The Visconti Sforza Fool
​By Michael Pearce

The Visconti Sforza deck of tarot cards is designed to have the trumps ordered in the sequence we now recognize as standard in modern decks. The cards were designed in 1450 by Bonifacio Bembo for Bianca Visconti and Francesco Sforza, the Duke and Duchess of Milan. The Visconti Sforza Fool is a lightly bearded vagabond, topped by a flush of feathers upon his head and armed with a rough wooden club in his right hand. The design is bawdy, showing a barefoot man who’s unable to dress himself properly in his white shirt and beige tunic, which hang open as his underclothes fall down to reveal his genitals. His left hand gestures towards his exposed crotch, while his leggings hang below his knees. He closely resembles a figure in Bembo’s Lancelot. 

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