(I have updated the post below to clarify the difference between my scenarios 1 and 3. It seems I never manage to communicate clearly in my first or even second draft, it always takes me one or two more rounds of correction, at least... - July 29, 2023)
Ross Caldwell wrote: 23 Jun 2023, 20:34
Thank you for sharing a summary of your theory, Nathaniel. It's really nice to see what you're doing.
Thanks Ross. Unfortunately, it's no longer quite "what I'm doing"... I have finally completed the article on Venetian cards that I was working on frenetically, but that has turned into only Part 1 of what is going to be at least three parts, and very likely four, which will occupy me for the best part of a year, I think. So the Petrarchan project is on hold for a while.
But I do now have enough time to briefly follow up on the discussion here, which I feel the need to do because it seems that the significance of what I wrote may have been overlooked. For instance, Mike and yourself have mentioned the other Trionfi manuscript containing illustrations by the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum. This is ms.
Barb.lat.3954, also in the Vatican. But, like the illuminations in the other manuscript illustrated by the Master, its images are not of enormous interest in themselves; they simply serve as an example to demonstrate the highly variable and non-standardized nature of Trionfi illustrations outside of Florence in general and in Milan in particular.
More importantly, I get the impression that Mike and others are not grasping the full implications of the Robertet images:
mikeh wrote: 28 Jun 2023, 04:49
The similarity of some Petrarch illustrations to the cards, however, still only shows that people did associate the two (as well as, about which later, to Boccaccio) at the times and places the Petrarch illustrations were made. Since this time may have been after the invention of the cards, it does not count, without something else predating the cards, as evidence that the cards themselves were made with Petrarch in mind.
There are two points to make here:
First, if the Trionfi deck was, as I increasingly think likely, the first ever attempt at illustration of the full cycle of all six Trionfi, or was at least created not long after the first such illustration, then there might not be much that predates it that could unequivocally be linked to both the deck and the poems. For example, the VdM Death card—which must be similar to the original Death card from which all others descend (because only the Milanese tradition diverged from it, by taking Death off his horse)—is quite different from nearly all later illustrations of that Petrarchan Triumph, but it
is the way that triumphant Death was very often depicted in northern Italy throughout the previous several decades.
In other words, we should not be surprised to find iconography in the tarot depictions of the six Petrarchan subjects which is not found in most or even any other illustrations of those subjects, because the tarot depictions must have been created very early, quite possibly before any other attempts to illustrate the full cycle.
In cases where there was a strong, well-established earlier tradition for depicting the subjects in question (as in the cases of Love and Death), the tarot cards evidently followed earlier traditions. But where the existing iconographic tradition was not so strong or established as to constitute a near-universal standard model (as in the cases of Time, Fame, and Chastity) or was more or less completely non-existent (in the case of Eternity), the designers of the tarot cards were more innovative. Many of their innovations were simply not followed by those who came after, who had their own ideas and preferences—and not just for these less-established subjects, but even for Death, despite the long-standing iconographic tradition in that case.
Second, and more importantly: the Robertet Eternity is remarkably similar to the woman on VdM World, our earliest surviving example of that card by far (and which, as I said before, must be very similar to the proto-World card from which all later World cards are descended). As far as I can see, there are only four possible explanations for this similarity:
1. An early tarot World card existed that resembled the VdM card, but was not intended to depict Petrarch's Eternity, and yet someone was nevertheless inspired by it to depict Eternity in a similar way in illustrations of the Trionfi cycle, such as the Robertet images.
This is exceedingly unlikely, because the vast majority of the illustrations of Eternity in the 1440s did not look like this at all; in particular, and most crucially, they never depicted Eternity as an anthropomorphic allegorical figure (unlike their depictions of all five of the other Triumphs). So it is very hard to imagine someone looking at a playing-card that was not originally meant to depict Eternity, and which looked almost entirely unlike the other depictions of Eternity, and nevertheless thinking to themselves, "why, that reminds me of Petrarch's Eternity, we should illustrate it like that." This scenario is so implausible that it can be safely dismissed.
2. Someone was inspired by an illustration like the Robertet Eternity to create a World card like the VdM one.
This would allow the possibility that there was a previous World card that was not intended to represent Eternity, but it nevertheless would imply the existence of a tarot deck structured around the six Petrarchan Trionfi, because it is very hard to imagine any other reason why someone would add an image modelled on the Triumph of Eternity to a deck named Trionfi. And because all subsequent World cards appear to have been descended from one like the VdM World, and all subsequent tarot decks were called Trionfi (for several decades anyway), it would follow that all those subsequent decks must be descended from one structured around the six Petrarchan Trionfi.
