Re: dummett and tarrocchi appropriati

11
mikeh wrote: Here I cannot resist another quote from Folengo, in the discussion of his third sonnet:
TRIPERUNO: Dear master, in this sonnet you often play the mute.
LIMERNO: It was always valuable.
TRIPERUNO: What?
LIMERNO: Truth...
TRIPERUNO: To confess?
LIMERNO: On the contrary: to be silent.
TRIPERUNO: Why?
LIMERNO: To avoid hate.
TRIPERUNO: Hate would not be important, if it was not followed by persecution.
LIMERNO: So a bit for the mouth was invented.
This interchange ostensibly relates to the previous sonnet, which is critical of the Emperor and the Pope. But the criticism there is a perfectly safe one, clearly stated, that they aren't fighting the Turks enough. The interchange would seem to be making a more general point.
Hello Mike,
the interchange is about the political content of the sonnet. In the 1527 edition, the references to the Pope and the Emperor were removed from the sonnet. See this post by Ross. Renda's 1911 edition reproduces the partially "mute" sonnet.
Interpreting these sonnets as cartomancy "a la Etteilla" seems to me out of place.

Re: dummett and tarrocchi appropriati

12
Thanks for pointing out the background on Folengo's comments, Marco. However it seems to me that the point remains. If he has to remove reference to the Pope and the Emperor out of fear, as he says, then his comments would seem to say something more than just about the sonnet. But I will have to read the expurgated sonnet in context.

Also, I was not saying that Folengo's sonnets were the same as Etteilla's five-card readings. I said it was a small step from there to Etteilla, given the context of much fortune-telling of other sorts at that time.

In preparing my post I missed noticing an important comment by Dummett's, which I have now inserted in the "philosophy of religion" section, first paragraph, in which Dummett addresses the egregious errors of the Church in the past, an issue that thetarotist78 had raised. He was not blind. That he was sensitive to the known facts at the time of the early tarot I am still not convinced.

Re: dummett and tarrocchi appropriati

14
just a couple more things.

to believe that faith and philosophy could be kept separate is such an absurd idea on the human level,that anyone believing in the possibility of such an absurdity would be showing themselves to be stranded in the aforementioned ivory towers of disembodied intellectuality.
it is not a matter of `ad hominem`,it is a matter of simple psychology,
and to ignore this is to make an unrealistic attempt to extract the human from human endeavour.

further, the idea that gambling games with cards could have existed for 300 years without divination being practiced as well is simply a ridiculous idea on the human level.
gambling and divination are twins.
they use the same equipment,
lots,wheels,straws,dice,cards etc etc..

whether in gambling,divination,scamming,religion ,philosophy,history....all things humans love and seem to need, we are quick to adapt anything to our needs and wants.
there is evidence of guys being arrested in paris ca.1400,for using playing cards for doing a `find the lady` scam in the street. I don't think they checked with historians about the `intended purposes` of the cards!

2 new essays by Vitali on cartomancy

15
Andrea Vitali has posted two new essays pertaining to cartomancy in the 16th-17th centuries, now duly translated into English: “Il Torracchione Desolato: A card-reading sorceress in a poem of the XVIIth century” (http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page. ... 49&lng=ENG) and “An enigma in Orlando Furioso: From a verse in a poem, an hypothesis on the existence of cartomancy in the XVth century” (http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=451). I would like to summarize their main points and give some reflections. However I urge people to read Andrea's essays for themselves, as he presents them in greater detail and with his own perspective on them, more than I can summarize here.

In the poem of the first essay, a particular sorceress is described:
...che nell’arte
Magica era eccellente e la serena
Aria oscurava a un sol voltar di carte,
E per via di figure e note inferne,
Facea parer le lucciole lanterne.

(...who in the magic arts excelled, and the serene
Air darkened with one turn of the cards,
And by means of symbols and infernal words
Made the false appear true.)
The phrase “lucciole lanterne”-- “the lantern’s light”--is an Italian expression for the creation of illusions, Andrea says. The image is of a woman turning the cards one by one, as though they were laid out in a series.

