Early Book Collections | Ephemeral Renaissance

17th-century Italian Game Boards

Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (1634-1718) was a popular Bolognese painter and prolific engraver. A seminal figure in the advent of the popular caricature and pictorial satire, Mitelli is far less famous today than his eighteenth-century successors in these areas, most notably William Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson. Closer attention to his extensive corpus—the majority of which are held in JHU’s Ephemeral Renaissance collection—nonetheless reveal a remarkable precocity and keen sense of regional Bolognese identity that merits closer study.

Mitelli’s engraving Il gioco nuovo del Turco, del Tedesco e del Veneziano is one such example. Printed ca.1685, the scene depicts three characters, all caricatures, of an Ottoman Turk, a German, and a Venetian, gambling over cards. Like several of Mitelli’s works, this print is heavily textual, elaborately metatextual, and ludic. As the words splayed across the upper background and lower foreground confer, the print of gaming men is itself a gameboard meant to be played by the owner according to the dice sequences illustrated at the very bottom of the scene. The contemporary Bolognese reader would also have been able to read into the work currents of contemporary political events, popular passions and prejudices, social satire and critique, as well as confessional themes.

The uppermost inscription reports a dialogue between the three players. The first interlocutor is the Turk, who invites his two European opponents to join him in the game. The German and the Venetian accept, separately agreeing with one another to beat the rival and abscond with all his money. As the Turk reveals his cards, he expresses his expectation of victory. The answers of the other two players are telling, beginning with the German’s remark: le mie spade ammazzarano la tua primera alterigia. Et il mio flusso di spade ti farà evacuare quanto hai ingiustamente usurpato [“my swords will kill your haughtiness and will make you abandon what you have occupied unfairly”]. This game metaphor relays a veiled rhetorical gesture to the recent, abortive 1683 Siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Empire, and other such incursions into European territories. This subtext is further developed in the Venetian’s more explicitly racist remark: Missier turco animalazzo, nu te venceremo tutti i to’ sultanini e i to’ ongari [“Mister animal Turk, we will win all of your sultans and Hungarians”]. The air of inevitability in their defeat of the Turkish player is carried throughout until they indeed left him with none of his money.

At the bottom part of the table an inscription explains the rules of the board game. If the players obtain numbers of dice rolls associated with either the German or the Venetian, they will win a quattrino. If, however, they throw rolls whose numbers are associated with the Turk, they will lose money to their opponents. Though Mitelli’s scene begins with a clear caricature anti-Ottoman political and religious prejudices, popular European feelings of competition and peril carry over into the game itself when played according to its peculiar rules. Further satisfaction among European players of this game may also have derived from the fact that the failed Siege of Vienna marked the close of major Ottoman efforts at imperial expansion within Europe. It is notable that this same pictorial caricature of the Turk appears in numerous other of Mitelli’s illustrated broadsides from this period.

The Turk is associated with eleven possible dice combinations, compared to only five for the German and the Venetian, respectively, resulting in a player’s total of eleven chances of losing versus ten of winning. As the art historian Patricia Rocco has observed, gambling is one of Mitelli’s dominant themes, despite the Roman Catholic Church’s strong condemnations of the practice at the time. Gambling was considered a harmful and dangerous vice, and a vain and idle obstacle to religious devotion. It is a singular irony, then, that Mitelli can imply the immorality of gambling while actually inviting the reader to do so: “by throwing the dice and using the print as a game board, the player arrives at the conclusion that gambling is a moral hazard.”

In another of Mitelli’s gameboards, Il novo gioco degli asini, ca. 1687, three men are shown mimicking the bestial actions of the asses upon which they eat, drink, and defecate. The man on the far right holds up a printed broadside inscribed Noi siamo sette. Rangio d’asino non va in alto [“There are seven of us. The ass’s braying does not go upward”]. To win this game the player must throw the number seven, as illustrated on the print-within-the-print. The number seven was traditionally associated with the divine, in contrast to the diabolic number six represented by the six figures within the scene.

Mitelli’s distinct style of engraving diverged significantly from those of his contemporaries. His often satirical subjects are both highly stylized, but without many distinct details, reflecting not so much aesthetic aspiration, but rather a predilection for relaying a clear moral or political significance within the larger visual performance. For Mitelli, the customary emphasis of his contemporaries on visual form cedes priority to moral substance. As historian Siliva Carminati has noted, in this way above all Mitelli was a vignettist avant la lettre: il Mitelli pare aver precorso i tempi, divendendo un vignettista ante litteram [“Mitelli seems to have been ahead of his time, becoming an artist ante litteram”].

—Martina Franzini