Knight of Cups

What survives of this pack is 48 cards, and the gaps say a lot about how it was used. Of the trumps that gave the game its name, only two are left, the Emperor and the Wheel of Fortune. In the suit of cups, this rider and his page are the only court figures still here. The rest were lost somewhere across four centuries in which nobody thought of them as art. They turn up again in Venice around 1900, bought by a collector named Giovanni Brambilla, whose family name the deck still carries alongside Brera's. The Italian state acquired it in 1971. Rank was built into the materials as well as the pictures. Court figures like this rider were laid on gold, while the plain numbered cards of the pack got a silver ground.