In the card in the Visconti Sforza Tarots deck the hermit is represented by an old man who leans on a stick and holds an hourglass in his hand (figure 1). In the so-called Tarots of Charles VI the character, without a stick, looks at the hourglass that he holds high in his hand (figure 2). A stylised mountain appears in front of him: its top, very near to the sky, participates in the symbolism of the transcendence, fulcrum of the meeting between sky and earth and the end of human ascension. Regarding this, John of the Cross  (1579-1585) writes in the Slope of the Carmelo Mountain: “The soul that wants to climb the mountain of  perfection to talk to God has to abdicate all things and leave them below” (I, 5,6). In the Minchiate of Florence (figure 3 - Minchiate Etruria, XVIII century) and in the Tarocchino of Bologna (figure 4 - Tarocchino Al Leone, 1770) the Hermit is represented according to the iconological model of the God of Time, Saturn:  an old winged man (Volat irreparabiles tempus) (Time flies irreparable) and with crutches (since he is old, he has to lean against them). In some Minchiate a deer appears as well, an animal that pulls the Wagon of Time in the Petrarca Triumphs (figure 5 - Georg Pençz, Triumph of Time, woodcutting, XVI century), while in the Bologna cards a column appears behind the old man shoulders.
Its presence is connected to the ancient tradition of the hermitage orientated towards the “stylite”. The columns were part of a pagan symbolism in which the idols were set (figure 6 - The dances around the gold calf, particularity the sheet 59v. Exodus. Historic Bible, Vienna, ca.1470. At the sight of the gold calf set above a column, Moses lifts the tables of Law high in the air in order to throw them to the ground and destroy them). They were transformed by stylites into places of elevation and Christian sanctification. Such columns were put near  monasteries or villages and they were  from 10 to 20 meters high. The most famous stylite was Simeon the Old (Cilicia, 390-459) who remained on a column for twenty-seven years, operating miracles and conversions, but above all meditating. Another important stylite was Simeon the Young, a native of Antioch, who lived for forty-five years on the column he had erected at the centre of the monastery he  founded upon the Admirable mountain (figura 7 - Nemeh of Aleppo, St. Simeon Stylite and St. Simeon of the Admirable mountain,1699, Lebanon, Notre-Dames' Monastery de Balamand). We can see that such columns had a balcony on top, a parapet and roofing and that the food was given to hermits through pulleys.
In the Liber Chronicarum we find different illustrations in which some apostles, who in their lives were hermits and preached the gospel are represented being killed because of their faith. Behind them a whole column, or one that is breaking up, appears from which a devil falls into the emptiness. As was mentioned above, the origin of these columns was from pagan times when idols were set on top of them. For Christianity the Devil represents the idol for excellence, the adversary of God, forced to fall from his own pedestal because of the Apostle Saints who, first with their thought and subsequently with their preaching and death, offered themselves to the cause of their faith demolishing with this the false faith in idols (figure 8 - Michael Wohlgemut, Torture of Simon / figure 9 - Michael Wohlgemut, Torture of Mattia, woodcuttings, 1493)
In addition, the column also represents the “ruin” quoted by Ripa in his essay on iconology (see more later), as a consequential effect of its inexorable elapse. In fact the representations of ruins almost always include a sole erect column among the rubble.
The deer is there because of  the belief that ancient people had in its longevity, even if Aristotle in his work Historia Animalium denies it: “About the duration of the life of the deer, some say it is long-lived but there is nothing definite that can confirm this legend” (578b). In the Physiologus by Pseudo-Epiphany, an exegetic text about nature according to the canons of the Christian faith, the deer itself and its three ages assume value of moral teaching for men: «Its horns are characterised by three ramifications and because during its life it renews them three times. Really it lives fifty years and it runs fast in the depths of the woods, the precipices of mountains, smelling the dens of snakes». In this description, “depth of the woods” is allegorical in relation to the darkness of sin that forces man into a state of obscurity, to be overtaken suddenly “like a fast runner”, while the precipices of the mountains represent not the easy, but the difficult run to discover the traps of Evil (the dens of the snake). Pseudo-Epiphany adds: “You, reasonable man, have three renewals. The first is the one you get through the baptism, that is incorruptibility, the second one is the grace of the adoption and the third one, that of penitence. If you succeed in surprising the snake, that is the sin, in the recess of your heart, you immediately resort to the sources of water, that is to the springing of the Writings (according to the interpretations of the prophecies) and draw in the water of life in the saint gift. Communicating the penitence, through that you will renew yourself and your sin will come completely extinct” (Chap. V).