Later in the poem she lays out a magic circle on the ground:
Ivi giunta, fa un cerchio e note orrende
Su vi sussurra: d’ossa d’impiccati
Ridotte in polve lo cosparge e poi
Tra l’erbe il cela, e torna agli orti suoi.

(she comes here and makes a circle
and over it recites horrendous words:
she rubs it with the bones of hanged ones reduced to ash
and then hides all in the grass and goes back to her gardens.)
There is no mention of cards here, but for Andrea it is reminiscent of “a verse of the poem Storied Spain, a chivalric romance composed in the fourteenth century but only printed in Milan in 1519”. Andrea continues:
“Fe’ un cerchio e poscia vi gittò le carte” ["He made a circle and afterwards threw the cards"], which means, as Lozzi pointedly suggests in his article of 1899, that "he threw the cards as is done in a game, or in the throwing of dice, but threw them within the circle, to discover from their arrangement, as determined by magic power (sortilege) who were the enemies of the Emperor and where they were to be found" (9).
This would seem to be “an intuitive observation of the overall design” he says, similar to that of the casting of knucklebones, of the pattern made by the carte in the circle, Andrea says. Here we do have the word carte, apparently meaning cards. I do not know whether the word "carte" is a quote from a Milan edition in Italian or a translation of something before then, 1519, in Spanish.

In the second article Andrea focuses on two lines in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. They are preceded by the description, in the same Canto VII, of a queen, Alcina, with whom, because of her beauty and grace, a Saracen knight named Ruggioro falls in love, followed by his disenchantment, literally, by means of a magic ring he is persuaded to wear. Alcina is a sorceress, and all her beauty is an illusion created to entrap him, when in fact she is an ugly old hag. The ring has two powers, to render its owner invisible (to hide the truth) when put in the mouth, and to neutalize all spells (and so to reveal the truth) when worn on a finger. The lines of interest, in Octave 74, have to do with the latter use, Ariosto’s characterization of the revelatory power of the ring:
“Ma l’anel venne à interpretar le carte
Che già molti anni havean celato il vero...”

(But the ring came to interpret the carte
Which already for many years had hidden the truth)
The question is how to understand “interpretar le carte”—whether it is “interpretation” as one would figure out the meaning of pages in a book—“carte” in the sense of “pages”--or as interpreting a series of playing-cards—“carte” in a relatively new sense, to designate what had previously been called “naibi” and “triumphi”. In the context of the poem, one or the other is a metaphor for how the ring reveals the sorceress’s true appearance.

In Ariosto’s day, as now, “carte” meant both “pages”--an established meaning--and “cards”—the new meaning. The metaphor of “interpretar le carte” could mean that the ring interprets the images of beauty that the sorceress has created by analogy to the way, for example, that Christian writers interpreted pagan writers on the gods to show their literal falsity, or that the birth of Christ interpreted the pages of the Old Testament. This last, as Andrea points out, is the same sense of “carte” as in Petrarch’s sonnet IV of Rime Sparse (translation from p. 38 of Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics . Robert M. Durling, ed. and trans., http://books.google.com/books?id=5iOL0H ... 22&f=false):
Que' ch'infinita providentia et arte
mostro nel suo mirabil magistero,
che crio questo et quell'altro hemispero,
et mansueto piu Giove che Marte,
vegnendo in terra a 'lluminar le carte
ch'avean molt'anni gia celato il vero
tolse Giovanni da la rete et Piero,...

(He who showed infinite providence and art
in his marvelous workmanship,
who created this and the other hemisphere
and Jove more gentle than Mars,
who, coming to earth to illuminate the pages [carte]
that for many years had hidden the truth
took John from the nets and Peter..,)
Alternatively, “interpretar le carte” could mean that the ring interprets the images the sorceress created by analogy to the way in which a card-interpreter interprets playing cards, seeing behind the images on them to a hidden truth, different than what is literally depicted. And not just one card, but a series of them, as it is “le carte”. Such metaphors with playing-cards were and are common in everyday speech, both in Italian and in English, e.g. “he laid his cards on the table” meaning “he disclosed his ideas and plans”; or “he played his cards close to the chest”, meaning “he kept his plans and ideas to himself”.

With “interpretar”, either pages or cards could be meant, depending on the context. Which is it here?

