A Review of the Tarocchi Milanesi by Teodoro Dotti, 1845
The Tarocchi Milanesi of Teodoro Dotti, dating to around 1845, presents classical artwork in this equisite reproduction. It belongs to the elegant Milanese tarot tradition that grew out of Ferdinando Gumppenberg’s celebrated Soprafino designs. Soprafino disigned his tarocci decks for royalty and wealthy patrons. Milanesi mostly refers to the regional area called Milan, in Italy.
Main differences between the two decks are:
- Line Quality: The Soprafino used fine copperplate engraving, giving it very detailed, flowing, and graceful lines. Traditional Milanese decks derived from it often relied on slightly simpler or woodblock prints.
- Political/Sovereign Symbols: Later Milanese variants (such as the Dotti editions) altered details like the Empress’s shield—removing Hapsburg or imperial eagles due to changing 19th-century Italian politics.
For both decks, the figures seem to inhabit a world that is simultaneously ordinary and symbolic—a world where the Fool’s journey, the Hermit’s solitude, the Wheel of Fortune, Death, and the Star feel less like abstract concepts and more like stages in an ancient human story. The imagery retains much of the traditional Tarot de Marseille structure while incorporating the refined Milanese aesthetic.
How Many Cards did the Milanese Deck have?
The earliest versions of the Milanese decks sometimes featured an extra set of female court cards, temporarily bringing the total to 64 or more cards per pack before standardizing back to the traditional 56 suit cards. This of course was before the 22 Major Arcana cards were added.
An especially delightful historical connection is that William Butler Yeats owned a Dotti deck and wrote upright and reversed meanings on his cards—an intriguing reminder that these nineteenth-century images eventually found their way into the hands of one of the great poets of the twentieth century.
Jumping slightly ahead in time, the poet William Butler Yeats introduced Pamela Colman Smith to London’s occult circles and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn around 1901, which later led to her collaboration with Arthur Edward Waite on the famous tarot deck. Pamela Coleman Smith became the illustrator of the Rider/Waite/Smith tarot deck, the most widely known and used tarot deck in the world.
Teodoro Dotti: Milanese Card Maker
Teodoro Dotti was a nineteenth-century Milanese card maker whose work became an important chapter in the history of Italian tarot. Sources place him in Milan’s thriving playing-card industry during the first half of the nineteenth century, where he became worked under the influential printer and card maker Ferdinando Gumppenberg. Dotti is described as having been Gumppenberg’s employee, partner, or associate during the late 1830s and early 1840s. Around the 1840s, he established his own printing workshop, eventually becoming one of the leading card makers in Milan.
Gumppenberg had already produced the magnificent deck later known as the Soprafino around 1830–1835, and Dotti worked within this artistic and commercial environment before developing his own versions. When he established his independent workshop, Dotti commissioned new engraved plates rather than simply reproducing Gumppenberg’s originals.
Dotti’s contribution to tarot was ultimately much greater than simply producing another pack of playing cards. His designs softened and refined elements of the Soprafino tradition while bringing some imagery closer to the familiar visual richness of the Tarot de Marseille. His workshop continued producing tarot and playing cards for decades, and his son Edoardo later carried the family tradition forward. Teodoro’s 1845 tarot has since become particularly prized by historians and collectors because it captures a fascinating moment when Milanese tarot was evolving between older Italian traditions and the increasingly influential Marseille vocabulary.
- Hand-coloured woodcut
- Backs printed in blue and yellow with ornamental panel
- The word “Milano” also printed on the card backs
- Production date approximately 1857-9 (circa)Published in: Milan, Italy
- Printed on pasteboard
- Technique: woodcut
© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
Zhao Chen: Tarot Restoration, Collector, and Historian
The Tarocchi Milanese of 1845, has been faithfully restored by tarot researcher, collector and restoration artist, Zhao Chen. Zhao Chen’s work is devoted particularly to the history and visual traditions of classical tarot. Rather than approaching tarot solely as a system of divination, Zhao has pursued it as an important form of European cultural and artistic history. His interests encompass historic playing cards, early tarot traditions, and especially the development of the Tarot de Marseille and related European patterns. According to a biographical introduction accompanying an interview with him, Zhao has collected more than 2,000 historical and classical card decks from around the world, reflecting an unusually extensive engagement with the material history of tarot.
He has successfully restored or redrawn several significant historical designs, including examples associated with 1701, 1930, 1845, and 1658, as well as the Bacchus Tarot. His approach combines the eye of an art conservator with the curiosity of a historian: paper, printing techniques, coloration, line work, iconography, and the physical deterioration of old cards all become part of the investigation. In interviews, Zhao has discussed how to identify historically valuable decks, how restoration decisions are made, and why certain obscure or damaged decks deserve to be preserved. His work therefore helps bring otherwise inaccessible historical tarot imagery back into circulation for collectors and students of tarot.