... I don't mind your assertions, but the fact, that I've to repeat myself in a stuff, that I've written often enough...
Well, I miss things the first time around sometimes. Like for example, this time I missed the part about the feathers.
The six-palle-model was chosen in May 1465, and that was mentioned at the start, when I talked about it .... It's true, that before other numbers of palle's was used.
The choice of the motifs: 3 cardinal virtues were connected (not Iustitia) at least by feathers to the heraldic device.
I don't understand what you mean. What feathers, and connecting the virtues to what in the heraldic device? I realize I need to understand more about the di Medici and their symbolism at that time, 1465. Can you give me a good reference, preferably in English, that talks about the balls and the feathers, why it was six balls and not five or seven, Lorenzo's interests and personality at that time, etc?
I assume, that you got your informations from the text of 1895.
Yes.
Around the object now exist rather different theories ... according to new findings. So you can forget about your dates, at least partly.
You lost me. What object? The book, the phoenix? And what dates? That sounds interesting.
And now I need to respond to a few things in your earlier post.
Well, that was from a letter from Francesco Sforza to Galeazzo, not Galeazzo's real behaviour.
In 1465 and earlier it is not Galeazzo's real behavior that matters, as far as what is appropriate to put in an educational game, it is his conduct as perceived by his parents; they are the ones being given some of the presents at Ippolita's wedding (you say) and are the ones still trying to educate him. And we know that Bianca Maria continued be at odds with Galeazzo, still trying to educate him, until her death (whatever the facts about his alleged poisoning of her and her alleged threat to give Cremona over to Venice).
Galeazzo aimed at this goal, but it is not confirmed, that he got "recognition". ...
... you've to prove this "recognition".
Likewise in 1474-75, the issue is not whether Galeazzo actually obtained any victories or recognition; pretty clearly he didn't. It is his hope of victories, his attempt to obtain victories of the sort I indicated, that matters.
...Or do you insist in this case on a single-deck-version?...
I don't hold to a single-deck theory. I just didn't see why Borso would have had a copy of the PMB deck lying around in 1465. In Ferrara they had their own decks. But if he was an aficionado, he might have had one. It is unforunate that all these many decks in Ferrara got lost, until the d'Este in the 1470's. They weren't as meticulous about keeping cards as they were manuscripts and art objects.
I think, that the last part of Dummett's article (inclusive the Benedetto Bembo suggestion) is not very interesting ... I've only seen fotos, but it seems, that the differences, according which the work of the first painter was parted from the work of the second, included differences in the (resulting) color of the golden background.Perhaps he used another sort of gold ... which should be then not a sign of the same workshop. The used gold is possible more thin (and for this the gold has less relief and has more light) for the second artist and you more often have red spots, possibly going back to damage by use. The relief effect is far more impressive for the cards of the 1st artist (a great variation and exception is at the lover cards, which has a "red gold" or whatever as background).
As this is not really attested at the real cards, but only at the fotos, this observation is not reliable.
Anyway, it doesn't look like the "same workshop".
The coloration of the 2nd artist’s cards certainly looks different from those of the 1st artist’s, as well as their state of preservation. But I do not see how from that we can conclude that the cards were from different workshops. They might be from the same workshop at different times. Artists had much more freedom to change their paints than they did their subject matter and style, especially if the results held up better. It is possible, although not likely, that different artists in the same workshop at the same time even preferred different mixes.
Now I want to get to the main subject of this post: Dummett. The end of his article has some interesting ideas, even though not pursued adequately. Here is the last paragraph of the essay (
Artibus Historia 56 (2007), pp. 15-26), where he finally says something positive on the question "Who really painted the six cards?"
The most probable attribution seems to me to be to Benedetto Bembo, an artist agreed to have been influenced by Ferrarese art, as shown by the female figures on the Temperance, Star and Moon cards. These figures, with their high foreheads and pursed lips, have affinities with the Madonna and female saints in Benedetto's Torrechiara polyptych, now in the Castello Forzescho in Milan, and his Madonna of Humility, now in the Museo Civico, La Specia, and probably painted in Ferrara. The very expressive male heads in the polyptych are close to the male figure on the Fortitude card, and the particularly curly russet hair of the boy on the Sun card and of the putti is characteristic of Benedetto. The pack was the product of the Bembo workhop: of the surviving 35 picture cards, Benedetto executed six and Bonifacio the remainder (missing are the Devil, the Tower or Lightning and the Cavallo di Denari). Benedetto's earliest datable work is the Torchiara polyptych, signed and dated by him to 1462. The pack must therefore have been painted in the early 1460's. It may have been made for Bianca Maria, or she may have inherited it from her husband; in either case she probably gave it to Cremona during the two years between his death and hers. On the hypothesis that Benedetto painted the six cards, there is no need to suppose the original versions of them to have been lost or damaged: we have the original versions.
