How do I render *parts* of a svg file?

The GTK library for rendering SVG is called RSVG. It has python bindings, but they are undocumented, and they don't wrap the rsvg_handle_get_pixbuf_sub() and rsvg_handle_render_cairo_sub() functions which you would normally use for that purpose in C. Here's what you have to do as far as I can tell. You extract the XML node as Adam Crossland suggested. To render it, you have to do something like this:

import gtk
import rsvg
handle = rsvg.Handle()
handle.write(buffer=xml_data) 
# xml_data is the XML string for the object you want
image = gtk.Image()
image.set_from_pixbuf(handle.get_pixbuf())

That's if you want it in a gtk.Image, otherwise do something else with the pixbuf. You can also render it to a Cairo context with handle.render_cairo(cr) where cr is your Cairo context.

EDIT:

Sorry, I didn't read the python bindings closely enough at first. The _sub() functions are implemented using the id= argument, so your program can boil down to this:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import gtk
import rsvg

window = gtk.Window()
window.set_title("Foo")
window.connect("destroy", gtk.main_quit)
window.show()

svg = rsvg.Handle(file='cards.svg')
pixbuf = svg.get_pixbuf(id='#3_diamond')

image = gtk.Image()
image.set_from_pixbuf(pixbuf)
image.show()

window.add(image)

gtk.main()

I tested this and it works. However, the window is the size of the entire SVG canvas, and is clipped to the screen size (which is why I rendered the 3 of diamonds instead of the ace of clubs which is up in the corner.) So you'll still have to find some way to crop the pixbuf around the card that you want, but that shouldn't be too hard.

I believe that what he means by 'through a DOM interface' is that since SVG is XML, you could load the SVG file in minidom, or some other Python XML parser, and extract the XML node with the specific name that you are looking for. That XML node should represent an item that can be rendered.