Chancing It: Print, Play, and Gambling Games at the End of the Sixteenth Century Kelli Wood Introduction Detail of chess and goose game board from Gujurat by unknown artist, late sixteenth century (plate 8). DOI: 10.1111/1467-8365.12452 Art History | ISSN 0141-6790 42 | 3 | June 2019 | pages 450-481 © Association for Art History 2019 ‘Abandon all virtue ye who enter here’. This portentous phrase inhabits the centre of a game board published by the Roman printmaker Giovanni Antonio de Paoli in the last decade of the sixteenth century (plate 1). The New and Pleasurable Game of the Garden of Love was a gambling game; men and women in aristocratic salons and local taverns alike would throw their dice on the paper surface of the board in their quest for fortune. In the course of play the gamblers moved their tokens to spaces on the printed game that matched an image of a virtue or a vice with an instruction to win coins or ante up more money into the pot. The innermost scene of the print sets the tone for players to enjoy the game by depicting couples entering an enclosed garden, evoking the leisure of sixteenth-century court culture wherein gardens often served as the stage for pleasure activities in practice as well as in art and literature. A statue of liberalità, translated as ‘bounty’ or ‘generosity’, crowns the game’s central winning space, which is framed by an archway with Corinthian columns supporting the cryptic inscription, a play on the ominous ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’ in Dante’s Inferno. The twist might inspire the player to question precisely what the proclamation means: is it a warning against losing virtue, or an invitation for the lovers to do so as they enjoyed the pleasures of the central garden? What are the stakes for the gambler playing the Game of the Garden of Love? Playing such a gambling game was itself a morally questionable activity at the height of the Counter-Reformation in Rome. The papacy issued edicts against gambling no less than thirty times between 1590 and 1674, during the period in which games such as the Game of the Garden of Love proliferated.1 Legal restrictions on gambling were not at all new, but booming print production in the second half of the sixteenth century created an unprecedented supply, thus necessitating new restrictions on the eagerly sought and widespread gambling materials. Printed materials generally were subject to scrutiny, with works deemed immoral finding themselves on the Index of Prohibited Books and the papacy ordering publishers to seek papal privilege for their practices.2 Moreover, it seems no coincidence that restrictions on printed gambling games, such as that of Enrico Caetani, Camerlengo of the Church, who issued a ban on both the selling and playing of dice games on 30 August 1591, followed shortly after the Papal State implemented a tax on playing cards in 1588.3 Although these works attracted unwanted oversight, a large economy of popular prints – devotional images, lives of the saints, calendars, pamphlets, music, books, as well as playing cards and gambling boards – were designed, engraved, printed, sold, and distributed to Romans and tourists alike in shops and on street corners.4 451 Print, Play, and Gambling Games at the End of the Sixteenth Century 1 Giovanni Antonio de Paoli (publisher), Il novo et piacevol gioco del giardin d’amore, 1589–99. Engraving, 465 × 349 mm. London: British Museum. Photo: British Museum. This article explores the emergence, meaning, and significance of printed game boards such as the Game of the Garden of Love in Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century. These objects constitute an important and overlooked visual and material aspect of a pervasive culture of gaming that encompassed a huge range of the populace: both the rich and the poor, men and women, the educated and the illiterate. By looking at these prints in their context as a whole – as objects made by artists in conversation with one another, as commodities printed and sold by publishers, as systems for conveying and organizing information, and as games that were played with and used – it becomes clear how popular printed games functioned in and contributed to visual culture in Italy at the turn of the seventeenth century. Game studies as an emerging discipline in the humanities has treated the activities, histories, text, and materials of recreation within both historical and rhetorical approaches. Recent works have applied game studies to the early modern period, including Allison Levy’s edited volume on intellectual and material culture, Playthings in Early Modernity: Party Games, Word Games, Mind © Association for Art History 2019 452 Kelli Wood Games.5 Alessandro Arcangeli has defined leisure and recreation based on language about behaviour – what people in Europe thought leisure was, from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. For Arcangeli, leisure is the spirit behind the performance of recreation, and so activities performed for reasons other than relaxation and amusement – one might say outside the ‘spirit’ of leisure – are excluded, including gambling, which is not the subject of his work.6 Peter Burke has also addressed early modern leisure, questioning the dichotomy of traditional notions of festival culture in contrast to newly formed leisure culture, and arguing that leisure activities became less and less marginal to culture from the Middle Ages onward, made possible by a gradual rise in free time for ordinary people.7 During the last decades of the sixteenth century in Italy an intellectual interest in this culture of leisure became formalized and the field of game studies developed, with numerous theories, treatises, and encyclopedias of games being published.8 Within that literature, authors such as Torquato Tasso and Gregorio Comanini defined games as both representations of the world and competitions, as activities that connect the mimetic and the ludic.9 The game boards at the centre of this study visually manifest that dual understanding of games: their meaning is bound up in their purpose as objects of play. At once performative and also aesthetic, they provide images of different aspects of the world, reflecting its varied systems and values.10 Despite their artistry, ubiquity, and production by printmakers also involved in other important artistic projects and book publications, these games have only recently been highlighted in art-historical scholarship.11 One reason for the lack of interest is the anonymity of their authorship; many printed games list only the publishers and were not identified as products of important artists.12 In the past decade scholars have paid more attention to popular printmaking in Italy at the turn of the sixteenth century: Jessica Maier has explored printed maps, Evelyn Lincoln has reconstructed the intellectual milieu surrounding printed images, and Rebecca Zorach has looked at urban space and tourism surrounding the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae.13 Playing cards have long been recognized as important popular objects in the development of early print culture, even though later printed game boards have yet to be adequately enfolded into the discussion.14 Other studies have sought to recuperate the relevance of vernacular language and local culture in the visual arts, and the role of popular prints in Northern Europe.15 In step with this turn in art history, this work seeks to rectify an insufficient interrogation of game objects, countermanding their presumed lack of impact on art and intellectual culture because of their status as popular culture, and thereby helping to revise the canon of prints. The itinerary of this article begins by locating the specific print publishers producing game boards in Rome and considering their networks and modes of production, and then continues by situating printed game boards within their prospective audiences and analysing their rules and methods of play in relationship to their potential social, moral, and symbolic significances. The diagrammatic and map-like compositions employed in printed games evoke other forms of knowledge production, and their rich and polysemous imagery intersected with modes of artistic production that reached a multiplicity of viewers on various levels, from the symbolic, to the moral and spiritual, to the playful and parodic. Printed game boards not only served to entertain, but also mirrored and reified deeper social and moral concerns about gambling and leisure, a tension between the prescribed morality of the legal sanctions, decrees, and censures associated with the Counter-Reformation, and the everyday games common both in courtly leisure and play on the street and in the tavern. More than a dichotomy between the didactic or moralizing © Association for Art History 2019 453 Print, Play, and Gambling Games at the End of the Sixteenth Century and the entertaining or frivolous, the very function of play itself in printed game boards enacts the ontology of life’s journey, from the courtly, to the religious, to the quotidian.16 Games, in fact, could be serious, and serious issues could become subjects of play.17 Printing Play 2 Ambrogio Brambilla, Il piacevole e nuovo giuoco trovato detto pela il chiu, 1589. Engraving and etching, 404 × 523 cm. London: British Museum. Photo: British Museum. © Association for Art History 2019 The full title of the Game of the Garden of Love describes it as both ‘enjoyable’ and ‘new’. Although ‘newness’ was a standard marketing claim for prints, in fact few surviving printed game boards date before the Game of the Garden of Love. Roman printmaker Antonio Lafreri’s (1512–77) now well-studied 1572 catalogue of his vast offering of prints does not mention any games.18 By 1614, another printmaker, Andrea Vaccari, lists a printed chessboard with instructions and two other games: Ambrogio Brambilla’s the Game of Plucking the Owl and the Game of the Goose.19 The Game of Plucking the Owl (plate 2) visually strongly resembles the Game of the Garden of Love in that it also is composed of two concentric ovals (but requires three dice). Both games date to Rome in 1589, whereas race games similar to the Game of the Goose have much earlier roots, and the game of the goose itself is referred to (as a similar game) in the rules of the Game of the Garden of Love. Although the earliest surviving printed sheet titled Game of the Goose comes from Lucchino Gargagno in Rome in 1598 (plate 3), two prints from a decade earlier employ the same iconic spiral structure, thereby providing further evidence for its popularity before Giovanni’s Game of the Garden of Love, despite the limited survival of printed games generally.20 454 Kelli Wood 3 Lucchino Gargano (publisher), Il novo bello et piacevole gioco dell ocha, 1598. Engraving, 507 × 378 mm. London: British Museum. Photo: British Museum. The bottom-right corner of the Game of the Garden of Love reads ‘Ioannes Antonius de Paoli formis’, indicating not the artist of the image, but rather the owner and publisher of the plate, one Giovanni Antonio de Paoli.21 A fair amount is known about his life and work. In a petition for a papal privilege on 4 June 1599, Giovanni describes the kinds of prints he publishes: ‘many copperplate engravings of every devotional kind, curiosities, exempla of God, male and female saints, and the papal princes, in particular your Holiness’ – an obvious flattery in hopes of bolstering his chances of receiving a privilege, which explains the fact that, although Giovanni’s oeuvre contains mainly secular works, his request to the Pope emphasizes his religious ones.22 Although the Game of the Garden of Love potentially aligns with the ‘curiosities’ listed, Giovanni would certainly not state his intention to print a gambling game to the papacy, given the recent edicts against dice games. Giovanni’s 1599 papal petition indicates that his shop was located at Santa Maria della Pace, an area in Rome rife with printers. Three years before the papal