It is not just the context within the poem, which as far as I can tell does not choose between the two. We can also look to the context of the writer and his audience at the time and place in question.

We learn some of the circumstances of this composition from Alberto Cassadei (“The History of the Furioso”, pp. 55-70 of Ariosto Today, Toronto 2003, p. 57):
In all probability Ariosto began working on the Furioso around 1504-5. It is commonly accepted that he narrated a fair bit of the poem to Isabella d’Este, wife of Francesco Gonzaga, during the first part of 1507. It is noted that on 3 February of that year Isabella wrote from Mantua to her brother Ippolito, to whom Ariosto had dedicated the poem, to let him know that the narration of the new episodes of Orlando and the Paladins had given her great pleasure.
And in 1509, Duke Alfonso, writing to Cardinal Ippolito, is quoted as follows (Ariosto Today p. 33, in an essay by Antonio Franceschetti)
”We would like you to send us that addition which messer Lucovico Ariosto made to the Orlando inamorato”.
Of the three, according to Gioergio Masi (Ariosto Today p. 75) “the only one to demonstrate genuine attention and, dare I say, passion for Ariosto’s origins ... was certainly Isabella.”

I would expect that this appreciation, expressed first and then consistently thereafter by Isabella, would have had its effect on what the poet wrote. I think there is abundant evidence of that in the poem, especially in the first third or so. Here is one example (out of many), from Canto I, that seems to be written with Isabella in mind. A knight, in this case Muslim, spying a lady alone in the forest, thinks that one way or another this is his chance to enjoy her charms. But just then another knight comes by, with his helmet closed, and the first knight cannot resist challenging him. The result is that the first knight's horse is killed colliding with the second knight's horse, and the second knight and horse resume their journey without a word. The lady tells the knight, pinned beneath his dead horse, that he was surely the winner, since the other would not stay; then she pulls him out from under his horse. At that point a messenger comes by, and the knight learns that the one who sent him to the ground was a Christian lady. He is so embarrassed that he gives up on his plan and simply helps the lady, riding with her on her horse.

We don’t, of course, know what changes in the Furioso Ariosto made from 1507 to 1509, or even up to 1516, when it was first published, in 40 cantos. After that, Cassadei says, the revisions were mainly toward the end.

What was Isabella's attitude toward cartomancy? She was reported by her contemporary Paolo Giovio, Bishop of Nocera, as having “Lotto cards with the mystic number XXVII” (Julia Cartwright, Isabella d’Este, Marchionesse of Mantua, 1474-1539 (http://www.archive.org/stream/isabellad ... j_djvu.txt; this book also has numerous references to the Estense passion for card-playing). “Lotto”, like “lot” in English, means “lot”, ambiguous between “chance” and “fate”, as in the “lot-books” of the day. A bundle of such cards or papers was a favorite device of Isabella’s, meaning “the vicissitudes of fortune” (see my essay at http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page. ... 17&lng=ENG).

There is something else that seems to me relevant. In 1508 there occurred the murder in Ferrara of a minor poet just one year older than Ariosto, who served as the courier of secret letters between Ippolito’s brother Alfonso’s wife, Lucrezia Borgia, and Isabella’s husband, Francesco Gonzaga. The victim was Ercole Strozzi, son of Tito Vespasiano Strozzi; the elder Strozzi was author of the epic Borsiade and a first cousin of Matteo Boiardo; Ariosto’s mistress(or secret wife) was of the same family (all Wikipedia). Ercole Strozzi was found dead in the street one morning with his hair pulled out and 22 stab wounds in his body, about which there is no dispute. In her biography of Lucrezia Borgia, Sarah Bradford says that Ercole had been charmed by Lucrezia into this dangerous mission (somewhat like Ruggiero in Ariosto’s story!). Bradford says that the murder was not even investigated, arguing that it was likely committed by a certain thug employed by “the senior Este brothers”. The hair was a trademark of his; just the year before, he had grabbed one of Ippolito’s chamberlains by the hair while arresting him (see my post at viewtopic.php?f=11&t=503&p=13864&hilit=wounds#p13887). Historians do not speculate on the significance of the number 22 here; but to me the murder would seem to have been in the nature of a prediction of the fate to befall the pair—Lucrezia and Francesco, one or both--if they persisted in pursuing their passion. The body is like a tarot spread, which it doesn't take much to interpret. Francesco scrupulously avoided any compromising situation, secret or not, from then on. Pope Julius II later reached a similar conclusion, accusing “those brothers-in-law of his” of wanting to kill Francesco, as Bradford documents.

