Department: Ruskin

This photograph is an image of an engraving made around 1460, probably in Ferrara, Italy. It is from a set, misleadingly known as a Tarot set, but more probably designed as some sort of a game card series. Mantegna, the artist of the set's title was not the artist either. Ruskin attributed the Tarocchi di Mantegna to designs by Botticelli, and engraved by his assistant Baccio Baldini. He used them to show how Florentine engravers used pure line and simple, abstract detail to allow observers space to contemplate ‘The Mystery of Life and its Arts’. Ruskin commented that to create deliberate, slow and spaced out lines like those seen here was an act of the ‘nobelest passion and tenderest patience’.