petition, © Association for Art History 2019 455 Print, Play, and Gambling Games at the End of the Sixteenth Century 4 Altiero Gatti (publisher), Il novo bello et piacevole gioco della scimia, 1588. Etching, 515 × 383 mm. London: British Museum. Photo: British Museum. Giovanni’s name appears in the estate inventory of another printmaker, Altiero Gatti. According to the document, Gatti owed Giovanni ten scudi, but more pertinently, the two men seemed to be in partnership, for they owned many plates and prints together that were located in Gatti’s shop upon his death.23 The jointly owned prints were of various sizes and kinds: ten copperplate engravings on royal folios, sixteen half sheets, forty-seven quarter sheets, nine portraits, forty small saints, sixty-six half sheet saints, and twenty-five coloured half sheets.24 Collaboration between printers such as Gatti and Giovanni and co-storage of prints would not have been unusual. For example, in 1553, the leading print publisher in Rome, Andrea Lafreri, formed a partnership with his rival Antonio Salamanca, perhaps in order to compete with the newcomer to the Roman print market, Venetian publisher Michele Tramezzino. Upon the official dissolution of the partnership in 1563, each party agreed to return the prints brought into the partnership to the respective owner within a period of eight days.25 © Association for Art History 2019 456 Kelli Wood The inventory of Gatti’s shop provides insight into not only the relationship between Gatti and Giovanni, but also the detailed workings of print publishers at the time. Gatti’s bench and two presses are ‘old’, but his inventory boasts an impressive number of prints: 780 woodcuts of Rome, 26,000 small saints, 5,300 royal folios of diverse figures, various books of plants, birds, seasons, more saints, and copperplate engravings in all sizes.26 Thus, the shared prints with Giovanni represent only a small portion of Gatti’s overall store. Christopher Witcombe calls Gatti a book publisher, a libraio, who also issued prints, and Giovanni too published both prints and books, as evidenced by his 1605 publication Relatione della solenne Cavalcata fatta in Roma alli 17. d’Aprile MDCV.27 Despite the large number of prints catalogued in his inventory, very few works feature Gatti’s address. One that does is another game: The New and Beautiful Game of the Monkey, dated 1588 (plate 4). Printed game boards at the turn of the seventeenth century such as the Game of the Garden of Love and the Game of the Monkey were thus, it is evident, invented and disseminated by artists, engravers, and publishers all working in a network and close community of collaboration and competition. This community shaped the significance and impact of printed game boards not only in their production and distribution, but also by utilizing common sets of rules and a shared visual vocabulary – which will be elucidated later – as well as employing modes of organization shared by other prints by these publishers, including diagrams, images of processions, and maps. As such, the material and visual conditions of print as a medium influenced the reception and agency of the games. Gerolamo Cardano in his treatise on gambling, Liber ludo alea, written in 1526 but unpublished until the seventeenth century, paid close attention to the materiality of playing cards as a central aspect of their utility, noting that the ancients wrote on parchment, papyrus, wax tablets, and bark, which all functioned in contrast to the paper required for cards.28 As David Areford has contended of early prints that lack a clear authorial voice, the print enables viewers to move, prompting performative responses (in his case spiritual ones) from active viewers.29 The materiality of print served as an agent in the system of the game as well, in part by linking players and objects through rules and visual rhetorics. Each element of game play becomes an actor in the network of ludic experience: the game objects, the game space, the rules, and the playful cognitive mode. This network bridges the gap between the ludic and the mimetic, connecting the creativity of play with the underlying structures that govern images and representations.30 Playing by the Rules The Game of the Monkey (see plate 4) is an etching of almost exactly the same size as Giovanni’s Game of the Garden of Love. The top corners bear the name of the game in block letters, indicating that the game is not only new and pleasurable to play, but also visually pleasurable, bello. In the lower left corner, one of the titular monkeys trumpets from a portal with Corinthian columns leading into the pathway of the game. Sixty-three numbered spaces, some populated with various symbols and figures of apes, spiral into a final portal topped by another lute-playing monkey. Beyond this, in a central pastoral landscape, a group of simians dances in the round to a bagpipe. Although no known references exist on how to play the Game of the Monkey, its structure is the same as Lucchino Gargagno’s 1598 engraving The New and Pleasurable Game of the Goose (see plate 3). Gargagno fills the four corners of his composition with playful figures wearing loin cloths and caps with feathers; one whimsically covers his mouth with his hands and stares directly out at the viewer while another chases a © Association for Art History 2019 457 Print, Play, and Gambling Games at the End of the Sixteenth Century butterfly. The centre of the Game of the Goose explicates the rules in eleven points, with beggars seated atop a keg gesturing toward the centre with their wine glasses in order to solicit favour from the winner whose token would victoriously grace that central winning space. Each player of the Game of the Goose (or the Game of the Monkey) starts their token at the portal at the bottom left. By rolling two dice, players advance through the spiral course toward the central space that signifies victory, winning the agreed-upon pot of money. Several spaces have symbols indicating special rules: if there is a goose on the space, the player doubles their roll; at number six, where there is a bridge, one pays a toll and advances to the twelfth space; where there is an inn, one pays a fine and remains on the space; where there is a well, one pays another fine and remains until another player lands on the space; if the player lands on the labyrinth, he pays another fine and goes back three spaces; at the prison, the player pays a fine and remains until someone else rolls the same number; space fifty-eight signifies death, and returns one’s token to the beginning space of the game. In order to win, a player must land precisely on the sixty-third space; if the player rolls over, she advances to the sixty-third space and then counts backwards for the remainder of her roll. Essentially pathway games, the goal of the Game of the Goose and Game of the Monkey was to advance one’s token to the central space and claim the prize of wagered money. The Game of the Garden of Love also describes the rules of the game on the sheet, including them in the four corners surrounding the space of play. The present Game of the Garden of Love not only includes pastime but also recreation and grand amusement for men as for women who play it, and if they attend to the allegory of it, they see there the meaning of the title.31 The emphasis on allegory in the rules demonstrates a vitally important point for understanding the cultural significance of the game: the images and symbols of the game have specific meanings (plate 5), which gamblers were expected to synthesize and interpret during the course of play. ‘Double ones in each case starts the game’, state the rules, the double one space corresponding to an image 5 Detail from Giovanni Antonio de Paoli (publisher), Il novo et piacevol gioco del giardin d’amore, 1589–99, showing ‘Spedale’, ‘Pazzia’ and ‘Speranza’. © Association for Art History 2019 458 Kelli Wood 6 Ambrogio Brambilla, Concetto d’un amante uscito dele pene d’amore, 1575–90. Etching, 341 × 225 mm. London: British Museum. Photo: British Museum. of fortune, holding her symbolic wheel and a ship’s rudder indicating her control alone over the fate of the game. As with any throw of doubles in the game, the player rolls the dice again.32 Players sent to the spaces of ‘hospital’ or ‘rage’ are trapped in those spaces until someone else enables them to pay their way out.33 If a player throws a four and a one they land on the image of secrecy, symbolized by a mouse and his private lair. While the figure of fortune is conventional, the mouse as an emblem of secrecy seems not to be so, indicating artistic inventiveness in the game’s symbolism.34 The space below it is labelled ‘T. 4’ standing for ‘take four’, meaning the player landing on this space should © Association for Art History 2019 459 Print, Play, and Gambling Games at the End of the Sixteenth Century take four coins from the pot, while the text ‘Va alla speranza [Go to hope]’ indicates the player should move their token to space XVIIII, marked by an image of naked Hope holding an anchor, referring to Hebrews 6:19: ‘We have this hope as an anchor for the soul’. Thus, as players attend to the allegory of the game (as the directions have instructed), they see that landing on a virtue, secrecy, leads to a profit of four coins and moves them forward to spiritual hope. Landing on spaces with vices, such as ‘jealousy’ or ‘ungratefulness’, requires players to pay money into the pot and stalls them in the spaces of the hospital or rage. The printed page of the Game of the Garden of Love thus functions both pictorially and diagrammatically, depicting visual symbols and an abstracted structure within which the representations fit together.35 Some printed diagrams, in particular mathematical and philosophical ones, functioned more abstractly and non-discursively as cognitive images, while rebus puzzles merged the pictorial and the linguistic into one.36 Ambrogio Brambilla’s etching, Conceit of a Lover Escaped from the Pain of Love (plate 6), uses the visual pun of the rebus to create a poem, combining the sound of the words indicated by symbolic images with other letters to constitute the verse. The puzzle relies on the practice of reading and the metre of the poem in order to structure the movement through the printed page and create the meaning of the combined images. In the case of the Game of the Garden of Love, the system of the game’s rules provides a discursive mode in order to read these images and make connections between them non-linearly, enabling both physical and imaginative movements across the space of the game board and within the represented space of the titular garden. Two rolls of double sixes end the game by first moving the player’s token to the space labelled ‘honour’, and then into the central garden passing under the statue of liberalità, meaning ‘bounty’ or ‘liberality’, thus winning the player the pot of money (see plate 1).37 As it is the virtues that propel the player forward to win, the concluding inscription ‘Abandon all virtue ye who enter here’ seems an odd proclamation. Is the winning player able to abandon virtue as they triumphantly enter the garden of courtly pleasures? Or is the phrase a kind of warning, an invective against losing virtue through an excess of gambling and leisure? Moralizing the Game The diagrammatic game board, in concert with its discursive system of rules, in fact constructs a space for both options, enabling players to perform virtue while enjoying the pleasure of gambling.38 In The Divine Comedy, in Canto III of the Inferno, Dante sees the inscription ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’ as he follows Virgil through the gate into hell, after which he will be conducted on to purgatory, imagined as a series of terraces circling a mountain. At its summit lies the garden of Earthly Paradise, only reachable after sins have been fully purged.39 For early modern viewers, gardens (in particular walled gardens) were polysemous. Their use as spaces for pleasure connected