Marco, First, I’ll stop sandbagging soon (give me 2 more weeks to edit something together) and present the evidence that there is a literary source that accounts for all the trumps in a 3x7 format, but not anything resembling the three groups discussed above… which reminds me of Ptolemy’s epicycles ...

Marco, If the sequence determines the meaning and was at the essence of what the creator of the game came up with, why are there three variations almost from the get-go? "Civic pride" merely explains why a sequence variation was adhered to, not why the received wisdom of the ur-tarot would...

hm ... the jstor article speaks of 9 figures, Pantea is missing in this list. Azzone seems to have had 6 male figures beside vanaglory: Di rimpetto alla casa degli uccelli poc’anzi additata vi era un magnifico salone, contradistinto col nome della Vanagloria, che ivi si vedeva dipinta, ed all’intor...

Huck wrote: My impression (correct me, if I'm wrong): The Corte Ducale dell'Arengo is lost ... ???? ... or partly changed (now Palazzo Reale) ???? The same, but perhaps the correct word is "modified" rather than lost, although I'm not sure what might be original behind the 18th century fa...

Marco, I'm interested in you clarifying your own position. Do you believe, as Hurst seems to, that the tarot was complete with 22 trumps from its very inception and that it was made up of three groups: a first group suggesting the states of human life combined with the three Virtues (the cardinals, ...

Just to clarify something I wrote above - Filelfo hardly thought of himself as an artistic program director but rather as the leading rhetor/orator of his age (mainly due to his advantage in Greek). Flawlessly aping the ancients was the name of the game, not associating one’s name with a new leisure...

Huck, Not 1452, but more germane would be Raffaele Vimercati's presentation copy of his Liber iudiciorum (Biblioteca Trivulziana Ms.1329): "This manuscript contains the horoscope that the author, Raffaele Vimercati, made for Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the future Duke of Milan. There is only one min...

Reading the invective against Cremona after his third visit it's hardly imaginable, that Filelfo influenced in strong manner a successful Trionfi deck production produced just in this time, when the invective was written, in just this city of Cremona. … And at least once he commented on something w...

Mike, Have no idea on the fortune of Heralcides work (fragmented as it is) - I suppose it might be in Gottschalk. I've never seen Heralcides quoted by a humanist though. Sorry, but my interest there was restricted to Roman Mithraism (certainly the Romans knew Heraclides - I believe Cicero quotes him...

Rudolf George Adam at the given place noted ... Francesco Sforza was rather indifferent to the court poet. For reasons of prestige he renewed Filelfo’s contract as court poet, but he never took any serious interest in what Filelfo was doing. Worse still were the irregularities in the payment of Fil...