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Pack of Fifty-two Playing Cards
Southern Lowlands (Burgundian territories), ca. 1470-80
Pasteboard with pen and ink, tempera, and applied gold and silver
The Cloisters Collection, 1983 (1983.515.1–.52)

The figures on the court cards are arrayed in splendid costumes fashionable at the Burgundian court, which was famed for its excesses in attire. Some of the costume elements, however, are anachronistic, and several details appear to lampoon the figures: the King of Nooses, for example, wears a yellow bootlet on one foot and a black pointed shoe on the other. Thus the pack of cards may have been meant to parody the extravagant but outmoded behavior of the Burgundian court, for the amusement of a well-to-do and self-assured denizen of a prospering mercantile town in the southern Lowlands.