There are several theses here. One is in the statement near the end that "she probably gave it to Cremona during the two years between his death and hers." That refers to an earlier argument that since all the other PMB-style decks are copies of the PMB, as opposed to the Brambilla or Visconti di Madrone (Cary-Yale), the Bembo workshop must have had the PMB available to them to make the copies. I quoted from the earlier paragraph in an a previous post, but here is the whole thing:
From a letter of 1451 from Bianca Maria Visconti to her husband Francesco Sforza, asking him to send to Sigismondo Malatesta, lord of Rimini, a pack of tarot cards of the kind made in Cremona, which he had asked for the previous autumn, we may infer that Cremona was especially renowned for hand-painted playing cards of this kind. Sandrina Bandera, in the catalogue to the Brera exhibition of the three packs by Bonifacio Bembo, emphasises the production by the Bembo worhop of paintings and of decorated objects of all kinds; she also stresses the use by such workshops of “sketchbooks" containing standardized motifs which could be used in different works. Almost all of the fragmentary sets are probably authentic, and if the packs from which thye derive were painted in Cremona, it thus seems likely that in the later XV or early XVI century the Colleoni pack was held in Cremona, and was available to artists to copy from. It must have been given to the city by some member of the ducal family who had a particular connection with Cremona.
That person, of course, is Bianca Maria. (In a footnote, Dummett explains that what Bianca asked for was "carte de trionfi," of course, not "tarot cards.") But if the Bembo workshop indeed made the PMB in the first place, they might at that time have kept on hand the "sketchbooks,” with which to fill future orders from the same customer. Then they would have no need to borrow the original back again. However 1466-1468 would have also been convenient.
Dummett's other theses have to do with Benedetto Bembo, first, that he is the second artist; second, that he painted the six cards in "the early 1460's," and third, that Bonifacio painted the others at that time, too. I do not want to discuss when the original cards were done, as we have already gone over that, and it doesn't look like the early 1460's. Instead, I will focus on what Dummett says about the second artist.
To show that Benedetto painted the six cards, he compares different cards to different aspects of the Torrechiara polyptych and perhaps also the Madonna of Humility. It took me a while to find the Torrechiara, but here it is, from Steffi Roettgen's
Italian Frescoes: The Early Renaissance, p. 358:
To me this looks very International Gothic, and not very "Ferrarese," if I understand the term. Adolfo Venturi, writing in 1931, called this work "one of the most notable examples of the relationship existing betwen the art of Lombardy and the great school of Padua" (/i]North Italian Painting of the Quattrocento: Lombardy, Piedmont, Liguria[/i], p 12f). Roettgen calls it "of the Venetian type" (p. 359). Dummett calls our attention to the "expressive faces" of the males. I don't see much expression, except for Gothic devoutness. There is nothing of the secular emotionality of the Ferrara painters (as exhibited e.g. in the Schifanoia frescoes). One of the faces is mostly obliterated, but here is a closer view of the other four:
Then Dummett talks about the "high foreheads and pursed lips" of the Madonna and female saints, similar to the Temperance, Star, and Moon cards. Well, I looked at a bunch of Lombardy Madonnas and other women from that period and before. Quite a few have high foreheads and pursed lips. That seemed to have been the fashionable way to portray high-born women, at least in Lombardy. Look, for example, at this scene from Monza Cathedral (Roettgen,
Italian Frescoes: The Early Renaissance, plate 96:
Another example is this Madonna and Child by Michelino (
Pittura a Milano dall'Alto Medioevo al Tardogotico, p. 160):
And this one (p 171):
Is there any other similarity not shared by such as these? Well, here are Benedetto's faces alongside the tarot images:
I don't see much similarity, other than a generic one common to many artists.