them closely with narratives of courtly love such as the garden as locus amoenus in Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili or the Roman de la Rose.Yet they served simultaneously as integral tropes for biblical exegesis through their association with the Garden of Eden or Marian hortus conclusus.40 A book published in 1590 by Vittorio Baldini in Ferrara provides a moralizing framework for understanding the sphinxlike inscription in the Game of the Garden of Love. The text Garden of Love, written by the rather obscure author Diomede Nardi da Bertinoro, uses the trope of the garden to consider the nature of love in a philosophical and Christian paradigm.41 Book II focuses on the Christian conception of love, including chapters such as ‘God teaches the way to love perfectly’. Here, Nardi introduces a repeated trope of comparing God’s © Association for Art History 2019 460 Kelli Wood 7 Jacopo Ligozzi, The Allegory of Fortune, c. 1580–1600. Oil on panel, 46 × 27 cm. Florence: Galleria degli Uffizi. Photo: Art Resource. love to gold, with chapters such as ‘That to love God is truly Gold’ and ‘How God persuades in many ways he who buys the gold of love’.42 Through this religious reading, the garden in the centre of the Game of the Garden of Love would be a reference to the heavenly paradise achieved through virtuous life, with the greed or lust for material gold transformed into love of God on the virtuous path. At the same time, the actual coins gambled could be a reminder of the folly of fortune, as in an oil painting of The Allegory of Fortune c. 1580–1600 by Jacopo Ligozzi (plate 7), in which some coins enter and other gold coins deflect off the narrow mouth of the vase cradled by Fortune’s right arm, unable to be collected. On the right of the painting an hour glass is presented to Fortune on a platter, an indication of the fleetingness of life, whilst her gaze turns upward toward heaven, the ultimate goal of a virtuous life. The Game of the Garden of Love, then, in its teaching of virtues and vices, could be construed as a didactic tool warning against the vice of gambling itself.43 In 1616, Bishop Angelo Rocca – humanist, librarian, and once head of the papal printing office – wrote a treatise against card and dice games in which he recommended only chess as a worthy means for the mind to flee boredom.44 Nearly all printed board games from the end of the sixteenth century, however, claim that they are free from vice and well suited to mental recreation. Ambrogio Brambilla’s Game of Plucking the Owl (see plate 2) is similar to the Game of the Garden of Love both in format and in course of play, and the rules Brambilla outlines in the four corners surrounding the space of play emphasize it as a befitting entertainment. This page presents the beautiful game to pluck the owl, come to light now. With which if it pleases you to flee boredom, you can entertain yourself sometimes with it. But one should not think that to play for vice is permitted, for it is not. But if you spend your time wisely, play for fun and win if you can.45 This introductory text defends the game against the immorality of gambling by stating that it should only be played for fun in free time, after one has already spent time wisely. It employs the same language in favour of the game, ‘to flee boredom’, as Bishop Angelo Rocca would use to defend chess decades later. This is notable given that Brambilla’s is the only game to bear the mark of its inventor, rather than just the publisher, for Brambilla’s monogram is visible in the central scene next to the publisher’s address: ‘Romae Baptise Parmensis formis 1589’.46 Similarly, in Ulisse Aldrovandi’s six-page account of the rules of the game of the goose in his encyclopedia of games, he states that while it is purely a game of chance, it was invented for pleasure and play, not for illegal purposes.47 Seventeenth-century Sicilian chess player and historian Pietro Carrera records that Francesco de’ Medici sent a game of the goose board as a gift to King Philip II of Spain. Game boards created out of exotic luxury materials were popular with the Medici family and made ideal gifts because of both their materiality and their ability to impart novelty and entertainment to foreign recipients, so the board sent to Spain may have © Association for Art History 2019 461 Print, Play, and Gambling Games at the End of the Sixteenth Century 8 Unknown artist, chess and goose game board from Gujarat, late sixteenth century. Ebony, ebonized wood, ivory, horn and gold wire, 2.9 × 41.9 × 43 cm. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Association for Art History 2019 been one of the inlaid ebony and ivory boards created in Gujarat for export to foreign markets (plate 8). The gift, according to Carrera, inspired the creation of an emphatically moralizing and spiritual version of the game called the Courtly Philosophy Game.48 Alonso de Barros wrote a text called the Moralized Courtly Philosophy which allegorized life at court as a game and described its meaning, significance, and rules.49 While a game board does not survive alongside the first edition of the text, a later edition was printed in Naples, and an associated gameboard, the Courtly Philosophy Game, contains both Italian and Spanish instructions and bears the signature of a printmaker active in Rome and Naples, Mario Cartaro (plate 9).50 Cartaro worked in the same circle as Giovanni and Gatti in Rome, collaborating at times with Antonio Lafreri, until he moved to Naples in 1586 to complete maps of the Kingdom.51 Like the Game of the Goose, the Courtly Philosophy Game consists of a large spiral of sixty-three spaces, entered through a portal in the lower- 462 Kelli Wood 9 Mario Cartaro (printer), Filosofia cortesana de Alonso de Barros, 1588. Engraving and etching, 531 × 404 mm. London: British Museum. Photo: British Museum. left corner and ending with a central vignette. De Barro’s text indicates that the game represents an austere year of a courtier’s life, and the central scene of Cartaro’s print shows that the end of the journey consists of either the ‘sea of suffering’ for a sinful life or the ‘palm of victory’ for the moral and successful contestant.52 A swan perches atop a skull on the entry portal and blows into a horn to produce the Delphic aphorism noscete ipsum, ‘know thyself’, reminding players of their mortality (plate 10). The entry portal asks the player to look to the end of the game and the sea of suffering. De Barro notes in the text that the player must be temperate, neither arrogant in success, nor a sore loser in defeat.53 Players can double their advancement in the game by landing on spaces of bulls carrying the phrase ‘Fruits of just labour are honourable, useful, and enjoyable’. Each game therefore provides a pretext for gambling: the Game of the Goose and the Game of Plucking the Owl are for everyday recreation of the mind and fleeing boredom, while the Courtly Philosophy Game imparts spiritual wisdom. In 1585, Tommaso © Association for Art History 2019 463 Print, Play, and Gambling Games at the End of the Sixteenth Century 10 Detail from Mario Cartaro (printer), Filosofia cortesana de Alonso de Barros, 1588, showing entry portal. Buoninsegni, theologian to the Medici family, wrote an apologetic treatise on gambling dedicated to Eleonora da Toledo, no doubt to excuse the pastime that was so beloved by her.54 For Buoninsegni, the mechanism of chance in gambling games is a function of the ‘infallible providence of God’ and ‘divine will’ and as such cannot be a mortal sin if exercised in prudent moderation.55 Moreover, he notes if one plays games of chance ‘not principally for profit, but to pass time, that one does not sin […] because one does so not for an end in itself, but for stimulation and for the recreation of the soul’. He even goes so far as to claim that gambling ‘can be a virtuous act’.56 The inscription ‘Abandon all virtue ye who enter here’ in the central space of the Game of the Garden of Love, if taken in light of Buoninsegni’s treatise, cautions the player against the perils of the won money, while the apparatus of the symbolic virtues in the outer ring of the game board asserts the game’s rectitude. Starting with Fortuna and landing on spaces such as Hope, the game reveals the divine force behind the dice. By culminating with the virtue of liberalità the game board prompts the player to virtuously deal with their won money, not with avarice, but with magnanimous generosity. Mapping Play As much as the images, symbols, and rules of printed board games effect their meaning, engagement with these objects is also influenced by their visual similarity to © Association for Art History 2019 464 Kelli Wood 11 Unknown artist (Ambrogio Brambilla?), The Seven Churches of Rome, 1575. Etching and engraving, 39.7 × 50.9 cm. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Association for Art History 2019 period maps and prints evoking journeys and processions.57 In Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance, David Woodward identified the features of what he called a copperplate ‘map aesthetic’ constituted by a high degree of line definition, precise measured boundaries, and the addition of textual annotation and labelling.58 Moreover, Woodward asserted that this aesthetic carried over to other kinds of prints both in how they appear and by influencing how they were used. Late sixteenth-century game boards created on copperplate feature each characteristic of Woodward’s map aesthetic as well as employing organizational schemes similar to prints depicting journeys, including pilgrimages and ceremonial processions. The aesthetic and organization of these games not only facilitated their operation as ‘maps’ within which players navigate interwoven images, but also thematically reinforced their narratives as symbolic journeys. The arched entryway at the beginning of Gargagno’s Game of the Goose most readily reads as a pergola and the game symbolically maps the movements of a pleasure garden: the winding movements the player makes around the game board mirror the enjoyable, ambling movements through a garden or labyrinth of vegetation. On another level, however, the game also suggests a portal beginning an intra-urban journey, with references to stops including symbols of a bridge, an inn, a prison, and a well. Journeys evoking urban and natural landscapes in the form of processions and pilgrimages were frequently the subject of diagrammatic prints in the sixteenth century. For example, an anonymous print published by Lafreri, The Seven Churches of Rome, dating to 1575 in 465 Print, Play, and Gambling Games at the End of the Sixteenth Century 12 Gaspar de Albertis, Roman Triumphal Procession, 1603. Engraving, 55.7 × 78.5 cm. Chicago: University of Chicago Special Collections. Photo: University of Chicago Special Collections. © Association for Art History 2019 honour of the Jubilee of Gregory XIII, also depicts an urban journey (plate 11). The print shows processions of Jubilee pilgrims around Rome, highlighting the four Papal Basilicas. It was included in the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, the print series depicting notable artworks, architectural scenes, and monuments of Rome meant to be collected by visitors and locals alike and collated into albums.59 Another engraving in the Speculum Romanae by Antonio Tempesta, published by Gaspar de Albertis in 1603, of a Roman Triumphal Procession (plate 12) features a winding procession of figures extending from a portal in the lower right corner of the page and provides the viewer with a labelled cast of characters to follow through the streets of Rome. Just as the viewer of The Seven Churches of Rome or the Roman Triumphal Procession trails figures imaginatively into Rome through city gates and arches, players of the Game of the Goose imaginatively entered the space of the game through the portal and reinforced this action by moving their token through the pathway of play; both prints required a mental habitus for