3. The Robertet image is ultimately derived (most likely via a series of intermediate stages) from an image of Eternity like the one on the VdM World card, and quite possibly from an actual World card in some early Trionfi deck, which was intended as a depiction of Petrarch's Triumph of Eternity.
Like 2 above, this too would imply that the Trionfi deck was originally based around Petrarch's poems of the same name. 3 seems to me considerably more likely than 2, partly because it is much easier to imagine the Trionfi deck being based on the Petrarchan cycle from the beginning rather than having some other origin and then being repurposed (a hypothesis for which there is moreover no evidence ), and partly because it is easier to imagine the VdM World image evolving into the Robertet image than the reverse. This is because it is the Robertet image which seems more "correct" and "logical": we see Eternity holding the palm and crown symbolizing martyrdom, which fits well with the idea of eternal life in heaven. The VdM image, with the trumpet of fame instead of the palm, is rather more unusual and less "logical". It is more likely that someone would have "corrected" the strange trumpet by replacing it with the more obvious palm, than that someone would replace the palm with the idiosyncratic choice of the trumpet. The position of the second crown in the images reinforces this impression: it is easier to imagine a first image showing the woman sitting or standing on the crown and then someone "correcting" it by moving the crown to the more obvious and "logical" position on her head, rather than it starting on her head and someone moving it to the unusual position underneath her.
(This is the same reasoning as that which tells us that the trump order with World highest is more likely to be the original order than the trump order with Angel/Judgment highest, because it is more "logical" to have the Last Judgment last than to have the World last—so it is more likely that someone "corrected" the latter to the former than vice versa.)
4. The Robertet image and the VdM image came into being entirely independently, and it is simply a coincidence that they bear a striking resemblance to each other.
This seems to be what Mike is thinking, although I might be mistaken in that: they coincidentally resembled each other, and then someone just drew an association between the two. However, I think we can rule this out because of the many significant features that the other Robertet images share with tarot cards from the early Milanese tradition, as I argued in my earlier post above. These shared features establish enough iconographic links between the images in this manuscript and those early tarot cards to eliminate any possibility of mere coincidence.
So the only plausible explanations are 2 and 3, and so we must conclude that
the earliest World card from which all others descend was designed to depict an anthropomorphic personification of Petrarch's Eternity.
The trumpet Mike thinks is a symbol of worldly fame must have been intended, as Hurst argued, to symbolize heavenly fame, which is mentioned in Petrarch's poem. This conclusion is not based on any feature of the image itself, but rather the resemblance of the entire image to the Robertet image (confirmed by the fact that the card was the highest trump in both Milan and Ferrara, something that is otherwise very difficult to explain).
Many other conclusions then follow inexorably from that: the original sequence must have included not only Eternity, Time, Death, Chastity, and Love, but also Fame, which we see depicted fairly clearly on the Issy Chariot card and, it seems, also on the Visconti-Sforza card (with reference to BnF ms. Français 22541); this original sequence would have placed those subjects in their correct Petrarchan order, with World/Eternity highest; and therefore various major changes must have been made to the proto-Trionfi deck to arrive at the "standard" set which spread far and wide. The Florentine sequence cannot have been the original sequence of the earliest "Trionfi" deck, nor its subjects the original set of subjects. And this, plus a comparison the surviving cards and Trionfi illustrations from Florence and Milan, makes Florence less likely as the place of origin of that earliest deck, while the court of Filippo Maria Visconti becomes more likely.
Various things become much easier to explain (not just the World being highest trump in Milan and Ferrara): such as the presence of apparently all seven virtues in the VdM deck, together with the presence of Angel/Judgment as a seventh Petrarchan card. Six trumps being far too few, the seven virtues were probably added to expand the trump sequence to enough of a length to create an enjoyable game, with the seventh Petrarchan card being added to create numerical symmetry with the virtues (and probably also to bring the number of cards in the trump suit to the same number as in the other suits). The later addition of the Sun, Moon, and Star also becomes easy to explain, as mnemonically simpler replacements for the theological virtues after the Petrarchan association was lost, depriving the World card of its meaning as Eternity.
There are still many parts of the jigsaw puzzle yet to be completed, of course. But a major part of the early picture is now clear.
