“In the late Middle Ages and early modern times, card playing was widely enjoyed at all levels of society, perhaps because it was more challenging than dice and other games of pure chance yet less cerebral than chess,” curator Timothy B. Husband of the museum’s Department of Medieval Art writes in the accompanying catalog from Yale University Press.
Those on view exist because they were made not for play, but as commissioned luxury objects. Hand-painted, decorated with rare pigments and silver and gold, their visuals focused on the monarchy and hunting. The Stuttgart Cards (Upper Rhineland, 1430) feature a 5 of Falcons with five tethered birds of prey, and a 4 of Hounds with four mastiff-like dogs straining at their leashes. The Ambras Courtly Hunt Cards (Upper Rhineland, 1440) have a detailed progression of a hunt, with the falcon that kills the heron, and the hound sent to retrieve the dead bird.