These are all very convincing to me, Steve. Some excellent scholarship on your part. Keep it up. Then maybe we can discuss who the designer might have been. Poliziano was the most knowledgeable about Rome, I think. But perhaps these facts were more well known than that.

My recommendation for basic readings on the pre-de Gebelin tarot, non-esoteric, would be the texts I have uploaded on the two Dummett threads in the section of this forum called "Library (East Wing)." These are of course rather old, but still fundamental. The main change is that some decks attribute...

Bertrand wrote, Back to Christian's and his frame stories, the description of the 22 "arcana" (the term he was first to use for the cards according to Depaulis) found on the link you gave earlier is included in the narrative as the transcription of a "manuscript" written by an old man and given to a...

I hadn't noticed the beard. Thanks, Phaeded. And that page from the picture-chronicle is very nice.

I now have the 1863 version of Christian's tarot descriptions, in the edition of L'Homme Rouge des Tuileries (originally 1863) reprinted in 1977. Instead of the Egyptian initiation of Histoire de la Magie (1870) framing the 22 teachings, the frame-story is rather more complex. It is in a manuscript ...

This is a continuation of Bertrand's and Huck's earlier remarks about Paul Christian's frame story in L'Homme Rouge des Tuileries , 1863, where the tarot appears in a manuscript imagined as translated from a papyrus in Hebrew, signed by a certain rabbi of Alexandria and found in the mid-18th century...

Well, yes, but that star-like object above the phoenix you posted doesn't fit, as I'm sure you know. Here the "star" (astrum, celestial body) isn't black, it's red, and of course is the sun https://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/ms24/f56r The sun is the only astronomical object I know of that the phoenix i...

Simon Wintle has a very nice page exhibiting "Le Grand Tarot Belline". It is dated August 5, 2017. http://www.wopc.co.uk/tarot/grand-tarot-belline It is the reproduction of a hand-painted deck presumably made by or for "Mage Edmond" in 1860s Paris. Although the majors have been viewable online for a...

Thanks for the claraification, Phaeded. It still seems to me that your "Jupiter" is a woman, surely Venus since she is next to Mars. In that case the bound captive may be Jupiter, since that is the only one of the seven left unaccounted for. He was well known as a captive of love. His lack of regal ...

Thanks for resurrecting your old post in this new context, Phaeded. I am interested, primarily because Hermes Trismegistus as the PMB Old Man fits my hypothesis of an Egyptianizing intent for a few of the PMB cards, perhaps influenced by Ciriaco, in Cremona at the time of the cards. I hadn't connect...