Ariosto, it seems to me, was writing for Ippolito, Isabella, posterity, and himself, in roughly reverse order. Considering these audiences, it seems to me that Ariosto probably intended an ambiguous reading for “interpretar le carte”, using “Aesopian language” and the principle of deniability. By that last I mean that he could deny any knowledge of cartomancy if questioned: “I only meant ‘pages’”, he could tell an Inquisitor if needed. To an educated priest, accustomed to interpreting texts for others, the word “carte” in fact would likely simply mean “pages”, and the passage would be understood as a clever reference to Petrarch and perhaps a playful analogy with the magical birth of Christ in Petrarch's poem. But for the Estense and their ilk, familiar with card-playing and sortilege (literally, the “reading of fate”), it would also mean “cards”, interpreted by some mysterious means, in a way that the person concerned can feel to be true more powerfully and immediately than with mere logic. Such, precisely, is the effect of the ring. He was told it was a magic ring and was given it by an avowed enchantress; so he could just as well have decided that the ring, in order to make him fall under some other woman's spell, makes a genuinely beautiful and good woman appear ugly and malicious. But that is not what happens. Octave 65 tells the story from inside Ruggioero's head:
Ruggier si stava vergognoso e muto
mirando in terra, e mal sapea che dire;
a cui la maga nel dito minuto
pose l'annello, e lo fe' risentire.
Come Ruggiero in se fu rivenuto,
di tanto scorno si vide assalire,
ch'esser vorria sotterra mille braccia,
ch'alcun veder non lo potesse in faccia.

(Ruggiero stood shamefaced and mute,
Looking at the ground, not knowing what to say;
The ring the enchantress had put
On his finger made him feel again [or, return to his senses].
As Ruggiero felt himself again
He assailed himself with so much scorn,
He wished he was a thousand feet below [ground],
So that no one could see his face.
The ring frees him from passion-engendered illusion and restores him to "himself". It is like what Folengo's sonnets are intended to do with the people who have drawn the cards they did.

Wikipedia defines “Aesopian language” as “communications that convey an innocent meaning to outsiders but hold a concealed meaning to informed members of a conspiracy or underground movement.” This style of writing (which must be distinguished from the use of euphemisms, which Wikipedia's article falls into) is a common one. The most familiar example is rock song lyrics' allusions to drug-induced states. It doesn't take a signed statement by the author of the song to know what “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” means, in its less obvious implicit sense.People qho gre up in Poland tell me that in the 1980s there, rock song lyrics had political double meanings, related to the underground Solidarity movement. Films under Communism frequently had double meanings, too; the authorities either didn’t know the subculture meanings or countered them with more acceptable interpretations (example: Feliks Falk’s satirical “Hero of the Year”, which won prizes in 1987 Moscow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feliks_Falk). If questioned, the people involved could say that nothing of the sort had occurred to them. The same would have been true in Ariosto’s day, but with different dominant culture and subcultures. The dominant culture was that of the Church, and the subcultures were those of card-playing and card-interpreting.

Just what this card-interpreting claimed to do is unclear. In the poem, the ring does not make any predictions; it just restores the person to "himself". I suspect that among a certain elite that was the purpose of "interpreting the cards": to tell people what they knew, or could easily find out, but also in some way did not want to know. Whether that was true about "interpreting the cards" in general at that time is another matter. The throwing cards into a ring of the 14th century poem also makes no predictions, if it simply tells one where the enemy troops are. But that is a bit more magical and mysterious; it is the foundation for advice from premises which the person advised does not know to be true. From therapy to advice to prediction, in a culture where fortune-telling was rampant, is not a big couple of steps.

