Mike, You cut off the surrounding zodiac on the Brindisi disk - Hermes leads Ariadne/Dionysos towards Scorpius , which is where the brightest part of the Milky Way crosses the zodiac. Macrobius confuses the two MW crossing points with the solstices at Cancer and Capricron but in fact they are in Gem...

Mike, Very nice find on Dennis Lackner's "The Camaldolese Academy" (Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy). I've been researching Travesari somewhat lately, but mainly in an indirect connection with the puzzle of the San Lorenzo night sky fresco in the Old Sacristy (despite the p...

Huck, First of all it has struck me as odd at how little focus Filelfo has received on the various tarot message boards – besides Bianca, he is the key link between Filippo Visconti and Sforza, and operated as what his key translator refers to somewhere as Milan’s “cultural dictator.” It has always ...

Mike, My primary interest is the PMB and how it relates to the ur-deck. The PMB has pegasi (or whatever the plural for Pegasus is) which is a signifier of the Muses: with a blow from the hoof of Pegasus on Mount Helicon flowed a fountain called the Hippocrene (literally "horse's fountain"); both mou...

Also, I think the argument that the Cary Yale was a "freak" is stronger than the argument that it was the original, since it is also expanded in the court cards. It is just an expanded, customized creation. All datings are approximate, but 1441 is pure speculation, while art historians like Bandera...

Thanks Marco - a much better scan/detail. Back to the larger picture: The scorpion on the horizontal shield to the right might be considered in light of the Medici circle's interest in astrology. The scorpion is merely a symbol of evil, often shown on Roman shields and pennants, (or even Egyptian on...

I was surprised to find this bronze bust, because I did not expect Plato's chariot to have such an early iconographic tradition in the Renaissance. Still, in these Quattrocento examples (which apparently are copies of a Roman original), I don't see such a clear distinction in the direction of the h...

Mikeh wrote: After Plethon's dethroning of Aristotle in 1438, Aquinas would have been even less fashionable, since he was usually considered the Christian Aristotle. I don' think it was that clear-cut or abrupt, as many Humanists constantly sought to find a syncretic solution between Aristotle and ...

Michael Hurst, Is there a reason you have to persist with your long-winded diatribes regarding New Age beliefs? I don’t think anyone on this thread subscribes to those beliefs – least of all me. The Calvino reference was to extempore literary practices (he simply made up stories based on the random ...

Marco wrote: to me it seems meaningful that the three cards appear in this obvious chronological order. If they appeared in a different order, we would find in tarot a different, less understandable, story. But we are dealing with an object whose very reason for being is to be constantly shuffled i...