height: 172 millimetres
-
Width: 92 millimetres
- Curator's comments
- The print belongs to the second version (called 'S series') of a group of fifty engravings traditionally known as the 'Tarocchi Cards of Mantegna' (for this set see the entry for Hind E.I.1a: P&D 1895-9-15-1). It is one of ten images in the third group of the set marked with the letter "C" and illustrates the 'Liberal Arts', branches of medieval and early Renaissance learning. Their iconography and order derive from the 'Marriage of Mercury and Philology' ('De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae'), a fifth-century allegorical treatise by the North African author Martianus Capella. He described only the classical seven Liberal Arts and divided them into a lower group called 'Trivium' (Grammar, Rhetoric and Dialectic) and a higher one called 'Quadrivium' (Music, Geometry, Arithmetic and Astronomy). In the Tarocchi engravings the total number was raised to ten, with the addition to the Quadrivium of Poetry, Philosophy and Theology.
The image is a modified copy of the 'E series' Rhetoric; the upper part of the body of the main figure is unreversed in order to retain the sword in the r hand, while the lower part of the body and the children below are in reverse (for a comparison see Hind E.I.23a and Mark J. Zucker, 'The Illustrated Bartsch, Commentary', vol. 24, part 3, 2000, p. 34, no. 023a).
Other impressions of the print are in Bassano (Museo Civico); Boston; Chatsworth (Collection of the Duke of Devonshire); Dresden (Kupferstichkabinett, Zwinger); Cambridge MA (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard Universiry); Vienna; Paris; and in the Rothschild collection (Louvre, Paris).
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 1845
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1845,0825.309