understanding informational mapping and symbolic space. As Silvia Mascheroni and Bianca Tinti have suggested, the sixty-three spaces of the Game of the Goose represented sixty-three years of life.60 Gargagno’s print thus maps that lifespan as a quotidian journey through and between different spaces, and although the chance of the dice varies the player’s stops on the path, the journey is dictated by the linear movements along the pathway. The Courtly Philosophy Game, with its similar diagrammatic structure but thematically moralizing message, might be similarly read as a map for a kind of virtual pilgrimage that begins with the memento mori reminding the player that the important journey is the one toward eternal salvation. Its creator, Mario Cartaro, was an active map-maker, and the Courtly Philosophy Game reflects some elements of maps, particularly its sea monsters reminiscent of those inhabiting the waters of portolan charts.61 466 Kelli Wood 13 Floriano dal Buono, Il Nuovo Gioco dell’Honore, 1630–47. Etching, 386 × 558 mm. Bologna: Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna. Photo: Author. The analogy of the game board as a symbolic map is further supported by another style of board game that visualizes the game path like a route up a steep hill, somewhat like the path through Dante’s Purgatorio. An etching dating to the 1630s of a game titled The New Game of Honour by the Bolognese printmaker and painter Floriano dal Buono (plate 13) depicts a kind of path game with an entry portal in the lower-right side of the sheet with numbered spaces on the path of play.62 The game proceeds along a tree-lined switchback route up a mountain in the hilly landscape, with figures of virtues and vices occupying spaces on the board – fear, tiredness, laziness, apathy, industriousness, prudence, as well as spaces for a hearth and a tower of virtue. The object of the game is to ascend the mountain and reach the summit, signified by a villa and a statue of Honour, with the virtues advancing players up the mountain and the vices sending players back down. In Bologna, similarly, pilgrims frequently ascended the Monte della Guardia to reach the Sanctuary of the Madonna of San Luca, stopping along the way to pray and give tributes. In this way the journey visualized in the Game of Honour would have visually translated the physical journey of the pilgrimage into the symbolic journey of the game. Early modern pilgrims readily accepted such implementation of one kind of topography in place of another, for example, through mental and physical movement through representations of the sites of Bethlehem and Jerusalem at the Sacro Monte di Varallo.63 An etching by Matteo Florimi also visualizes a courtier’s life journey through a set of symbolic steps wherein the player profits from virtue and suffers from vice (plate 14). A young man ascends a short staircase at the right to enter the court through a portal of honour, lifted up by hope and ambition, only to descend a longer staircase of vices at the left and be ejected from the court as an impoverished elderly man, as hope flies away. Numerous books including Dante’s Divine Comedy and allegorical romances such as Piers Plowman, Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, and Roman de la Rose employed textual strategies of symbolic journeys with characters representing virtues and vices guiding the way. In this context, the Game of the Garden of Love also reads as a map for a symbolic journey, guided by virtues and vices like Florimi’s print. © Association for Art History 2019 467 Print, Play, and Gambling Games at the End of the Sixteenth Century 14 Matteo Florimi, Chi non sa impari, c. 1585–90. Etching, 39.5 × 50.6 cm. Austin: The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Photo: The Harry Ransom Center. © Association for Art History 2019 A closer look at the central scene of Giovanni’s the Game of the Garden of Love reveals that the villa and garden pictured is not a purely imaginary structure, but evokes the Villa Medici in Rome in its façade and the structure of the garden, which would have been a recognizable landmark for both locals and visitors interested in touring Rome’s architecture. This is visible from a comparison with an image from Roman printmaker Giovanni Battista Falda’s view of the Villa Medici (plate 15). Figures of couples, gardeners, dogs, and groups of men, women, and children all mill about the space of the garden in the same meandering fashion as the figures entering the Game of the Garden of Love. Falda’s print also numbers important sites around the garden and provides labels at the bottom of the page, inviting viewers to visually circumambulate the printed garden in the same way players moved around the printed game board. The space of the Game of the Garden of Love thus seems to map for a courtly journey in a pleasure garden, as even the structure of the Game of the Garden of Love uses the architectural vocabulary of the balustrade to separate the spaces between the virtues and vices, a hint that the players are navigating an outdoor staircase in order to access the central garden. Moreover, the print provides a reminder of an important site in Rome and gives a kind of virtual access to the pleasure garden of the Medici family, similar to the kinds of maps and views included in the Speculum Romanae, and both the large size of the print and its participation in the map aesthetic also makes it comparable to the kinds of works collected in the Speculum Romanae. Printed game 468 Kelli Wood 15 Giovanni Battista Falda and Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi (publisher), View of the Villa Medici, after 1677. Etching, 23.2 × 42.8 cm. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art. boards organized knowledge both by evoking structures similar to other printed works and by opening spaces for virtual journeys – quotidian, spiritual, and courtly.64 The diagrammatic games created new structures within which to imagine these aspects of lived experience, employing both the material of the print and the play of the game itself in order to make meaning. Playing with Fortune While games like Game of the Goose, Courtly Philosophy Game, the Game of Honour, and the Game of the Garden of Love were apt for moral or virtuous interpretation, they were still most powerfully in conversation with and a response to the widespread culture of gambling.65 Numerous inquisition records, laws against gambling, and records dealing with the management of public spaces all indicate the widespread practice of gambling on the street and in the tavern, and print culture – including printed playing cards – contributed greatly to the spread of information and nodes of interaction in these spaces.66 Evelyn Lincoln, in her recent work on print culture in early modern Rome, has persuasively argued that book publishers characterized their readers as avid collectors and organizers of knowledge as reflected in popular new genres of printed works, including pilgrim guidebooks, Gregorian calendars, and lives of saints. Rosa Salzberg in her work on Venetian ‘cheap prints’ has demonstrated how printed objects functioned through orality in a society of porous literacy and found a home amongst the poor and rich.67 Printed gambling games were central aspects of this material culture, able to function on the street and in the salon, not necessitating literacy but rather functioning through their symbolism in an oral culture. The space of the tavern hosted simple dice and board games as much as, if not more than, the salon – few of these game boards survive because they were pasted down on tables in taverns, gambled on, and then pasted over when they were worn out.68 Beyond the tavern, aristocratic audiences had a particular penchant for gambling games. Letters written in 1585 between Philip II’s court jester Gonzalillo and Francesco © Association for Art History 2019 469 Print, Play, and Gambling Games at the End of the Sixteenth Century I de’ Medici confirm Pietro Carrera’s later assertion that a game of the goose was sent from Florence to the Spanish court. Gonzalillo laments that the prince, his daughter, and court painter Luis Tristàn lost forty scudi playing it, and a letter dating just a day earlier from Philip II to his daughter Catalina mentions that his other daughter learned the game from Gonzalillo.69 Cosimo de’ Medici, and in particular his wife Eleonora da Toledo, were notorious gamblers, participating in gambling not only as a diverting pastime, but also as a political activity to demonstrate their fortitude in taking risks, as Nicholas Baker has recently claimed.70 Alongside its predisposition for all manner of sport, Duke Alfonso II d’Este’s court in Ferrara also played gambling games, frequently entertaining visiting guests with cards. A Florentine ambassador to Alfonso II’s court noted the particular role of women participating in merrymaking in his salon: no one can withstand the stamina of the countess in the Salon of the Duke, in which they banquet twice a day and party always until the tenth hour, chatting, playing games, drinking and dancing continually, until Don Alfonso finally went to bed.71 Venetian composer Giovanni Croce imagines a scene of noble men and women playing a game of the goose match in his Triaca musicale, first printed in 1595.72 Literally ‘musical anecdotes’, these were to be sung in masquerade during carnival, and one madrigal written for six voices imitates a group of men and women playing the game of the goose.73 The male singers begin by describing their location, a ‘noble place’, and ask the women what kind of game they want to play. The women respond, ‘Giochiammo all’Occa’, ‘Let us play the game of the goose’, and the song proceeds. The players ante up, the first lady to play rolls a nine, the luckiest combination on the first try. All the ladies who play have similarly good luck landing on geese, while the men have bad luck, landing on the inn, the well, and death. Finally, a lady wins the game and the group celebrates with a song honouring love: ‘E noi per farle honore, Cantiamo a tutte l’hore, Viva viva viva l’amore’, ‘And we honour you/ Let us sing/ Long live love / Long live love’.74 The rhetoric of Croce’s depiction of the game is clear: a polite game, the women must win in the name of courtly love. Although both men and women participated in gambling, women’s gambling received considerably more moral concern and resulted in different treatments both in art and literature.75 Gambling games on paper had a long history as part of entertainments in salons and taverns starting from the mid-fifteenth century, including dice games and tarot cards, which combined fortune-telling with strategic and chance play. As Suzanne Karr Schmidt has shown, by the end of the fifteenth century the combination of chance and divination in play extended into the realm of fortune books, especially those printed in Germany and Venice in the first half of the sixteenth century.76 Such works as Lorenzo Spirito Gualtieri’s Book of Lots, completed in 1482 and reprinted many times over the next century, and Sigismundo Fanti’s Triumph of Fortune, first printed in 1526, functioned as a combination of astrological guide and parlour games, with sections on the celestial spheres and the prophets as well as divinatory dice games related to wheels such as the ‘Sphere of the Sun’ (plate 16).77 Jessen Kelly has demonstrated that wheels in these fortune books were visually evocative of the rota fortunae, king one day and disgraced the next; the turning of fortune’s wheel, representing the vicissitudes of the earthly realm, visually instantiated the forces that governed the player’s lives – celestial, political, and sacred.78 Players asked common questions about their health and wealth, and then they followed the book through a series of wheels, dice throws, and sayings of prophets to finally find their listed © Association for Art History 2019 470 Kelli Wood 16 Detail of Lorenzo Spirito, Libro de la ventvra di Lorenzo Spirto con somma