So let us turn to the Madonna of Humility. Here it is (
http://museolia.spezianet.it/index.php? ... 69&lang=en):
This painting is more of the same. The "particularly curly russet hair" noted by Dummett is prominent on the Christ child in both paintings. But again, they all painted putti and baby Jesuses that way, russet, yellow, or gold: the color is that of the morning sun, appropriate to young children (see Roettgen's book, or Alexander's
Italian Renaissance Illuminations); the curls might come from Apollo. (See e.g. the Michelino above.)
However there is one more work that bears inspection, posted by Ross Caldwell on p. 4 of the thread with this title on ATF. He identifies it as "Madonna introno col Bambino," Cremona, Museo Civico, with the link
http://www.alfonsomariadeliguori.ne...IS77IS2006.html:
When I line up Temperance’s face with the Virgin's, I seem to see a resemblance:
And here is the Christ child next to the child on the Sun card:
In these cases there is a three-dimensionality to the figures that is perhaps associated with the "Ferrara" style , even while conforming in outline to Gothic convention. But Adolfo Venturi, writing in 1931, says of this piece, "his methods recall in some degree the earlier works of the Paduan school" (p. 12). It seems to me (as it did to Venturi, p. 12) that this painting was painted later than the Torrechiara of 1462. Here is more of Venturi's analysis:
The artist strives to impart relief to his figures, and for this purposes emphasizes the shadows on the Virgin's face to such an extent that the whole face appears swollen, while at the same time he tucks her body away into a mantle of gold filegee as though it were a swrod in its scabbord.
Venturi goes on to describe the paintings that are on either side of the main scene of this polyptych, of St. George and St. Anthony. Then he returns to the Virgin:
The drawing of the contours, especially in the case of the Virgin, the angels perched on the throne and the rugged St. George, is crude and stiff; the types are devoid of grace, with puffy cheeks, bulging foreheads and small features; the patterns on the brocades are put in with a sort of mechanical precision that might have been achieved with the point of a needle.
Especially note the needle-point pattern of the brocades that he describes, since many of the cards also have such brocades. All in all, the painting is just the thing to use as a model for some trionfi cards! As far as the dating, even if we knew with certainty when it was done, and that it was from the same workshop that did the Temperance card, we still wouldn't know when the card was done: it could have been made any time after the painting, using the preliminary studies, and even by someone else in the workshop. Presumably this painting has always been in Cremona (who else would want it?). If so, the person commissioining the cards could have just said, "Make her like in that painting."
But did that painting in particular have to be the model? Well, whoever did the cards knew his International Gothic but also learned from Padua or Ferrara. The three-dimensionality is evident in the folds of the Temperance lady's dress and in the skin of the putti of the Sun and World cards. Yet while the resemblance between card and painting is impressive, the resembling features are fairly standard.
To get a better match I would add one more variable. That is, the artist might have been asked not only to paint the cards like the painting, but also to paint it like certain family members. So instead of just looking like the Madonna of Humility, she also has to look like Elisabetta Maria Sforza, as I have suggested in earlier posts. But what did Elisabetta look like? All I have to go on is Vogt-Leuerssen's speculation (kleio.com). While some of her claims are difficult to sustain, that isn’t true of all of them. The front-view she uses for Elisabetta is from the altarpiece at Treviglio Cathedral, done around 1485 by Bernardo Zenale and Bernardino Butinone (
http://bode.diee.unica.it/~giua/SEBASTIAN/). She is the lady on the right:
This altarpiece is too late for our card, of course, but they might have worked from likenesses done earlier and now lost. Moreover, Butinone may even have worked for Bembo. Venturi notes that in the St. Anthony of the Cremona polyptych "we seem to find a forerunner of the figures painted by Butinone." (p. 12) One of Venturi's descriptions of Benedetto's Virgin's would apply even more to Butinone's females: "haughty, bloated, with a small inquisitive nose and a mouth like a rosebud" (p. 12). The best example is Butinoni's altarpiece at the Palazzo Borromeo (Venturi plate 15), a place already known to tarot buffs as the scene of the "tarocchi players" fresco.
Both the Virgin and the saint to the right compare to the figure in the Treiglio altarpiece. The other ladies in the Treviglio altarpiece certainly do look like other likenesses identified with Bona and Ippolita. Here is the face that Vogt-Leuerssn identifies with Elisabetta, added to the ones I showed before, from the cards and the Cremona Enthroned Madonna:
.