Culture. Playing cards, a precious selection from the Crippa collection at Castello Sforzesco
Recently donated to the Municipality, it will be visible until October 9th - Photo gallery
Milan, July 6 2022 – The Civic collection of "Achille Bertarelli" prints at the Sforzesco Castle is enriched by the prestigious collection of playing cards and course games established in Milan by Giuliano Crippa starting from the seventies of the last century and until his death in 2020. The collection was recently donated to the Municipality of Milan (through a council resolution dated February 4th). A selection of this, fifty works in total including fifteen decks of cards and twenty different course games, will be exhibited from tomorrow, Thursday 7 July, and until 9 October in the Graphics Room of the Sforzesco Castle.
The Crippa collection it is a collection of extraordinary typological and chronological variety which includes almost two hundred decks of playing cards (among the oldest, a nucleus of around forty eighteenth-century decks) and around fifty board games (mainly from the eighteenth century).
The types of card decks include traditional French and Italian suited playing cards (full-figure or half-figure), tarot cards, numeral cards and cards with other purposes such as educational and divination.
Milanese by birth, Giuliano Crippa has oriented his collecting and scholarly interest above all to the production of his city, which occupies a prominent role in the collection which boasts the presence of decks from the major manufacturers active in the Lombard capital between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A place of honor is occupied by the decks created by the Bavarian Ferdinand Gumppenberg, author of valuable examples that combine neoclassical influence and popular inspiration, as demonstrated by a rare tarot deck dedicated to the views and crafts of Milan.
Alongside traditional decks of cards, Crippa collected other types of cards (widespread since the 19th century): cards for pure entertainment (Questions and Answers), cards with a divinatory function (Sibilline), games which involved the use of dice ( Bell and hammer), but also cards used as models for a modern version of the ancient Chinese game of Tangram, widespread at the beginning of the nineteenth century as an extreme offshoot of the eighteenth-century fashion of chinoiserie.
The collection is enriched by a small nucleus of engraved wooden matrices, used to print the sheets of cards, which were subsequently cut out and colored by hand, with the aid of masks (stencils) for quicker execution.
Board games are also of great importance, such as path, extraction and battle games, around fifty in total, mainly from the eighteenth century.
Among these, particular importance belongs to the core of goose game sheets in its numerous variations. There are also two very rare examples of scoreboards glued onto wooden and painted structures dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries respectively, which incredibly survived and have come down to us despite their use.
Some objects in the collection also allow material aspects of the game to be documented. For example, the ancient bag for drawing tickets for the most popular gambling game: Biribissi, will be on display. It is a leather bag containing objects similar to large olives which have small scraps of parchment rolled inside them with the symbols of the game boxes.
The Crippa Collection had already made a significant contribution to the exhibition "How we played. Games and toys 1750-1960", organized by the Municipality of Milan in 1984 at the Rotonda della Besana. Other pieces were protagonists, together with those collected by Alberto Milano, of the fundamental exhibition Games from parlor Games from tavern in Milanese life from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century held in 2012 at Palazzo Morando - Costume, fashion and image.
The exhibition Paper Games and Playing Cards, organized on the occasion of the donation to the Bertarelli Collection, is the first monographic exhibition dedicated to Giuliano Crippa and his collection.
The exhibition is set within the Graphics Rooms recently inaugurated and dedicated to the rotating display of the very rich graphic heritage of the Bertarelli Collection and the Drawing Cabinet of the Sforzesco Castle. The exhibition is organized in two rooms dedicated, the first to playing cards, the second to racing games.
Civic collection of prints "Achille Bertarelli"
It is one of the largest image archives in the world, with a heritage of prints, posters, postcards and illustrations estimated at around one million works. It was born in 1927 from an important nucleus donated by Achille Bertarelli and rigorously organized by him according to iconographic criteria in sections such as Plans and views, Portraits, Historical events, Popular prints, which are the subject of continuous implementation. It preserves masterpieces of the art of printing from its origins in the fifteenth century to the present day. The Archive is normally open for consultation of materials to an audience of scholars only, while small thematic nuclei are cyclically displayed in the graphics rooms.
Updated: 08/07/2022