Bonifacio Bembo

Brera keeps 48 painted tarot cards, small rectangles of pressed board coated in gesso, laid with gold and silver leaf and coloured in tempera. They are too fragile to stay on show and come out only for short spells. The workshop that made them stood in Cremona and was run by Bonifacio Bembo, and the man who ordered the deck, around 1442, was Filippo Maria Visconti, the last Visconti duke of Milan.

Bembo's working life ran inside that court. When the Visconti line died out and Francesco Sforza took Milan in 1450, Bembo carried on for the new dynasty. He was the painter the dukes preferred, handed the decoration of their buildings at Milan, Pavia, Cremona and Vigevano, and in 1474 Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Francesco's son, granted him Milanese citizenship. The court work ended when Galeazzo Maria was stabbed to death at the close of 1476.

Very little survives under Bembo's own name, and specialists still argue over which Lombard panels are his rather than his brothers' Benedetto and Ambrogio, who painted beside him. The portraits of Francesco Sforza and his wife Bianca Maria Visconti that Brera shows under his name sit inside that argument. The pair of ducal portraits he is documented to have made, frescoed in 1462 for the ducal altar in Sant'Agostino at Cremona, have never left that city.