diligentia reuisto & corretto & da assaissimi errori espurgato che nelle prime stampe si trouauano, Venice: Venturino de Roffinelli, 1544, f. 2, showing ‘Sphera del Sole’. proverb to answer their query. The Game of the Garden of Love and the Game of Plucking the Owl visually evoke these earlier fortune book games, sharing their structure of a central image surrounded by an outward radiating wheel of symbols and text with directions for the player, as well as similarly using a mechanism of chance to direct the viewer’s engagement with the print. Moreover, these games reinforced the importance of fortune in the practice of daily life. A popularly disseminated etching by Ambrogio Brambilla titled the Tree of Fortune c. 1575–90 (plate 17) makes visible these commonplace ideas. Fortune sits atop a globe representing the world, with her drapery blowing in © Association for Art History 2019 471 Print, Play, and Gambling Games at the End of the Sixteenth Century 17 Ambrogio Brambilla and Lorenzo Vaccari (publisher), Arbore dela fortuna, c. 1575– 90. Etching, 250 × 189 mm. London: British Museum. Photo: British Museum. the wind to signal her unpredictability. Mankind gathers below the tree to collect the offerings of Fortune: some are blessed with riches, coins, jewels, and crowns, while others are afflicted with misfortune, stabbed by swords and threatened by falling rocks and knives. A poem at the bottom of the print concludes, ‘Do not be pained that chance looms above us, so long as it does not thunder death’, which reminds the viewer of their lack of control over one’s fortune, as well as trivializing minor ups and downs in comparison to mortality.79 These games – including printed game boards, fortune books, and parlour games – provided not only the physical substrate, but also the intellectual apparatus, for interpreting the meaning of not only images, but life. People of all classes participated in lotteries, using various strategies such as talismans to influence their fortune, while others used the chance mechanisms of books like Spirito’s Book of Lots or Fanti’s Triumph of Fortune in an attempt to access a glimpse of their future.80 Francesco Marcolini’s The Fortunes... Titled the Garden of Thoughts, published in Venice in 1540 and again in 1550, © Association for Art History 2019 472 Kelli Wood continued the tradition of divination games, using configurations of cards rather than dice as the vehicle for chance.81 The title page (plate 18) illustrates Marcolini’s games as taking place in a garden, evoking similar imagery as the Game of the Garden of Love: groups of men and women in classicizing garb gather in a landscape and under a partially covered archway with columns. The woodcut bears the signature of Giuseppe Porta in the cartolino, but the design closely resembles that of an earlier engraving by the school of Marco Dente in Rome, some think affiliated with Marcantonio Raimondi.82 The figures in Dente’s original image are meant to be scientists: they gaze up towards the heavens with an armillary sphere and down at a scientific manual. In Porta’s woodcut, 18 Francesco Marcolini, Le sorti intitolate giardino d’i pensieri, Venice: Francesco Marcolini da Forli, 1540, f. 1r. Printed book with woodcut illustrations, 31 × 22 × 2.3 cm. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Association for Art History 2019 473 Print, Play, and Gambling Games at the End of the Sixteenth Century 19 Reprint of Giuseppe Porta, ‘Veritas’, 1550, in Francesco Marcolini, Le sorti intitolate giardino d’i pensieri, Venice: Santini, 1784. Engraved book, printed on paper. Chicago: University of Chicago Special Collections. Photo: University of Chicago Special Collections. the imagery in the scientific manual has been replaced by fortune-telling card diagrams from the titular The Fortunes... Titled the Garden of Thoughts, accompanied by a deck of tarot cards. The garden scene, thus, functions dually in Porta’s image by using the armillary sphere to reference the astrological side of astronomy, while the book and tarot cards signal its relationship with chance and divination – a liminal space for imagination. Marcolini’s game incorporated allegorical symbols of human characteristics such as Vanity, Defect, Truth, Knowledge, and Nobility – similar to the virtues and vices in the Game of the Garden of Love. Truth, Verita, takes the form of an emblem (plate 19), a combination of a symbolic scene and a written motto. The Latin phrase veritas filia temporis (Truth, daughter of Time) appears on a banderole held by Truth, who emerges from a rocky cave or well in the landscape, pulled out by her father Saturn, symbol of time, while a harpy struggles to push her back in. This ancient mythological trope was known through such popularizations as Vincenzo Cartari’s 1556 dictionary of ancient mythology, The Images of Gods and the Ancients.83 Treatises on parlour games frequently incorporated the interpretation of these kinds of symbols and emblems. Alongside lively conversation, Baldassare Castiglione includes the creation of imprese, or emblems, as one of the recreations often enjoyed in the salon of Elisabetta Gonzaga, while in Ascanio De’ Mori’s Pleasant Game, players verbally create a garden containing a symbolic animal and invent for it a motto and a madrigal or poetic verse – similar to Marcolini’s inclusion of allegorical images in his garden game of chance.84 Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists specifically mentions Marcolini’s book, calling it a ‘marvellous work’ with ‘very beautiful figures’. And who does not marvel at the works of Francesco Marcolini da Forlì? Above all others is the book The Garden of Thoughts, printed in wood, featuring an astrological sphere from the design of di Giuseppo Porta da Castelnuovo della Garfagnana. The book presents many fantastical figures: Fate, Jealousy, Calamity, Timidness, Praise, and many similar things that were done beautifully.85 Vasari’s incorporation of Marcolini’s game into his consideration of the Lives of the Artists suggests that popular printed images including games were also considered in the visual realm of the arts. The social events surrounding the play of these gambling games in aristocratic salons or gatherings of erudite academies relied on an oral culture, including parlour games, which reinforced and taught a visual and cultural literacy.86 As Pat Simons and Monique Kornell have noted, the Roman Accademia della Virtù, a dining and drinking academy that gathered during carnival, held a weekly ‘Game of Virtue’, complete with elected mock nobility and a competition of literary compositions – an example of how games functioned in an economy of satire and parody.87 Other parlour games from the mid- to late sixteenth century include the ‘game of painting’ which © Association for Art History 2019 474 Kelli Wood encouraged players to debate the merits of painting vs. sculpture, or design versus colour.88 These parlour games could be a didactic activity, one that created a shared visual and linguistic vocabulary for understanding images. The kinds of emblems and images mentioned in parlour games relate to the allegorical images employed in games of chance like the Game of the Garden of Love, giving players a visual vocabulary and a shared way of interpreting the multivalent fortune-based imagery featured on these game boards, objects whose purpose was to elicit and entice play. Imagery and Parody in Play 20 Detail from Altiero Gatti (publisher), Il novo bello et piacevole gioco della scimia, 1588, showing simian. 21 Detail from Lucchino Gargano (publisher), Il novo bello et piacevole gioco dell ocha, 1598, showing space 58. 22 Detail from Altiero Gatti (publisher), Il novo bello et piacevole gioco della scimia, 1588, showing space 59. © Association for Art History 2019 In his discussion of the Game of the Goose and the Courtly Philosophy Game, the historian Carrera noted that witty men build upon original inventions to create inventions anew. Indeed, as is clear amongst printmakers and publishers such as Giovanni, Gatti, Brambilla, and Cartaro, printed game boards built upon, changed, and innovated from other existing games. The rules of the Game of the Garden of Love describe its play in comparison to the Game of the Goose, while the game produced by Giovanni’s publishing collaborator Altiero Gatti, the Game of the Monkey, also engages in intervisuality with other games. These objects demonstrate a shared visual culture of citation and invention that uses visual wit and parody in order to elicit not only the play of the game, but also playful visual readings of the objects. Altiero Gatti printed the Game of the Monkey in 1588, the same year as Cartaro’s Courtly Philosophy Game. It replaces the memento mori of the Courtly Philosophy Game’s entryway with a trumpeting monkey, and the sea of suffering with a scene of simians partially clothed in boots and jewellery as they dance to the music of a bagpipe. The monkeys inhabit the same spaces of play as the geese in standard Game of the Goose boards by humorously engaging with the imagery. For example, the image of the bridge shows two monkeys fighting with swords and shields, and in the ninth space of the board – the most advantageous first roll as demonstrated in Croce’s Triaca musicale – the goose is replaced by a monkey exposing his behind to the viewer (plate 20), an image denoting mockery dating back to the margins of medieval manuscripts.89 The fifty-ninth space of Gargano’s the Game of Goose shows a goose looking back at the space behind it, lifting his wings in defiance, having bested death (plate 21). Gatti’s monkey in the fifty-ninth space too looks back at the figure of death, mockingly holding a mask in front of his face toward the skeleton, thereby making the figure of death seem frightened by the mask, rather than menacing to the viewer (plate 22). Monkeys exemplified early modern concerns with mimicry and imitatio because they were understood to imitate human behaviour without understanding its meaning.90 For example, Giulio Cesare Capaccio’s treatise on emblems, Delle imprese – a book in fact owned by Gatti – gives as the motto for the simian, ‘He who seeks to imitate others often remains himself the only one fooled’.91 Humorous artworks often used monkeys to parody human behaviour, thereby signifying a carnivalesque 475 Print, Play, and Gambling Games at the End of the Sixteenth Century 23 Niccolo Boldrini (after Titian), Caricature of the Laocoon in the form of apes, c.1540–45. Woodcut, 275 × 402. London: British Museum. Photo: British Museum. © Association for Art History 2019 inversion, the world turned upside down, as in Niccolo Boldrini’s woodcut after Titian wherein monkeys replace the figures of the Laocoön (plate 23). Accordingly, the kinds of imagery employed in games like the Game of the Monkey engaged in a sophisticated way with a visual culture of polyvalent meaning that included high art and popular culture.92 The eighteenth and nineteenth spaces of Gatti’s game board, traditionally the spaces of a goose and an inn, are again replaced with monkeys (plate 24). The goose is replaced by a simian Mamluk traveller, whilst in the background behind the inn, monkeys mirror the actions of the players gathered around the game board. Some purchasers of Game of the Monkey prints may have been travellers themselves. When pilgrimages revived following the Sack of Rome in 1527, tourists became interested in collecting the classical antiquities of Rome through printed maps and views of monuments in the Speculum Romanae,93 and the thousands of small prints of saints and views of Rome recorded in the inventory of Gatti’s workshop indicates that he was creating prints for these pilgrims and tourists.94 Many of these printed game boards could also have been sold not only to locals, but also to the tourists and pilgrims coming to Rome, as an audience who might want to pass some time away during their travels. They could potentially see themselves in the image at the gaming table – the exotic Mamluk