more on "carte" in Orlando Furioso

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At http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7ofur10.txt, I did a search for all occurrences of "carte" in Orlando Furioso. Besides the one that Andrea talks about, and I did in my last post, there are 13 others. In all cases Waldman translates the word as "pages", "writings", "written accounts", and the like, and that seems to be correct. But Ariosto's use of the term in Canto 46, Octave 89 (50 octaves from the end) seems to me of interest. It is part of a panagyric of his patron Ippolito d'Este, done in the form of an ekphrasis, or poetic account, of a tapestry he fictionally says that " "a Trojan damsel with a prophetic gift" (i.e. Cassandra) wove it personally for her brother Hector; as history shows, however, it had the specific purpose of celebrating Ruggiero's glorious descendant Ippolito d'Este, as the poet demonstrates in describing and interpreting its scenes. These octaves may have been part of the additions that Ariosto first published in 1532 (Ariosto Today p. 59). Ippolito himself died in 1520. (In my view the praise can be interpreted somewhat ironically, like many other passages in the poem, given what Ariosto, who in one poem called himself a "nightingale in a cage" [Satire3.37,quoted in Ariosto Today p. 80ff], knew about Ippolito.) The Octave in question celebrates Ippolito as a young pupil of his tutor Fusco:
Quivi si vede, come il fior dispensi
de' suoi primi anni in disciplina ed arte.
Fusco gli e appresso, che gli occulti sensi
chiari gli espone de l'antiche carte.
- Questo schivar, questo seguir conviensi,
se immortal brami e glorioso farte, -
par che gli dica: cosi avea ben finti
i gesti lor chi gia gli avea dipinti.

(Here he can be seen spending the flower
of his early years in discipline and art,
Below can be seen Fusco, who explains clearly
the hidden meanings of the ancient pages.
- This must be avoided, this followed,
if you yearn for immortality and glorious deeds, -
he appears to be saying: so well has
the artist depicted their gestures.
Here "l'antiche carte" has the primary meaning of "the old pages", which Waldman (p. 567) translates as "the classics".
But "gli occulti sensi chiari gli espone" --explains clearly the hidden meanings--has a very similar meaning to "interpretar" in the octave of Canto VII. Moreover, guidance in one's choice of actions to be followed or shunned is just what would be expected from the interpretation of cards. In that way, given the previous ambiguity of "carte", the same applies, less clearly, to "antiche carte" here. It might take the secondary meaning of "old cards". By 1532 the tarot was almost a century old at least, and even by 1516 its origin in Ferrara probably was already obscure, In any case, it is clear that from an early age, humanists and their pupils were accustomed to looking for "hidden meanings" in texts, pictures (e.g. this very tapestry), and other things.

What is a "tarocchi appropriati"?

17
In re-reading this thread, I realize that an important issue was left dangling. What counts as a "tarocchi appropriati"? We know that the attribution of card subjects to ladies of a court, or the canons of Bologna, or cardinals in conclave, is a "tarocchi appropriati". We know that a description of the order of trumps in a manual of how to play the game is not a "tarocchi appropriati". But there is a lot in between.

There is also the question, how should the phrase be translated into English?

Ross at http://trionfi.com/0/p/28/ gave a concise "working definition" of tarocchi appropriati: "using the trumps to describe something else; simple lists of trumps, like in the Steele Sermon, Alciato or Garzoni, are not included."

He also described it as a "literary genre," one that probably grew out of a custom as early as the later 15th century:
The rules of Matteo Maria Boiardo's circa 1465 triumph game imply that extemporaneous poetic compositions based on the tarot pack were part of the body of tarot games from very early on.
This apparently even developed into a game, from which the genre emerged:
In its played aspect, described by Girolamo Bargagli in Siena in 1572, each player is assigned a tarot trump by an opponent, who then had to explain the reason for the attribution in a witty or "delicate" way, usually poetically.

This game developed into a purely literary phenomenon, in which the author creatively assigned the trump cards from the tarot pack to a series of related individuals (related by profession, location or status), groups of cards to several people, the entire series of trumps to one person, or in some cases even to a group religious buildings or a subject (e.g. Love), based on qualities shared by the cards and the subjects of the composition.
In this way the term would seem to apply to a variety of literary compositions. He gives 18 examples, from the 16th to 19th centuries. It includes the Folengo sonnets and "due sonetti amorosi", among other compositions. He invites us to find other examples. However it is still not clear to me what is included in the category and what isn't.

