Terpsichore, plate thirteen from Apollo and the Muses (c. 1465): Artwork and History

Terpsichore, plate thirteen from Apollo and the Muses (c. 1465) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Master of the E-Series Tarocchi Italian, active c. 1465.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

The deck of fifty so-called Tarocchi are not tarots in the modern, fortune-telling sense, nor were they intended as playing cards. No cut-out impressions mounted for play are known, and they lack the suits and numbers of a regular deck. Instead, these delicately engraved didactic allegories are grouped in five numbered ranks describing the workings of the spheres of man, the muses, the liberal arts, the cosmos, and the heavens in order of increasing significance, and offer a didactic sequence to educate courtly youths or possibly university students, who could have used them as flashcards or a pamphlet.

Object facts

• Title: Terpsichore, plate thirteen from Apollo and the Muses
• Date: c. 1465
• Artist attribution: Master of the E-Series Tarocchi Italian, active c. 1465
• Place of origin: Italy
• Medium: Engraving on paper
• Dimensions: Plate: 17.8 × 10 cm (7 1/16 × 3 15/16 in.); Sheet: 18.4 × 10.5 cm (7 1/4 × 4 3/16 in.)
• Type: Print
• Department: Prints and Drawings
• Reference number: 1924.39.31

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Potter Palmer, Jr.

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.