monkey traveller as the inversion of the Christian on pilgrimage to Rome. The bagpipe-playing monkey in the central vignette of Gatti’s print also contributes to the playful inversion in the game. The bagpipe epitomized both lay excess and a witless demeanour, especially after its use in Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools to represent folly, the loud-mouthed inconsistent bagpipe symbolizing foolish proclamations.95 The Game of the Monkey, then, humorously inverts moralizing games like the Courtly 476 Kelli Wood 24 Detail from Altiero Gatti (publisher), Il novo bello et piacevole gioco della scimia, 1588, showing simian traveller and hosteria. Philosophy Game as a carnivalesque pilgrimage, a journey now undertaken by imitative, foolish monkeys. What’s more, it is clear that Gatti himself was in on the joke. His address appears in the lower-right corner of the page alongside ornamental vine work (plate 25). If one looks closely, several small mice crawl on the vines, and a cat perches uneasily on top, back arched and eyes wide in fear. The world turned upside down continues: the cat is afraid of the mouse. Moreover, the Italian word for cat, gatto, plural gatti, was also the publisher’s name. Altiero Gatti is then rendered with playful inversion in the ornament alongside his address, figuring himself as the scared cat. The imagery, aesthetic, and materiality of Game of the Monkey all reify the print’s purpose as a game by linking its ludic and representational functions; the monde à l’envers narrative guides the player through the game board, humorously reinforcing the playful purpose of the object until the end of the game.96 At the centre of the board next to the final space, the back of a cat is visible nestled in vines while a mouse balances uneasily at the top: when the game concludes, the world is righted. Conclusion The richness and multivalence of the imagery in the Game of the Garden of Love, like that of other printed games at the time, is grounded in its purpose as an object of play. The witty twist of Dante’s phrase into ‘Abandon all virtue ye who enter here’ signifies dually. On the one had the game was legible, or at least defensible to inquiring eyes, as moralizing and didactic; the ‘Abandon all virtue’ served as a warning like Dante’s inscription at the gates of Hell, the central garden resonated with a heavenly paradise like Nardi’s The Garden of Love. But the object was still a gambling game, men and women still wagered, won, and lost quattrini rolling the dice on the paper surface of the print as it was pasted down to a table. The title itself exalts the pleasure of the game, and many of the virtues therein – courtliness, music, nobility, fidelity, elegance – would be just as useful in the conquest of courtly love or social ambition as in the strive toward eternal salvation. And in fact the space of ‘Nobility’ itself sends the player into the winning centre of the game and liberalità, the appropriate generosity suggested for the winner of the prize money. The rhetorical aim of the Game of the Garden of Love is the same as Buoninsegni’s treatise on gambling: to rationalize the gambling of aristocrats and the nobility while simultaneously condemning the same activities by the poor, lauding the possible virtuosity of gambling by those who do not need to earn money from it. ‘Abandon all virtue ye who enter here’ not only cautions the player against the perils of the won money, but when read in conjunction with the symbolic virtues in the outer ring of the game board, creates an apologetic for aristocratic gambling. The journey the player takes is a pleasurable path through the gardens of a noble villa, and the player and purchaser of the print, like others included in the Speculum Romanae, gains virtual access to that privileged space. Making rules, taking bets, finding fortunes, dictating morals, and mapping journeys: early modern printed game boards engaged early modern viewers visually, materially, and performatively, creating meaning through play and parody, signs and symbolism. The diagrammatic printed surface of the game board corresponded with a web of printed materials relying upon shared modes of reading and interaction, utilizing common structures and imagery. Printed game boards at the end of the sixteenth century in Italy mapped the various valences of life’s journey in a new space © Association for Art History 2019 477 Print, Play, and Gambling Games at the End of the Sixteenth Century 25 Detail from Altiero Gatti (publisher), Il novo bello et piacevole gioco della scimia, 1588, showing signature. open to both morality and fun: the popular, quotidian, and intra-urban in the Game of the Goose and the Game of Plucking the Owl, the moral and spiritual in the Game of Honour and the Courtly Philosophy Game, and the aristocratic in the Game of the Garden of Love. The publisher Baldini used several devices, but the one paired with Nardi’s The Garden of Love book provides a lens for interpreting games as simultaneously potentially moralizing and as pleasurable activities of chance. A blindfolded putto throws three dice onto a table under the motto Sorte tandem, ‘Ultimately, chance prevails’. Players of the Game of the Garden of Love, like so many Romans in the sixteenth century, took a practical approach to fortune, enjoying the morally questionable activity of gambling without abandoning the path toward spiritual salvation, not ignoring virtue, but ultimately letting fortune prevail: chancing it. Notes Versions of this paper were first presented in March 2016 at both the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and the ‘Renaissance Games’ panel at the RSA conference in Boston, and this work has benefited greatly from the formative feedback I received there. I also give thanks to the anonymous reviewers as well as my colleagues at the Society of Fellows and History of Art at the University of Michigan for their valuable input. I am especially grateful to Jonathan Bober, Sean Roberts, Pat Simons, Chris Zappella, and Rebecca Zorach for their intellectual support. 1 Giorgio Roberti, I giochi a Roma di strada e d’osteria: dalla ‘Passatella’ alla ‘Morra,’ dalla ‘Ruzzica’ alla ‘Zecchinetta’: più di 400 modi per divertirsi ricostruiscono il vivace © Association for Art History 2019 2 3 e popolare spaccato della Roma d’una volta, Rome, 1995, 351–357. Similar bans also appear in Florence, for example a ban on 27 September 1591 published by Giorgio Marescotti that notes a ban not only on dice and card games, but also ‘nuovi modi di altri giuochi’. See: Prohibitione del giuoco di Ventura col Girello, Florence, 1591. For the Index, see J. M. De. Bujanda et al., eds, Index de Rome: 1557, 1559, 1564: les premiers index romains et l’index du Concile de Trente, GenèveSherbrooke, 1990; and Gigliola Fragnito, ed., Church Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy, Cambridge, 2001. Morena identifies the earliest tax on playing cards enacted by Pope Sixtus V in 1588 in Capitoli sopra l’appalto fatto del bollo delle carte, Rome, 1588. Archivio di Stato di Roma, Ospizio di S. Michele, b. 158, see Marina Morena, ‘L’amministrazione del bollo e la fabbricazione delle carte da gioco nello Stato pontificio (1588–1837)’, Rassegna degli Archivi di Stato, LII/2, 1992, 324–333. 478 Kelli Wood 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 For print publishers and the market in Rome, see Evelyn Lincoln, Brilliant Discourse: Pictures and Readers in Early Modern Rome, New Haven, 2014; Christopher Witcombe, Print Publishing in Sixteenth-Century Rome, London, 2008; Rebecca Zorach, The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome, Chicago, 2008. For an overview of surviving evidence on playing cards in Rome, see Thierry DePaulis, ‘Playing Cards in Rome: 15th–17th Centuries’, The Playing-Card, 36: 3, 2007–08, 205–211. Allison Levy, ed., Playthings in Early Modernity: Party Games, Word Games, Mind Games, Kalamazoo, MI, 2017. For an overview of the material culture of early modern gambling, see Thierry DePaulis, ‘Bingo! A Material History of Modern Gaming’, in Random Riches: Gambling Past & Present, ed. Manfred Zollinger, London, 2016, 36–51. For an approach considering the contribution of games to early modern philosophical thought, see Andreas Hermann Fischer, Spielen und Philosophieren zwischen Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, Göttingen, 2016. Alessandro Arcangeli, Recreation in the Renaissance: Attitudes towards Leisure and Pastimes in European Culture, c. 1425–1675, New York, 2003, 1–3. See Peter Burke, ‘The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe’, Past & Present, 146: 1, 1995, 136–150; and Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London, 1978. A number of works demonstrate that the last decades of the sixteenth century saw the formation of a new field, game studies, which was enmeshed in the sixteenth-century interest of encyclopedic knowledge of the world. A few examples include Innocenzo Ringhieri, Cento giuochi liberali, et d’ingegno, Bologna, 1551; Girolamo Mercuriale, Artis gymnasticae, Venice, 1569; Girolamo Bargagli, Dialogo de’ Giuochi che nelle vegghie sanesi si usano di fare, Siena, 1572; ‘De’ giocatori’, in Tomaso Garzoni, La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, Venice, 1585, Discorso LXIX. See Torquato Tasso, Dialogho...overo del Giuoco, Venice, 1582; and Gregorio Comanini, Il Figino overo del fine della Pittura, Mantua, 1591. See Kelli Wood, The Art of Play Games in Early Modern Italy, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2016. Notable works on seventeenth-century game boards have appeared in the past two years; see Marjolein Leesberg, ‘El Juego Real de Cupido: A Spanish Board Game Published in Antwerp, c. 1620’, Delineavit et Sculpsit, 39, October 2015, 23–43; Patricia Rocco, ‘Virtuous Vices: Giuseppe Maria Mitelli’s Gambling Prints and the Social Mapping of Leisure and Gender in Post-Tridentine Bologna’, in Playthings in Early Modernity, Kalamazoo, MI, 2017; and Suzanne Karr Schmidt, ‘Lotteries, Gaming, and the Public Reaction’, in Interactive and Sculptural Printmaking in the Renaissance, Leiden, 2017, 325–352. Even Christopher Witcombe, who has recently focused on copyright and on publishers of prints and provides a brief background for Giovanni di Paoli and his printed books, omits printed games. See Christopher Witcombe, Print Publishing, 319. Jessica Maier, Rome Measured and Imagined, Chicago, 2015; Lincoln, Brilliant Discourse; Zorach, The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome. Peter Parshall discusses the role of playing cards in the development of early European prints, but only one printed board game thereafter appears in the standard literature; see Peter W. Parshall, Origins of European Printmaking, New Haven and London, 2005, 23–25, 38–40; and Michael Bury, The Print in Italy 1550–1625, London, 2001, 231. For treatment of luxury playing cards, see Tim Husband, The World in Play: Luxury Cards 1430–1540, New York, 2016. For popular prints and the intersection of art and vernacular culture, see Joost Keizer and Todd Richardson, eds, The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts (Intersections, 19), Leiden, 2011; Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life, New Haven, 2011; Christiane Andersson, ‘Popular Imagery in German Reformation Broadsheets’, in Print and Culture in the Renaissance, ed. Gerald Tyson and Sylvia Wagonheim, Newark, NJ, 1986, 120–150; Angela Vanhaelen, Comic Print and Theatre in Early Modern Amsterdam: Gender, Childhood and the City, Burlington, VT, 2003; Elizabeth Savage, Printing Colour 1400–1700: Histories, Techniques, Functions and Receptions, Leiden, 2015. For the ways games enact multiple and ambivalent moralities and mores, see Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play, Cambridge, MA, 1997, 1–51. Jeremy Bentham’s concept of deep play in his The Theory of Legislation, 1802, was famously adapted into the study of anthropology by Clifford Geertz; see Clifford Geertz, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’, Daedalus, 101: 1, 1972, 1–37. © Association for Art History 2019 18 Biblioteca Marucelliana, Florence, Misc. 79.4. Antonio Lafreri, Indice delle tavole moderne di geografia della maggior parte del mondo di diversi auttor, Rome, 1572. For Lafreri’s citation of games, see Alberto Milano, Giochi da salotto; Giochi da osteria nella vita Milanese dal Cinquecento all’Ottocento, Milan, 2012, 12. 