Part of the problem is with the word "appropriati". In Italian one word (with various endings) functions both as an adjective and as a past participle. In English there are very distinct forms: "appropriate" is the adjective, "appropriated" is the past participle. They mean different things. An appropriate tarot is one that fits the circumstances: for example, a tarot without the Pope and Popess might be an appropriate tarot in a social setting in which Protestants and Catholics are playing together, because the Protestants might be tempted to make nasty comments. Another example is that an appropriate tarot for a game in France might be one with the TdeM, while in Bologna it would be the Bolognese deck, and Sicily the Sicilian, etc. For enthusiasts of ancient history the Sola-Busca might be appropriate, while for moral examples from ancient sources, the Boiardo. Synonyms for "appropriate" might be "suitable", or "fitting". It also applies to different games with the same deck: one for experts, another for children, etc.

On the other hand, an "appropriated" tarot is something else. To appropriate is to take possession, to commandeer, to seize. It is the same in Italian with "appropriare". In that sense, an appropriated tarot would be one in which some aspect of the game is commandeered for some other purpose than the trick-taking game. But there are problems. In that sense saying that, for example, someone is like the Fool of the Tarot, would be to appropriate the subject for another purpose, to say that he is a non-entity, or a person who is a useful sacrifice to avoid greater damage, or a person who is welcome in any gathering, comparing him or her to the role of the card in combinations. Another poet that says that when the flies bite his eyes, then he's like the seventeen of the tarocchi before sunset, meaning, if the poet is writing for a Bolognese audience, in the dark, like the moon.

And then there is Aretino's dialogue in which the cards talk to the card-maker, explaining who they are. This is for another purpose, too, in that they are not at that point being used in a trick-taking card game. And what about when the titles are simply arranged in the meter of a popular type of song, like the "strambotto", that, too, is "appropriating" the cards for another purpose, even if they clearly don't describe something else: as part of a satire, for example. And finally, when Lollio actually describes the conduct of a card game, but does so in a literary way, that, too, is an appropriation.

If these last are not examples of tarot appropriati, then "appropriated tarot" is not a good translation, any more than "appropriate tarot." But perhaps it will suffice, if it is understood as meaning "an example of the literary genre in which a main point is to appropriate the titles of several or all of the tarot trumps in order to describe something or someone else." That will rule out the strambotto, the talking cards, and many other literary examples, including the occasional metaphorical description using a tarot card. It will not rule out, however, poems or other compositions designed to satirize some aspect or aspects of society or human relationships, etc. However I have not much sense of whether this definition includes and excludes what it should. For example, the Folengo sonnet that incorporates most of the tarot subjects does not describe anything else besides what the tarot titles mean, more or less. Is it a "tarocchi appropriati"? Perhaps we don't need an answer, but one would be nice.

P. S. Andrea Vitali informs me that another term for the same thing is "tarocchi attribuiti", i.e. "attributed tarot". "Attribute" has the sense of "belonging to a person, thing, group, etc.; a quality, character, characteristic, or property." That is like "describes". In that sense the first four Folengo sonnets would be examples "tarocchi attribuiti" but not the fifth. About the "due sonetti", etc., I don't know what to say. Here is the second one, in an approximate translation (http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page. ... 99&lng=ENG):
Because the angel, the star, the sun, the moon,
With the world, and the one who craves living,
Hate the beauty that the sky concentrates
In the proud face of the Lady Mother.
That from them is stripped of good, those who love valor,
Or maybe, because neither death nor bad fortune
Deters the firmness of her will:
But all must firmly believe
That a malevolent spirit has her,
Submitting only to the small Magician [Bagattino],
So that to be able to say the good tarots will be
Mine, I have to play, and this one card
I draw will be the Fool, which is the divine brain.
Well, the "Lady Mother"[signora Mama] is the person to whom the poem is dedicated, Mama Rinaldi, but that isn't a tarot subject. I have no idea if this is a "tarot attribuiti".

Re: dummett and tarrocchi appropriati

18
I always understood it as the participle, "appropriated tarocchi", "taking" them for something other than ranked cards in a trick-taking game. So maybe it can be defined as "any use of the cards, particularly the trumps, other than in a trick taking game."

