Le Sorti … intitolate giardino di pensieri (The Fates … Entitled Garden of Ideas): Garden of Ideas (frontispiece)Author: Francesco Marcolini (ca. 1500–after 1559), with verses by Lodovico Dolce (1508–1568)
Venice: Francesco Marcolini, October 1540
Printed book with woodcut illustrations
12 3/16 x 8 11/16 x 7/8 in. (31 x 22 x 2.3 cm)
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1937 (37.37.23)
Le Sorti … intitolate giardino di pensieri (The Fates … Entitled Garden of Ideas): Woodcut frame with portrait of Marcolini, dedication page (pages 2 and 3)
Author: Francesco Marcolini (ca. 1500–after 1559), with verses by Lodovico Dolce (1508–1568)
Venice: Francesco Marcolini, October 1540
Printed book with woodcut illustrations
12 3/16 x 8 11/16 x 7/8 in. (31 x 22 x 2.3 cm)
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1937 (37.37.23)
According to Vasari, this handsome portrait of Francesco Marcolini, the inventor of this new fortune-telling method and the entrepreneur who brought together talented designers, woodcutters, and writers to produce this fascinating book, is based on a drawing by Giuseppe Porta Salviati. The frame, with its expressive and delicately cut male and female herms, had been used earlier as the frontispiece to the first edition of Sebastiano Serlio's Regole generali, published by Marcolini in 1537 (43.65.12).
On the opposite page, Marcolini's beautifully printed dedication to Ercole d'Este, duke of Ferrara, provides an example of the typography for which Marcolini was famed. Here, in addition to the flattery characteristic of such dedications, we find Marcolini referring to his book as an opera piacevolissima (a most pleasurable work), which he hopes will provide amusement for the duke.
Le Sorti … intitolate giardino di pensieri (The Fates … Entitled Garden of Ideas): Small woodcuts representing cards, larger woodcut of Fraud (page 33)
Author: Francesco Marcolini (ca. 1500–after 1559), with verses by Lodovico Dolce (1508–1568)
Venice: Francesco Marcolini, October 1540
Printed book with woodcut illustrations
12 3/16 x 8 11/16 x 7/8 in. (31 x 22 x 2.3 cm)
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1937 (37.37.23)
Marcolini's method of predicting the future is more straightforward than Sigismondo Fanti's (25.7) but requires the use of a deck of cards. The deck that would have been employed had only three face cards—king, knight, and jack—and lacked the number cards three, four, five, and six.
First the player must choose a question from the initial list, which included thirteen questions specific to men, thirteen specific to women, and twenty-four of relevance to both sexes. Among the questions for women are whether it is wise to marry, whether a bad husband will become good, and whether she should change lovers. Among those specific to men are how many wives he will have, whether love will make him suffer, and whether it is better to choose an ugly or a beautiful wife. Both sexes want to know whether their appearance gives a good impression and whether it is necessary to avenge a wrong. From the question, the reader is directed to the appropriate page, where he or she must draw two cards at random and match them to a set depicted. From there the player is directed to one of the squares or the central cross on a left-hand page and asked to draw a single card. Upon matching this card to one of those illustrated (the suit is unimportant), the reader is sent to the correct double-page spread of responses and asked to draw a final pair of cards in order to arrive at the answer.
Marcolini's book is not merely a tool for telling fortunes but a repertory of iconography. Half a century before Cesare Ripa's Iconologia (first edition 1593, first illustrated edition 1603) described how every abstract quality could be represented by a personification bearing certain attributes, Marcolini provided a series of fifty allegorical woodcuts that depict vices, virtues, and such states of mind as melancholy, pain, and desperation. These images seem to have been designed by at least three different artists, but both draftsmanship and cutting are at a consistently high level. This representation of Fraud, a deceitful woman who seduces a man while robbing him, is one of the designs usually attributed to Francesco Salviati (1510–1563), who may have drawn directly on the woodblock for one of Marcolini's skilled cutters.
Le Sorti … intitolate giardino di pensieri (The Fates … Entitled Garden of Ideas): Small woodcuts representing cards, larger woodcut of Wisdom (page 37)
Author: Francesco Marcolini (ca. 1500–after 1559), with verses by Lodovico Dolce (1508–1568)
Venice: Francesco Marcolini, October 1540
Printed book with woodcut illustrations
12 3/16 x 8 11/16 x 7/8 in. (31 x 22 x 2.3 cm)
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1937 (37.37.23)
The most extraordinary image in Marcolini's book is this mysterious representation of Wisdom, a bearded man seated astride two others, with his foot on the prow of an ancient boat, a sea of faces floating behind him. With its contorted forms, twisted postures, and ambiguous space, this woodcut is unlike any of the other allegorical illustrations in the book, with the possible exception of Fraud, and has plausibly been attributed to Francesco Salviati, who was in Venice at the time and whose student Giuseppe Porta signed the frontispiece of the publication. Salviati had designed the woodcuts for another book published by Marcolini, Pietro Aretino's Life of the Virgin, in the previous year.
Le Sorti … intitolate giardino di pensieri (The Fates … Entitled Garden of Ideas): Small woodcuts representing cards, larger woodcut of the philosopher Socrates (page 126)
Author: Francesco Marcolini (ca. 1500–after 1559), with verses by Lodovico Dolce (1508–1568)
Venice: Francesco Marcolini, October 1540
Printed book with woodcut illustrations
12 3/16 x 8 11/16 x 7/8 in. (31 x 22 x 2.3 cm)
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1937 (37.37.23)
In the last hundred pages of the book appear the answers to the questions posed at the beginning. These responses are in the form of verses composed by the well-known poet and translator Lodovico Dolce. The pages are adorned with a series of unusual images of philosophers, identified not by their attributes but by their actions, as described in Diogenes Laertes' Lives of the Philosophers. (These woodcuts would later be pressed into service to illustrate a 1611 edition of that book.) Here Socrates is shown apparently in the act of ending his life by drinking hemlock—without quite relinquishing the book in his hand. Marcolini was evidently in a hurry to get this book into press, for the last six images of philosophers are repeats. In the second edition, published in 1550, the repeats are replaced with six new woodcuts.