19 Andrea Vaccaro, Indice e nota particolare di tute le stampe di rame che se ritrovano al presente nella stamperia di Andrea, e Michel’Angelo Vaccari in Roma, Rome, 1614. Reprinted in F. Ehrle, Roma prima di Sisto V…, Rome, 1908, 60–62. For the iconography of labor in Brambilla’s Game of Plucking the Owl, see Sheila McTighe, ‘Perfect Deformity, Ideal Beauty, and the Imaginaire of Work: The Reception of Annibale Carracci’s Arti di Bologna in 1646’, Oxford Art Journal 16, 1993, 81–82. 20 While it is often proffered that printed game boards were pasted down, the impressions discussed in this article (from the British Museum, Civ. Raccolta delle Stampe A. Bertarelli, Milan, and Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna) show almost no evidence of them being pasted; there is very little wear and tear at the corners or significant damage on the back of the prints. Thus it follows that these games survive because these specific impressions were not used. Moreover, the fact that so many survive from just two collaborating print publishers suggests that a bit of luck contributed to the survival of these specific impressions, perhaps the excess store of the publishers themselves. It is notable that both the Game of the Garden of Love and the Game of the Monkey were owned by the Spanish engraver José de Madrazo y Agudo before coming into the British Museum’s collection. Madrazo studied in Rome, where he may have acquired the prints. Numerous impressions dating to the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggest that the plates for games were used over again in the same publishing workshop, restruck by later workshops, and that the game designs were also re-engraved; all indications of the high probability that a substantial number of game boards were printed in the sixteenth century and onward. The general size of the printed game boards ranges from roughly 35 to 40 centimetres by 46 to 53 centimetres, printable on a royal folio and then trimmed. 21 For an explanation of the different signatures of printmakers, publishers, and dealers, see Paolo Bellini, ‘Printmakers and Dealers in Italy during 16th and 17th Centuries’, Print Collector, 13, 1975, 17–45. 22 ASV, Sec. Brev. 284, fol 192 r. 4 June, 1599. From Giovanni Antonio de Paoli to Pope Celement VIII: ‘Giovanni Antonio de Paoli stampatore alla Pace devote servitor di V.S.ta intende dar in luce (Con approvatione però del sacro Palazzo) molte stampe d’intaglio in rame d’ogni sorte devote, curiose, et esempari come del Signore, di santi, e sante, di Principi pii, e generosi, et in particolare una di V.S. con le sue opera […].’ For a transcription of the document, see Eckhard Leuschner, ‘The Papal Printing Privilege’, Print Quarterly, 15: 4, December 1998, 359–370. 23 Atti Tino, vol. 22, c. 347 rv. October 14, 1596 in Masetti Zannini, Stampatori e librai a Roma nella seconda metà del Cinquecento. Documenti inediti, Rome, 1980, 307. 24 A royal folio measured to 445 × 615 millimetres; see David Landau and Peter W. Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550, New Haven and London, 1994, 83. 25 Witcombe, Print Publishing, 143, 164. 26 Atti Tino, vol. 22, c. 347 rv. October 14, 1596 in Masetti Zannini, Stampatori e librai a Roma, 307–308. 27 Giovanni di Paoli, Relatione Della solenne Cavalcata Fatta in Roma alli 17. d’Aprile MDCV. per l’andata di N.S. Papa Leone XI. – pigliare il possesso – S. Gio. Laterano: Con l’Iscrittioni & Epitaffi degl’Archi, Apparati, Livree, & altre cose occorse in essa, Rome, 1605. 28 Øystein Ore, Cardano, the Gambling Scholar. With a Translation from the Latin of Cardano’s Book on Games of Chance Liber de ludo aleae, ed. Sydney Henry Gould, Princeton, 1953, 185. For the life and intellectual world of Cardano, see Anthony Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer, Cambridge, MA, 1999. 29 David Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe, London, 2010, 2016, 9 and 67. 30 For actor network theory see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford, 2005. 31 ‘Il presente Gioco del Giardin d’Amore non solo contiene passatempo ma ricreatione e spasso grandiss° si alli Huomini come alle Donne che vi giocaranno et se attenderanno all’allegoria di esso scorgeranno esservi la corrispondenza di tal nome.’ 32 ‘Li ambassi in ogni tempo principieranno il gioco si che all’hora si partirà il denaro del piatto egualmente tanto per uno et vi si lascia il convenuto et se più d’una volta farà ambassi si seguita il gioco.’ 479 Print, Play, and Gambling Games at the End of the Sixteenth Century 33 ‘Chi giunge all’Hospidale non tirerà più fin che non venga un altro che facendo il medesimo punto lo cavi et doverrà pagare a quello che lo leva il convenuto. Et si averte che quello che lo cava non resta nell’hospedale ma seguita a tirare perchè non vi resta nissuno quando il luogo hè occupato il medesimo si osservi al luogo della Pazzia.’ 34 On secrecy, see Timothy McCall, Sean Roberts and Giancarlo Fiorenza, eds, Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe, Kirksville, MO, 2013. 35 For diagrams see John Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of Diagram, Stanford, 2010. For early modern prints that work as pictures and diagrams, see Evelyn Lincoln, Brilliant Discourse, 223. 36 Zorach has argued that some prints held a special status as cognitive images, more abstract and closer to ideas; see Rebecca Zorach, ‘Meditation, Idolatry, Mathematics: The Printed Image in Europe around 1500’, in The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World, ed. Michael Cole and Rebecca Zorach, London, 2009, 337. For the rebus, see Jean Céard and J. C. Margolin, Rébus de la Renaissance, Paris, 1986. For the spiritual potential of the rebus, see Jessica Brantley, ‘“In Things”: The Rebus in Premodern Devotion’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 45: 2, 2015, 287–321. 37 John Florio, Queen Anna’s New World of Words, or Dictionarie of the Italian and English tongues, London, 1611, 283. 38 In a Deleuzian sense, the combination of the diagram and rules of the game board combine to create a new space wherein virtue can be performed through a sinful activity. For Deleuze on diagrams and structures of power, see Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand, Minneapolis, 1988, 35. 39 For the terraces of purgatory, see Purgatorio, in Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, commentary by Siro Chimenz, Torino, 2000. For the inscription on the gate, ‘Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’entrate. Queste parole di colore oscuro, vid’io scritte al sommo d’una porta; per ch’io Maestro, il senso lor m’è duro.’ Inferno, Canto III, lines 9–12. 40 For the range of interpretations of gardens, including as a courtly setting and as a biblical paradise on earth, see Bryan Keene, Gardens of the Renaissance, Los Angeles, 2013; and Elizabeth Hyde, A Cultural History of Gardens in the Renaissance, London, 2013. 41 Diomede Nardi da Bertinoro, Giardino d’amore, del r.m. Diomede Nardi da Bertinoro. Nel quale si discorre la comparatione dell’amare et essere amato. Tratta dall’amorose attioni di Christo N.S., Ferrara, 1590. 42 Nardi, Book II, Chapter XIX, 83–90. ‘Che l’amar di Dio è veramente oro’, ‘Che Dio persuade in molti modi che da lui si compri l’oro dell’amore’. 43 Alberto Fiorin, ed., Fanti e denari: Sei secoli di giochi d’azzardo, Venice, 1989, 197. 44 Originally published in Latin in 1616, then in Italian in 1617. See Angelo Rocca, Commentarius contra ludum alearum, Rome, 1616; and Angelo Rocca, Trattato per la salute dell’anime e per la conservatione della robba, e del denaro contra i giuochi di carte e dadi, Roma, 1617. 45 ‘Questo foglio il bel gioco s’appresenta/ Di pela il Chiu venuto in luce adesso/ Col qual se fugir l’otio si talenta/ ti potrai trattener tal hor con esso. Ma qui non si pensar che si consenta/ Giocar per vitio, che nonte concesso/ Ma se il tempo utilamente spende voi/ Gioca per spasso e tira se tu poi.’ 46 Baptise Parmensis is the signature of the printer Giovanni Battista di Lazzaro Panzera; originally from Parma, he set up his shop in the Borgo district of Rome, just across the Tiber from publishers like Giovanni and Gatti. For Giovanni Battista di Lazzaro Panzera, see Bury, The Print in Italy 1550–1625, 231. 47 Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, Ms. Aldrovandi 21, Miscellanea Vol. II, De Ludis tum publicis, tum privatis methodus, 25. ‘Ludus Anseris vulgo il gioco dall’occa, mihi visus est hoc loci inter ludos tesserarum, seu talorum describere, cum in eo utamur tesseris duabus, qui quidem ludus quamvis duabus utatur tesseris, ingeniosus t[ame]n est < quoad eius inventorem, sed in sola fortuna, et sorte consistit nec illicitus, sed iucundus, et voluptate causa inventus> nec illicitus, sed iucundus, et voluptate causa inventus.’ 48 Pietro Carrera, Il gioco de gli scacchi di D. Pietro Carrera diuiso in otto libri, ne’ quali s’insegnano i precetti, le vscite, e i tratti posticci del gioco, e si discorre della vera origine di esso. Con due discorsi, l’vno del padre D. Gio. Battista Chèrubino, l’altro del dottor Mario Tortelli, opera non meno vtile a’ professori del gioco, che diletteuole à gli studiosi per la varietà della eruditione cauata dalle tenebre dell’antichità, Militello, 1617, 24–25. ‘ritrovamento del gioco dell’Oca ne’ tempi nostri padri, perchè questo gioco essendosi ritrovado in Firenze, e piacendo sommamente parve à © Association for Art History 2019 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 Francesco di Medici gran Duca di Toscana di mandarlo alle Maestà del Rè Filippo II. In Ispagna, ove publicato die matieria à buoni ingegni di ritrovarne altri poco differenti dal primo, fra quali vi è il gioco detto la Filosofia Corteggiana ritrovato da Alonso di Barros spagnuolo.’ On the history and significance of the Game of the Goose see Adrian Seveille, The Royal Game of the Goose Four Hundred Years of Printed Board Games: Catalogue of an Exhibition at the Grolier Club, February 23 – May 14, 2016, New York, 2016. For a consideration of the editions of Alonso de Barro’s text, see Ernesto Lucero Sánchez, ‘Las ediciones antiguas de la Filosofía cortesana de Alonso de Barros. Una historia del texto’, Criticòn, 127, 2016, 169–195. Alonso de Barros, Filosofia Cortesana moralizada, Naples, 1588. For a thorough consideration of Cartaro’s game board in relation to Alonso de Barros’s text, see Fernando Collar, ‘El Tablero italiano de la “Filosofia Cortesana” de Alonso de Barros (1588); la carrera de un hombre de corte’, Anuario del Departamento de Historia y Teoria del Arte, 21, 2009, 81–104. For Mario Cartaro, see Annalisa Cattaneo, ‘Mario Cartaro, incisore viterbese del XVI secolo’, Grafica d’arte, 9: 35, 1998, 2–9; Jessica Maier, ‘A “True Likeness”: The Renaissance City Portrait’, Renaissance Quarterly, 65: 3, 2012, 711–752. For an overview of the rules and play of the game, see Manfred Zollinger, ‘Un Jeu retrouvé: la Filosofia Cortesana d’Alonso De Barros’, Le Vieux Papier, 395, January 2010, 2–6. For Barro’s success as a courtier, see Trevor Dadson, ‘La biblioteca de Alonso de Barros, autor de los Proverbios morales’, Bulletin hispanique, 89, 1987, 27–53. Fernando Collar, ‘El Tablero italiano de la ‘Filosofia Cortesana’ de Alonso de Barros’, 97. Tommaso Buoninsegni, Del giuoco: discorso, Florence, 1585. Buoninsegni, Del giuoco: discorso, 11. ‘perche come ne dimostra S. Tommaso, i casi fortuiti si riducano nell’ infallibil prouidenza di DIO, appressò la quale niente è fortuito, preuedendo ogni cosa col eterno suo occhio; onde il commettere qualcosa alla sorte (purché si facci con giudizio, de non per tentare IDDIO) è il rimmetterlo alla disposizione del diuin volere, come ben disse Salamone. Sortes mittuntur in finu pàuperum, et à domino temperantur.’ Buoninsegni, Del giuoco: discorso, 9 and 17. ‘Venendo poi al giuoco ordinato al guadagno, che è il principal mio intento, parlo di quello, che si esercita per fine, & oggetto di guadagnare, come è il giuoco delle tavole, de le carte, de i dadi, & altri simili, i quali son più giuochi di fortuna, che d’ingegno, & industria. Perche chi giocasse à questi giuochi, non per guadagnare principalmente, ma per passarso tempo, non faria peccato, quantunche in tal giuoco si esponesse qualche somma di danari, perche quello non si fa come fine ma come stimol, & mezzo per ricrear l’animo.’; ‘il giuoco per se stesso […] anzi può essere atto virtuoso.’ Sean Roberts has argued that early modern thinkers understood a wide variety of cartographic expressions as maps, in particular as reflected by the slippage and indiscriminate use of language to refer to maps, such as carta, mappa, and pittori. See Sean Roberts, Printing a Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople, and the Renaissance of Geography, Cambridge, MA, 2013, 86–87. David Woodward, Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance: Makers, Distributors & Consumers, London, 1996, 27–32. One aspect of Woodward’s printed map aesthetic that has been shown to be problematic is his characterization of prints and maps as black and white. For colour in print, see Elizabeth Savage, Printing Colour 1400–1700: Histories, Techniques, Functions and Receptions, Leiden, 2015; and Susan Dackerman, Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts, University Park, PA, 2002. Witcombe, Copyright in the Renaissance, Leiden, 2004, 273. For standard readings of the Game of the Goose in relation to gardens, and the Game of the Goose’s significance as symbolic of human life, see Silvia Mascheroni and Bianca Tinti, Il gioco dell’oca: un libro da leggere, da guardare, da giocare, Milan, 1981. See Chet Van Duzer, Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps, London, 2013. A fragment of one so-called ‘path game’ from a private collection, possibly dating to the middle of the sixteenth century, depicts an entry portal in the lower-left side of the sheet with numbered spaces on the path of play. See Alberto Milano, ‘Antichi giochi su carta’, in Come giocavamo: giochi e giocattoli 1750/1960, Firenze, 1984, 21–24. In the same catalogue the fragment of the path game is object number 4, in Come giocavamo, 1984, 118. 480 Kelli Wood 63 See Allie Terry-Fritsch, ‘Performing the Renaissance Body and Mind: Somaesthetic Style and Devotional Practice at the Sacro Monte di Varallo’, Open Arts Journal, 4, Winter 2014–15, 112–132. 64 For the many ways that prints contributed to organizing knowledge, see Susan Dackerman, ed., Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, MA, 2011. 65 On the history and historiography of gambling, see Manfred Zollinger, ed., Random Riches: Gambling Past & Present, London, 2016; and Gherardo Ortalli, Barattieri. Il gioco d’azzardo fra economia ed etica. Secoli XIII–XV, Bologna, 2012. 66 For a historical look at gambling on the street, see John Hunt’s forthcoming project, Gaming and Sociability in Early Modern Rome and Italy. 67 Evelyn Lincoln, Brilliant Discourse, 4–6; and Rosa Salzberg, Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice, Manchester, 2014. 68 It is widely accepted that early modern prints survive in inverse proportionality to their production, that is, very few or no copies survive of large runs of popularly printed objects in contrast to a much greater survival rate of luxury prints. See Peter Parshall, ‘Prints as Objects of Consumption in Early Modern Europe’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 28: 1, 1998, 19–36; and David Landau and Peter W. Parshall, The Renaissance Print: 1470–1550, New Haven and London, 1996, 30–31. 69 Archivio Storico di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato, Vol. 781, fol. 126, 24 August 1585. Gonzalo de Liaño to Francesco I de’ Medici, ‘[...] le voy dando relaçiòn de todo yo he hechado maldiçiones a un criado de Luys Dobada que ha traydo un juedo endimoniado que se llama el juego de la occa que se juega con dos dados y es todo por q(uen)ta si se comiença y se hechan seis con los dados dan en una Puente y meten un Real el que esta en la hostedìa juega dos vezes, ay dos pozos y muerte que se vuelve a jugar de nuevo. es juego que se juega en la Toscana, que plegue a Dios que quien le hizo yo le vea que mado porque me anganado el prìnçipe y la infanta y Luis Tristàn quarenta escudos y gusta el rey de verme picado yo creo que no gustara màs [...]’; Fernando Bouza, ed., Cartas de Felipe II a sus hijas, Madrid, 1998, 125: ‘vuestra hermana se hace tahùr de un nuevo juego que ha traido Gonzalillo’. For Gonzalo’s role as not only a jester, but also a travelling diplomat and art dealer, see Marika Keblusek and Badeloch Vera Noldus, eds, Double Agents: Cultural and Political Brokerage in Early Modern Europe, Leiden, 2011, 218–232. 70 Nicholas Scott Baker, ‘Dux ludens: Eleonora de Toledo, Cosimo I de’ Medici, and Games of Chance in the Ducal Household of Mid-SixteenthCentury Florence’, European History Quarterly, 46: 4, 2016, 595–617. 71 Florence, Archivio di Stato, Archivio Mediceo. f. 2895. 18 Feburary 1577. From Canigiani (Florentine ambassador in Ferrara): ‘Hoggi quì si recita Comedia, e domani haremo Quintanata in piazza con livree nuove, e poi festone in palazzo sino alle Cenere: alli tre o quattro dì della quale si andrà con queste dame à Comacchio, quei che saranno sani, et che haran potuto reggere; perchè non ci resta persona utriusque sexu che possa resistere alla lena della signora contessa di Sala di Duca, in bachettar due volte il dì et vegliar sempre sino a dieci ore, cianciando/giuocando/beendo/ et ballando continuamente, con che hanno posto in letto il signor Don Alfonso.’ 72 Giovanni Croce, ‘Hor che siam qui (Il Gioco dell’Occa)’, in Triaca musicale, Venice, 1595. 73 For a thorough and innovative consideration of the intersection of games and music generally, and the gioco dell’oca specifically, see Paul Schleuse, Singing Games in Early Modern Italy: The Music Books of Orazio Vecchi, Bloomington, 2015. 74 Schleuse, Singing Games in Early Modern Italy, 191–195. 75 For images of women gambling see Antonella Fenech Kroke, ‘Ludic Intermingling/Ludic Discrimination: Women’s Card Playing and Visual Proscriptions in Early Modern Europe’, in Playthings in Early Modernity: Party Games, Word Games, Mind Games, ed. Allison Levy, Kalamazoo, MI, 2017, 49–71. 76 Suzanne Karr Schmidt, ‘Lotteries, Gaming, and the Public Reaction’, in Interactive and Sculptural Printmaking in the Renaissance, Leiden, 2017, 325–352. 77 Lorenzo Spirito Gualtieri, Libro delle Sorti, Perugia, 1482, reprinted as Lorenzo Spirito, Libro de la ventvra di Lorenzo Spirto con somma diligentia reuisto & corretto & da assaissimi errori espurgato che nelle prime stampe si trouauano, Venice, 1544; and Sigismundo Fanti, Triompho di Fortuna, Venice, 1526. 78 Jessen Kelly, ‘Predictive Play: Wheels of Fortune in the Early Modern Lottery Book’, Playthings in Early Modernity, ed. Levy, 145–166. On Spirito Gualtieri’s Libro delle Sorti, see Allison Lee Palmer, ‘Lorenzo “Spirito” © Association for Art History 2019 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 Gualtieri’s Libro delle Sorti in Renaissance Perugia’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 47: 3, 2016, 557–578. For the dissemination of literary and artistic representations of fortune, in particular in relation to their moral and political contexts, see Florence Buttay-Jutier, Fortuna: usages politiques d’une allégorie morale à la Renaissance, Paris, 2008; and Alfred Doren, ‘Fortuna im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance’, in Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, ed. Fritz Saxl, Vol. 2, 1922–1923, 71–144. ‘Non ti doler perche la sorte sta sopra noi, sin che ne trona morte.’ For lotteries in the creation of social order and a shared fantasy of fortune and wealth, see Evelyn Welch, ‘Lotteries in Early Modern Italy’, Past & Present, 199, May, 2008, 71–111. Francesco Marcolini, Le sorti intitolate giardino d’i pensieri, Venice, 1540. On Marcolini and Porta, see Suzanne Karr Schmidt, ‘Lotteries, Gaming, and the Public Reaction’, in Interactive and Sculptural Printmaking in the Renaissance, Leiden, 2017, 350. On the copying and sharing of imagery in prints, see Lisa Pon, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print, New Haven, 2004. Pietro Aretino created the emblem, and Marcolino used this emblem as his printers’ device. Vincenzo Cartari’s dictionary of ancient mythology, Le imagini de i dei de gli antichi, Venice, 1556. For a consideration of Castiglione and Ascanio’s texts, parlour games, and visual literacy, see Kelli Wood, ‘Performing Pictures: Parlor Games and Visual Engagement in Ascanio de’ Mori’s Giuoco piacevole’, in Playthings in Early Modernity, ed. Levy. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostril, Vol. I, Part III, 1568. ‘E chi non vede senza maraviglia l’opere di Francesco Marcolini da Forlì? il qual oltre all’altre cose stampò il libro del Giardino de’ Pensieri, in legno, ponendo nel principio una sfera d’astrologi, e la sua testa col disegno di Giuseppo Porta da Castelnuovo della Garfagnana; nel qual libro sono figurate varie fantasie: il Fato, l’Invidia, la Calamità, la Timidità, la Laude, e molte altre cose simili, che furono tenute bellissime.’ For more on parlour games and their audiences including women, see George McClure, Parlour Games and the Public Life of Women in Renaissance Italy, Toronto and London, 2013. Cited in Patricia Simons and Monique Kornell, ‘Annibal Caro’s After-Dinner Speech (1536) and the Question of Titian as Vesalius’s Illustrator’, Renaissance Quarterly, 61: 4, Winter 2008, 1069–1097. Annibal Caro, Lettere familiari, ed. Aulo Greco, 3 vols, Florence, 1957–61, 1:69–70: ‘Il Giuco de la Virtù […] ogni settimana sedeva un re, che al’ultimo avea da fare una cena, in fine de la quale ogn’uno era comandato a presentarlo d’un stravaganza e d’una composizione a proposito d’essa, tanto che a gara l’uno de l’altra, e i regi e i vasalli hanno fatto cose notabilissime.’ Innocenzo Ringhieri, Cento giuochi liberali, et d’ingegno, Bologna, 1551, 146. Michael Camille, Image on the Edge, London, 1952. On monkeys, see H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, London, 1952. Giulio Cesare Capaccio, Delle imprese, Libro III, Naples, 1592, 12v. Capaccio’s book is listed as ‘Un libro intitolato imprese di Giulio Cesare’ in the continuation of the inventory of Gatti’s shop. See Atti Tino, vol. 22, c. 371r– 372r, 15 October 1596 in Zannini, Stampatori e librai a Roma, 307–308. For engagement with ‘low’ styles in ‘high’ art, see Morten Steen Hansen, ‘The “Low” Style of Giovanni da San Giovanni at the Medici Court’, Center 36: Record of Activities and Research. Reports June 2015—May 2016, 2016, 74–77. See Peter Parshall, ‘Antonio Lafreri’s “Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae”’, Print Quarterly, 23: 1, March 2006, 3–28; and Zorach, The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome, 11–20. Atti Tino, vol. 22, c. 347 rv. 14 October 1596, in Zannini, Stampatori e librai a Roma, 307–308. I am grateful to Peter Parshall for drawing my attention to this. See Edwin H. Zeydel, The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant. Translated into Rhyming Couplets with Introduction and Commentary, New York, 1944. For the parodic function of carnival and the world turned upside down, see Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Carnival and Carnivalesque’, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, Second Edition, ed. John Storey, Harlow, 1998, 250–260; and David R. Smith, ed., Parody and Festivity in Early Modern Art: Essays on Comedy as Social Vision, Burlington and Farnham, 2012. 481