This obviously leaves too much room for other uses, for instance physical ones like making a house of cards, or in magic tricks, which we should want to exclude in any working definition.

So a more refined definition might be "Tarocchi appropriati, 'appropriated Tarot,', consists in making an interpretative use of the imagery or titles of the cards to describe a person or situation. The imagery of the card, or even merely the title, is used as the basis for a shorter or longer visual, literary, or extemporaneous oral composition. Tarot esotericism and divination with the cards can thus be considered as falling under this definition, since the cards are 'appropriated' from their plain use as ranked values in a game. Literary works like Italo Calvino's novella Il castello dei destini incrociati (1969), or cinematic appropriation for the plot of Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, (1968) can be thought of as 'tarocchi appropriati.' So too can the recent fashion house Dior's short film Le Château du Tarot (2021).

For this last, see -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYOrGvVh7mk
Image

Re: dummett and tarrocchi appropriati

19
I think we need to be a little careful here, and should distinguish between "tarocchi appropriati" in a narrower (and earlier) sense, in which Dummet and most other scholars have used the term, and the broader sense that Ross is giving it here.

The first and original sense derives (as far as I'm aware) from the use of these words in the title of the poem brought to light by Giulio Bertoni in 1904, Trionphi de Tarocchi appropriati. Dummett defines this sense of the term as follows (GoT, p. 390): "In a poem of this kind, a set of people is described by associating each of them with one of the trump subjects from the Tarot pack." This is what I think of as the "classic" tarocchi appropriati: It's what Mike was referring to with "the attribution of card subjects to ladies of a court, or the canons of Bologna, or cardinals in conclave" in his post above. It's fine for us to use the term in a broader sense as well—I'm inclined to do that too—but we should not lose sight of the fact that most people have used it only in this narrower sense.

Re: dummett and tarrocchi appropriati

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Nathaniel: from one use only of the of the term "tarocchi appropriati," that of the poem cited by Bertoni, it is difficult to draw a conclusion about a whole genre. Bertoni himself describes it as an example of "tarocchi versificati".

But thanks for drawing our attention to Dummett. I had quoted him on that point in my first post. However he doesn't say on what basis he makes this characterization, and the term has been used more broadly, for example by Ross. If it is just on the basis of Bertoni, that is a rather big leap, from just one example where the term is used, especially considering that there was a whole lgenre incorporating the tarot titles into the words of literary compositions.

Ross. A problem is when there is no interpretation at all, just the assignment of tarocchi subjects to persons. See, from the Biblioteca Universataria di Bologna, which Andrea found recently, when we were on a "fishing expedition" for something else. These are surely at least "tarocchi attribuiti", and they fit the characterization that Dummett gave.

I want to try another approach: to look at the titles of the various compositions securely identified as "tarocchi appropriati", and uses of the terms by Italians, to see how they would naturally be translated. The Italian whose writing I have the most familiarity with is Andrea Vitali.

In an as yet unpublished footnote to an essay, referencing another essay yet to be published, he says:
Sulla moda di appropriare carte di Trionfi ai più vari personaggi, si veda qui ...
That is clearly a verb-form!

Then there the title of a theatre play, not with any "tarocchi appropriati" but at least with the word "appropriati":
Il furto amoroso, comedia onesta, Et spassevole, nuovamente data in luce per sfuggir l’Otio dal Sig. Camillo Scaligeri dalla Fratta, con gustosi intermedi Innapparenti, & Apparenti a ciascun atto appropriati, In Venetia, Appresso Giacomo Vincenti, 1613, p. 107.
That would seem to be the adjective, even though there is a the same "a" after it (in English), so "appropriate to each act" or "suitable for each act". Another translation might be "fitting", without the "to" after it: "fitting each act", referring to the little scenes between acts.

Vitali speaks of the "appropriata" forma in "Tarocchi in Letteratura I" (http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=199)
L’unico esempio rinvenuto riguardante l’utilizzo delle Minchiate o Germini (Tarocchi Toscani) in forma appropriata, appartiene alla metà del sec. XVI e porta il titolo di I Germini, sopra quaranta meritrice della Città di Fiorenza,....

