I look at the Visconti Sforza cards of the 1400s as well-kept examples of court art and courtly games. While I don't have any access to online scans, I was able to observe a private alterpiece "from the School of Bembo Boniface"---like the School of Mantegna out of Ferrara, the more popular artists had schools and sponsored nameless students who learned to paint in the manner of the 'master' comissioned to do the painting. They looked like Cary Yale cards and the best guess was about 1450.
But I think they were a conservative example of the painting style of cupids (Putti), golden-haired heroines, pages and knights and kings. Giovanni di Paolo's naive and golden-haired paintings of Dante's Paradiso or French-painted Romance of the Rose illustrations with Italinesque landscapes circa 1300s have some similarities?
I'm more inclined to see the older and more established family of D'Estes of Ferrera as those who kept and set a stage for a medieval taste in early gothic art. The Viscontis and D'Estes were not only linked by marriages, but a certain similarity of fame and ducal estates that came from their military exploits and fighting services. Card games, jousting, falconry, hunting and other forms of gambling and sport would have been popular culture. The court ministers, and ducal wives would have sponsored artists and artisans with tapestries, paintings, books with illuminated graphics and courtly scenes of romance.
In terms of an allegorical bent of Greco-Roman gods in the poetic and painterly products of artists and craftsmen that the D'Estes and Visconti's patronized---
There seems to be agreement in Tom Tadforlittle's site and my other Renaissance art history/poetry biographies of Fererra (with a few notes on the Visconti-Sforza) that classical astrology was a strong superstition. I know that in Ferrera, Maria Matteo's Boiardo's tarocchi verses and subsequent poetry from the 1460s-1480s paid homage to Greco Roman figures, the idea of Fortuna and even Arthurian romance in an allegorical mileau that was popular for the time.
I've not studied Milan and Ferrara's early history (prior to the 1400s) yet. But I can tell you cities such as Florence and Rome were extremely proud of their Roman past---so much so, that Popes in Italy would spend thousands and decades unearthing Roman ruins. There were other things that led to the rise of the Protestant religions and Reformation, but the dissatisfaction from other Catholic countries about the riches of Papal and Italian cities is a recurring thread.
Italy was supposedly part of the Holy Roman Empire, but the Byzantine and later Germanic rulers from the 900s through the late 1400s saw Italy as independent city-state regions and setting the stage of fashions and cultures. There were emissaries and representatives from prominent families of the respective regions. At times, the ruling houses of Italy seemed to have a loose but somewhat stable alliance. But the first assassination of the Visconti duke and subsequent problems in the Italian landscape might suggest reasons why card games and other examples of art and culture might have been lost.
Italy's subsequent history after 1494 (when King Charles of France invaded Italy) was troubled. While Machevelli and others wrote later of the beautiful myth of past courtly perfection, the 1500s were a time of the Italian civil wars. There were only brief periods of prosperity for certain regions.
It may be that France, Germany, Spain and England showed more continuous examples of Renissance culture and art and prosperity from the 1500s. Maybe there are more recent card examples because of a greater stability in those regions.
