«quelle carte de triumphi che se fanno a Cremona». I tarocchi dei Bembo

Publisher: Skira Editore

Curators: Sandrina Bandera Bistoletti, Marco Tanzi

Year: 2012

Binding: Paperback with fins

Pages: 104 pages, 141 ill. colors

Description:

Exhibition catalogue (Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera, 20 February – 7 April 2013)

Editor's comment:
Bonifacio Bembo, from Cremona, is the main late Gothic painter of the Duchy of Milan. Owner, with his brothers, of a well-equipped workshop, he is at the service of three dukes, Filippo Maria Visconti, Francesco and Galeazzo Maria Sforza. Among churches and castles, ducal residences and conventual scriptoria, feudal lords and priors, the workshop is engaged in a varied and almost frenetic activity. The tarot, an all-bembesca excellence, is "a dream of brilliant and absurd profanity", the ephemeral emblem of the "civilization of Lombard gold" evoked by Roberto Longhi. Starting from the Visconti papers of the Brera deck, flanked by a few, very chosen pieces, between painting and "congener arts", the volume aims to unravel, as far as possible, some of the many critical problems that have always been linked to Bonifacio and his brothers. Paintings, tablets and codes thus contribute to taking stock, also in the light of recent critical acquisitions, on the fascinating production still of late Gothic register of the Bembo brothers, made in and for the main courts of the Po Valley during the central decades of the fifteenth century. In addition to the already well-identified Bonifacio and Benedetto, it is now possible to trace a rather coherent profile of Ambrose and Jerome.