That is the verb form, which can hardly be translated but as "appropriated", perhaps even in quotes, since it sounds odd in English. There is no preposition after.

Later in this same essay he has:
Versi Appropriati

Un vero e proprio sottogenere letterario derivò dalla consuetudine di mettere in rima o di versificare i tarocchi ‘appropriandoli’ a personaggi della più diverse classi sociali,...
"Appropriandoli" is clearly a verb-form. Even he puts it in scare-quotes!

An example he gives of is the piece highlighted by Bertoni:
Trionphi de Tarocchi appropriati dedicato a donne ferraresi ...
Also, Vitali says, :
Appartiene invece alla tipologia di componimenti dei “Tarocchi Appropriati” il Capitulo de’ trionfi del passo col Matto e l’Amore facti in Prato l’anno MDXXXIIII di Niccolò Martelli dove ciascun trionfo è abbinato ad una gentildonna di Prato.
"Abbinato" just means "matched." And in Bologna:
Il componimento è intitolato Thrionfi de Tarocchi e motivi latini appropriati a ciascuno dei canonici di San Pietro (44) dove troviamo i nomi dei Trionfi in italiano e i motti in latino.
...
In the next section, no longer that of "versi appropriati" he writes:
Oltre ai sopracitati documenti bolognesi descritti nel paragrafo "Versi Appropriati" diversi altri testi furono composti prendendo spunto dai Tarocchini. Uno di questi porta l’altisonante titolo di La Granda de Tarochini che invita le Sfere Celesti Aeree Ferree, e Sotteranee, al Trionfante Applauso Universale del Sig. Andrea Casale (53). ... Questa storia è versificata dall’autore abbinando i nomi dei Tarocchini alle diverse situazioni, ...
So this poem is not a "tarocchi appropriati."

There is also, cited elsewhere,

I Trionfi de Tarocchini Apropriati ciascheduno ad una Dama Bolognese con la spiegazione in fine per capire meglio li sudeti Trionfi ossia satira da N.N
.

Andrea's Italian, and the Italian titles using "appropriati", so far at least, fit Dummett's definition. I will keep looking for counter-examples.

The question remains, how to translate "appropriati". If the work is not an "appropriati" the word can still be used, but it is an adjective, translatable as "suitable". But Andrea's term "appropriandola" is clearly a form of the verb. I notice also that the Italian titles use the preposition "a" or "ad" or "ai", etc. after "appropriati", meaning "to", followed by

So it is "appropriated to", followed by "each to a lady..." or "to each of the canons" or (more generally, by Andrea) "to a personage". One translation that Andrea has suggested to me is "fitting", without the "to". That works in English both in the participial and adjectival sense. However, in one case, that where no verses are even included (see my links above), the names fit to each lady might well have been drawn at random, and so not "fitting", which means "suitable". In fact that is explicitly the case in Croce's Lotto Festivole, of which, comparing one of its sonnets with the corresponding one of Leonardo Colombina, Il Trionfo Tridentino, Andrea says (not yet published):
Il motivo per cui si è riportato questo sonetto è per mettere in relazione il suo contenuto con quanto descritto da Giulio Cesare Croce nel suo Lotto Festevole 6 da considerarsi appartenere a questo tipo di componimenti appropriati.

(The reason we report this sonnet is so that its contents can be compared with what is described by Giulio Cesare Croce in his Festive Lottery, considered [by us?] belonging to this type of appropriati composition.)
In the Festive Lottery, as the title implies, the ladies' names are explicitly drawn at random, from a vase. (On this composition, see my post at viewtopic.php?p=23009#p23009.)

Another translation might be "fitted to", which works only in the participial use. So in general, "tarocchi each fitted to a person in a designated group." There is also "matched to", abbinato in Italian.

But there still remains the question of whether the triumphs can also be matched to things other than persons, such as buildings, as Ross once indicated (or indeed women's outfits, or lack thereof). An example is needed, in the pre-20th century era. Even so, it would seem to be a matter of pairing triumphs to things or persons, whatever or whoever they are, and surely in more than one case of each, not necessarily all (moors and papi are typical casualties) but a lot.