We should remember that the images of the Ancient Gods in the medieval and Renaissance epochs were not assimilated according to the concepts of ancient people but used and interpreted according to Christian thought, assuming moral and doctrinal meanings (see, for instance, the description in the essay about the Temperance in reference to the Alexander Sforza Tarots deck).
The image of Saturn is expressed according to the usual iconographical typology of the so-called Mantegna Tarots, in the Planets and the Universe Stars series (figure 10). In the famous Liber de imaginibus deorum attributed to Albricus (Alexander Neckam,1157-1217), the God is described in this way: “Saturn was seen by the ancients as an old bearded and long haired man, patient and melancholic, pale and with his head covered. He holds a sickle in his right hand with a snake that bites its tail and on the left is a child that approaches his mouth, almost as if he is going to eat him. Next to him there are his children Jupiter, Neptune, Iuno and Pluto”.
In order to avoid the prophecy coming true according to which he would be dethroned by one of his children, Saturn devoured them one by one. But Rea, his bride, succeeded in giving birth secretly to his last child, Jupiter, who defeated his father inheriting his kingdom. Originally Saturn was a divinity linked to agriculture who over time assumed the role of the God of Time. The Greek word “chronos”, which means time, is in fact similar to Kronos, the mythical god that devoured his children, the Latin Saturn. As God of agriculture Kronos-Saturn is represented with a sickle in his hand, which gathered the harvests and became, following the identification of the two Gods as just one, a tool that cuts off man’s life. Saturn therefore passed from devouring children to devouring everything, since (Time) destroys all beginning with its children “seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years”. The arrow that strikes the hourglass as represented in the Florentine Minchiata (figure 3) has this value.
In the Middle Ages, thanks to the illustrations of De universo by Rabano Mauro, of De Civitate Dei by Saint Augustine, of the Ovide Moralisé and of Fulgentius metaforalis, the God was gradually identified with Wisdom and reached its highest expression of the thought in the Florentine Neo-Platonism and in the alchemic Renaissance tradition.
Ripa in his Iconology offers us different descriptions in which Time (a word that derives from the medieval Latin temps whose root means “to cut”) contains elements linked to Saturn: “An old suit of various colours, holding a coiled serpent in his right hand, it will go slowly and with delay... The Snake, like this, means the year, according to  ancient people, and is measured and characterised by time, & is immediately united with itself” and again “ a winged old Man, who holds a circle in his hand: & is in the middle of a ruin, has his mouth open, showing his teeth, and they are the same colour as iron. The circle signifies that time always turns, and it has neither beginning, nor end, but it is the start and end only of terrestrial things, & and its elements are spherical. The ruin and the open mouth, & the iron teeth, show that time melts, spoils, consumes, & makes everything that is not expensive & doesn’t require effort  fall to the ground” (page 620, 1 edition 669).
As a God of melancholic temperament it was painted dressed as St. Jerome and as other hermit saints and was thus subsequently represented in the tarot cards. Such transformation is also due to an assimilation of the hourglass with the lantern (figure 11 - Tarocco al Soldato, Milan, XVIII century), a typical object used by pilgrims, as we can see in a woodcutting of 1510 by H. Steiner where St. Christopher appears and ferries Baby Jesus (figure 12) and in a chisel by Grechetto representing Diogenes alone searching for himself (figure 13). The hermit's image, together with the internal search, is also results relate to Fortune.
Claudia Cieri Via writes: “To it (Fortune), considered the fate and vanity of terrestrial things,  intellectual research is counter posed and therefore those values that contrast with the frailty of life and its purely material connotation, thus calling into question the eschatological existence of  medieval culture and the intellectual - scientific one of  Italian humanism” (Cards of Court. Tarots. History and Magic at the Court of the Estensi, 1987, page. 172).
A XVII century incision by Giovan Baptist Bonacina represents Saturn, as a Time-Hermit with scythe and hourglass, while he is gambling the fate of the world with Fortune. The latter appears with hair covering her face according to the motto “Fortune must be caught by her hair" (figure 14). And if this is true, men cannot do anything with regards to Time since “Pulvis est et in pulvere reverterit” (Man is dust and to dust he will return). A Memento Mori that in medieval thought indicated the way of meditation, which constituted the second step of the  divine lectio: after the lectio, before the oratio (conversation) and of contemplatio, the latter was defined  by St. Teresa of Avila as “an intimate relation of friendship, a one to one party  with the One we know we are loved by” (Autobiography 8, 5).