This is the second of a three-part post on the process used to paint the earliest extant tarot cards*, made in fifteenth-century northern Italy. Part…
This is the first of a three-part post on the process used to paint the earliest extant tarot cards (about tarot), made in fifteenth-century northern…
Early tarot cards — used for gaming, not divination — emblemize the midpoint of fifteenth-century Italy, a crossroads of Medieval imagination and Renaissance intellect. They…
Abandoned to water and sky and what earth the roots of the scrubby trees and grass can hold, abandoned islands dot the lagoon of Venice.…
The sidesaddle, designed with stirrups on one side so that women could ride horses in relative safety without sitting astride, didn’t come along until around the sixteenth century. How…
In the Arthurian tale of Tristan & Iseult, the little dog is inseparable from the lovers after it laps up the remains of a love…